“Cool” is remarkably enduring as a word. It comes from the West African concept,
according to Robert Faris Thompson (Jessica Ogilvie, “You Know It,” LAT, Nov.
10, 2012, p.E7). Chevere is South
American Spanish for “cool.”
Traveling light….
The train done gone and the Greyhound bus don’t
run
But walkin’ ain’t crowded and I won’t be here
long.
Traditional
blues verse
Got the key to the highway, I’m booked out and
bound to go,
Gone to leave here runnin’ cause walkin’ is mo’
slow
Studies
of genocide find that once killing is started, almost everyone joins in. People suddenly change from peace and order
to violent murder, and often back to peace when the dictator falls. This can be explained only by the existence
of both potentialities within people. Human
evil is here defined as gratuitous harm to people and other lives. It very often comes from simply following
orders or doing a job, or from “greed” (gain by predatory taking from others),
but most often it comes from hatred and defensiveness. At worst—and very commonly—it causes people to
hurt themselves simply to hurt disliked others. At root, it can be traced to irrational,
overemotional responses to fear and threat.
These are common among people abused as children and subsequently, and
among people raised in disempowering, oppressive, intolerant environments. They become resentful, frustrated, and
personally weak—lacking in self-efficacy.
They often bully or scapegoat others, usually even weaker persons. Social hate is especially damaging, seen in
genocide, bigotry, warfare, allowing people to starve or die of disease when
they could have been saved, and other mass destruction. Empowerment, rational coping with stress, and
comprehensive morality based on “we’re all in this together” are the major
cures. These general cures can be
applied to specific social issues.
**
“Son, it’s
time to teach you the most important lesson about life and people. It is that everyone has within him, or her,
two wolves: a good wolf that wants to
help everyone and do what’s best for all, and a bad wolf that wants to do evil
and hurt people and the world.”
“Father,
that’s scary. It really worries me. Which wolf wins out in the end?”
“Son: the
wolf you feed.”
Native American folktale
**
Preface
This
story—perhaps more Manichaean than Native American—captures much of what I have
learned in my life. I was raised to
think people are good, and that evil is merely ignorance. The people around me gave the lie to
that. They were often quite deliberately
bad. Many ordinary people, perhaps most
at one time or another, hurt themselves just to hurt others. They ruin marriages and friendships because
of imagined or trivial slights. They vote their own destruction by electing
people who promise to crush “the others.”
They sacrifice their lives for violent and extremist causes. Humanity has a sorry record. Despite claims of moral progress, the
genocidal dictator and the suicide bomber are the emblems of the late 20th
and early 21st century.
Yet,
obviously, many people are good, some are saintly, and almost everyone is good some
of the time. Even mass murderers and
psychopaths usually have a history of decent behavior when not having a
psychotic break.
Jesus
said: “Ye are the salt of the earth: but
if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be
cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men” (Matthew 5:13). The salt of the earth—as opposed to sea
salt—came from salt springs, and was contaminated with ordinary dirt or
carbonate. Over time, aerial moisture
would leach the salt out, leaving only the residue. Natural human goodness and sociability is
subject to similar leaching. This was,
of course, Jesus’ real message. (One
wonders what Biblical literalists make of verses like this one.)
Most
people are in a rather neutral, everyday state most of the time, not thinking
of acting saintly or demoniacal, but they are still torn between virtuous
ideals of helping, sheltering, and caring, and vicious ideals of excluding, ignoring,
and hurting. They are either working for and with people, or working against
people. We are constantly forced to
decide. As Pascal Boyer (2018:33) says,
“Observers from outside our species would certainly be struck by two facts
about humans. They are extraordinarily
good at forming groups, and they are just as good at fighting other groups.”
The
nature and promotion of good have been addressed by every religious writer in
history, as well as countless psychologists and other scientists. Covering this literature is neither necessary
nor possible in the present brief essay.
Evil is less well studied.
Outside of religious imprecations against sin, there are rather few
studies, mostly by psychologists. Of
these, particularly valuable are Roy Baumeister’s Evil (1997), Aaron Beck’s Prisoners
of Hate (1999), Alan Fiske and Taj
Rai’ Virtuous Violence (2014), Ervin
Staub’s books (1989, 2003, 2011), the Sternbergs’ The Nature of Hate (2008), and James Waller’s Becoming Evil (2002) and Confronting
Evil (2016). Simon Baron-Cohen’s Zero Degrees of Empathy (2011), Steven
Bartlett’s The Pathology of Man (2005),
Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear (1997),
Fiske and Rai’s Virtuous Violence (2014),
Robert Sapolsky’s Behave (2017), and Kathleen Taylor’s Cruelty (2009) cover some important
psychological terrain. Zeki and Romaya
(2008) review the physiology of hate.
Albert Bandura’s book Moral
Disengagement (2016) exhaustively treats that aspect of evil.
Most
of these books, as well as the literature on genocide, spice up their texts
with horrific stories. Baumeister is
especially graphic. I have absolutely no
interest in transmitting such stories here.
If you need to know how bad people get, seek out those sources.
By evil, I mean a very specific thing:
deliberate harm to people simply because one wants to harm them, because of
what they are or might be. It is the
state described by words like “murderous,” “malevolent,” and “cruel.” Ordinary everyday selfishness is bad enough,
but it is part of the human condition; most of us give ourselves the benefit of
the doubt, cutting corners, being stingy, cutting ourselves some slack. This is no doubt deplorable most of the time,
but it is not what I am considering in this book; I have devoted two previous
books (Anderson 2010, 2014) to the problem of overly narrow and short-term
planning and acting, and need not go into it here. Selfishness becomes more evil as it moves
into violent robbery, gangsterism, and raiding.
There is obviously a transition zone.
Similarly, violence in defense of self and loved ones is not evil, and
is often praiseworthy. A transition zone
exists between clearly necessary violence—resisting Hitler in 1941, for instance—and
clearly excessive use of force, as when police gun down an unarmed boy and
claim “defense.” Transition zones make
moral decisions difficult—“hard cases make bad law”—so I will confine this book
to issues like genocide and intimate partner violence that are clearly
unacceptable in functioning societies.
**
Part I.
Human Evil in Context
Starting with Genocide
Visiting
Cambodia together, we saw the relics of genocide and the devastation it had
wrought. We resolved to study genocide
seriously.
At
that time, little was known about genocide in general. Thousands of historical sources covered
Hitler’s Holocaust, and a much smaller but still important literature covered
the mass murders by the Young Turks, the USSR leadership, and Mao Zedong. Much more recent genocides, such as those in
ex-Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Cambodia itself, were only beginning to be visible
in scholarly sources.
Very
few generalizations had come out of this work.
Rudolph Rummel had just written a book, Statistics of Democide (1998; see also Rummel 1994), arguing that
genocide was the natural result of totalitarian regimes. His oft-repeated conclusion was direct: “Power
kills, and absolute power kills absolutely” (Rummel 1998, passim; a rephrasing
of Lord Acton’s famous quote about corruption.)
We
quickly realized that this was not far wrong, but that it was not quite true or
adequate. Hitler was democratically
elected, though he committed genocide only after taking total power. Several other notorious genociders have been
democratically elected. They usually
seized absolute power in the process of killing, but often not until the
killing was under way. We thus set off
on a long voyage of discovery, comparing all documented genocides since 1900 to
find common themes.
When
science reaches this stage—several teams working on a problem—one expects
simultaneous discoveries, and they occurred in this case. Barbara Harff (2012) and ourselves (Anderson
and Anderson 2012, 2017), and shortly after us Hollie Nyseth-Brehm, developed
broadly the same model of genocide, and James Waller, in his great work Confronting
Evil (2016), has developed it further.
Gregory Stanton’s well-known list of traits (2013) is another
independent invention of a similar, but more developed, model.
It is quite a simple
one. A would-be leader wins by
developing a whole ideology based on ethnic or ideological hate, but going
beyond mere hate to promise a utopian world—usually, harking back to a lost golden
age and promising to recall it and improve it–if we can only eliminate
“certain people.” He often flourishes
only when difficult and uncertain economic times give people economic
incentives to look for radical solutions, but many such leaders take power in
good times; mobilizing antagonism is always available as an easy and
straightforward way to win in politics. All that is required is that the existing
administration is either fighting a war and not doing well (as in Russia when
Lenin took power), or widely perceived as corrupt and incompetent. People then work for change. Most commonly, the country in question had a
long record of ethnic and political killing, but this was not always the case.
Many dictators simply
rode popular movements to victory, but many were installed by large economic
interests, almost always rentiers—landlords, natural resource owners, and
others who make their money from controlling primary production rather than
from enterprise. Oil has been the
greatest single backer of modern autocratic states, from fascist (several in
Africa and elsewhere) to feudal (Saudi Arabia) to socialist (Venezuela). We will examine this link in due course. In the early 20th century, most
dictators were puppets installed by fascist or communist regimes when they
conquered countries, and in the mid-20th the United States installed
or backed several genocidal fascist regimes, most notably in Guatemala and
Chile (on the history of 20th century genocides, see Anderson and
Anderson 2012; Kiernan 2007; Rummel 1994, 1998; Shaw 2013). Since then, however, genocidal and autocratic
regimes have come to power through coups, local wars, or, very often,
elections. Corrupt and weak regimes
create conditions where many will vote for strongmen.
John Kincaid says of
American far-right politics, “right-wing movements are successful when they
deploy rhetorical frames that synthesize both material and symbolic politics”
(Kincaid 2016:529), and this finding summarizes a fact that seems well
documented worldwide. Oliver Hahl and
collaborators (2018) have shown that “lying demagogues” succeed with
disaffected voters who feel disrespected by elites and cultural brokers; lying,
violating norms, openly expressing widely-held prejudices, and economic
populism are a particularly successful (and deadly) combination. Trump in the United States was only one of
many leaders who triumphed in the early 21st century by using this
technique.
When
he (such leaders are male, so far) takes over, he quickly moves to consolidate
power. He can usually bring about a brief return of prosperity, by cracking
down on crime and by “making the trains run on time” (as the proverb claims for
Mussolini), but the prosperity may be illusory or short-lived. Alternatively, the leader may take over during
a war, in which case he may lead the people to victory—or may simply make
things even worse, as in Cambodia. He
suspends whatever democratic or institutional checks exist, and becomes a
dictator or functional equivalent. Many
small genocides have taken place in democracies, but, in almost all such cases,
the victims were not citizens and were under de facto authoritarian rule. Native Americans in the 19th
century constitute a prime example.
A
dictator begins by consolidating his power.
As Rudolph Rummel often reiterated, “power kills, and absolute power
kills absolutely.” Almost inevitably, a
dictator begins to consolidate his rule by killing “certain people”—whether
they are Jews, bourgeoisie, political enemies, educated people, “heretics,” or
any other salient group that seems opposed in some way to the new order. I term these “structural opponent groups.” The savagery and scope of the killing sometimes
depends on the number of targeted groups, which in turn depends on the
extremism of the dictator. Hitler’s
indiscriminate hatred extended from Jews to handicapped people to gays to
modern artists, totaling over six million dead. The Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia included
people defined by ethnicity, education, foreign influence, and other broad
variables. The Rwandan genocide began
with Tutsi, but quickly moved on to eliminate many Hutu (Nyseth Brehm 2017b). At the other extreme are mass political
killings that eliminate the opposition and anyone related to it, but at least
stop there, such as Agustin Pinochet’s in Chile, which killed about 10,000
people. These political genocides blend
into the sort of mass political elimination characteristic of medieval empires.
Usually,
there is then a lull in the killing. The
leader has his power. However, eventually,
unrest challenges his position. In some
cases, he is forced out by popular movements.
Dictators often fall. Frequently,
they come to believe their own personality cult, think they are infallible and
can do anything, and decline into something hard to tell from madness (Dikötter 2019). Often, however, a leader meets the new
challenge by another wave of mass murder.
The challenge is often external war, as in Hitler’s Germany and the
Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia. Sometimes it is
power jockeying within the ruling party, as in the USSR and Mao’s China. Sometimes it is civil war or revolt, as in
the Indian subcontinent when successive episodes of violence accompanied the
breakaway of Pakistan from India, the later breakaway of Bangladesh from
Pakistan, and the failed revolution of the Tamils in Sri Lanka.
The
most important thing to note is that the people go along. Humans are prone to anger and hate, and
even the most incompetent politician can whip up hatred and direct it against
enemies.
This
simple model—exclusionary ideology, dictatorship, consolidation, and
challenge—turns out to be 100% predictive.
We concentrated on genocide under the strictest construction of Raphael
Lemkin’s definition of the term—actual mass murder of innocent citizens or
subjects by their own government—as opposed to general killing of civilians in
war. Some of the best work on genocide
has used that wider definition (e.g. Kiernan 2007, Shaw 2013). Our model does
not work for this extended use of the term.
One would have to have a predictive model of all war—something that has
so far defied scholarship, despite literally thousands of attempts. Wars are notoriously multicausal; it usually
takes several reasons to make leaders decide to go to war. Economic gain (or plain loot), political
power of the state or its leaders, land, ethnic and religious conflicts,
maintaining warrior culture, and other factors all operate.
By
contrast, genocide is usually rather simple: when autocratic leaders feel they
are in a shaky situation, they kill.
Very often—famously with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—they come to depend
more and more on the level of hatred of their backers, and thus must whip up
more and more hate to stay in power; this makes them take still more power and
kill still more minorities, to provide red meat to their “base.”
There are four ways to
hate: hate upward (hating the elites), down (hating the less fortunate, from
the poor to the less abled to the minorities), laterally (real enemies or
social rivals), or not at all. Bad
leaders, and often even relatively good ones, move more and more toward getting
their followers to hate downward—to hate the weak, the powerless, the
minorities. Even those who took power by
marshaling upward hate, such as the Communists, soon find it pays better to get
their followers to hate downward.
A
marginal sort of genocide is “cold genocide”:
Slow and not very sure elimination of an ethnic group by selective
killing over a long time, coupled with every effort to destroy the group as a
distinguishable entity possessing its own culture or ideology. The term “cold genocide” was coined by Kjell
Anderson to describe the Indonesian pressure on West Irian (West Papua). It has been applied to the far larger and
bloodier repression of the Falun Gong movement in China since the late
1990s. This movement, a spiritual
discipline that by all accounts except the Chinese government’s was utterly
inoffensive, seemed dangerous to the Communist leadership, because of its size
and rapid growth. Suppression included
propaganda wars, but also mass torture, imprisonment (“reeducation” in
“camps”), and killing by extracting body parts for transplantation or the
international black market (Cheung et al. 2018, citing a huge literature). The Falun Gong has become the major source of
hearts, livers, and other vital organs in China, a practice that may seem even
more ghoulish than most genocidal atrocities.
The
Chinese government has now expanded its reach to include the Muslim Uighurs of
Xinjiang. Approximately a million have
been placed in concentration camps (“vocational training centers”) and
subjected to intense pressure to acculturate to Han majority norms (Byler
2018). Children have been removed from
homes and parents, and educated according to Han patterns. Islam is attacked in particular. The Uighurs’ sin appears to have been
agitating for minority rights guaranteed by the Chinese constitution. The Chinese government has accused them of
ISIS-style terrorism because of a very few extreme individuals. Recently, government agencies in Uighur
territory have been ordering thousands of clubs, stock probes, tear gas
canisters, spiked clubs, handcuffs, prison uniforms, and other instruments of
suppression and torture (SBS News 2018).
This constitutes “culturocide,” the form of genocide that involves
destruction of an entire culture by restriction of personal freedoms and forced
removal and re-education of children—one of the forms of genocide specifically
addressed by Lemkin.
Most
genocides have been propagated by elites: ruling governments or powerful groups
that whip up hatred to consolidate their power.
However, these groups may have started as small popular movements, like
the original fascists. Moreover, settler
genocides are largely bottom-up phenomena, and so are many small-scale
religious massacres and revolutionary bloodlettings like the French Terror.
Mobs, genocides, and wars do not just happen,
and they are not the result of blind forces.
They are invoked by individuals.
People do not spontaneously go into orgies of murder, unless some leader
or leaders are profiting in important ways.
Whipping up hatred in others is not confined to leaders—anyone can do
it—but ordinary people doing it at grassroots levels can do only so much
damage, though if they form a large organization like Hitler’s Nazis or the Ku
Klux Klan they can have devastating effects.
Further
work since 2012 has extended the models backwards, to look at the factors
behind the final extreme abuse of autocratic power. From Waller’s Confronting Evil, Frank
Dikötter’s How
to Be a Dictator (2019), among other books (cited below), we learn that the
vast widely-targeted genocides of modern times accompany the decline of
traditional societies and communities and the rise of mass communication and
mass top-down society. Links evolve from
networks of local people, only somewhat influenced by governments, to
top-to-bottom chains of authority by huge governments that take more and more
power, even in peaceful and democratic societies. When a dictator seizes control in such a
mass society, he can quickly draw on his power, on loyalty, and on the lack of
countervailing horizontal forces. He can
rapidly turn a peaceful, orderly society into a killing machine.
He
will do it only if he has not only public but also financial support, and many
genocides are enabled by specific firms or economic interests. These turn out to be primary-production
interests—extractive, often rentier, often export-oriented—in most cases (see
below, part 3). Large agrarian
interests—landlords—are often involved, and more recently the oil industry has
been notorious (Auzanneau 2018).
Sometimes industries come on board, as in Nazi Germany. Some communist genocides have taken place
with support from peasants and workers rather than giant firms, but some others
had the support of giant state-owned economic interests.
The
dictators who invoke genocides are also a special selection (Dikötter 2019). Many genocidal leaders fall into two types. Most are elites, often military, but a
surprisingly large number of them are marginal—subalterns or regional-derived,
educated in metropoles or big cities, and educated in contexts that are also
somewhat marginal, ranging from military academies (very often) to extremist
mentoring by other radicals or lovers of violence (for details, see, again,
Anderson and Anderson 2012; Waller 2016; this has been noted before, e.g.
Isaiah Berlin noted a correlation with origin in border regions; Rosenbaum
2019:7). The range is from Napoleon
(Corsican), Stalin (Georgian), and Hitler (Austrian) to Mao (educated in Japan)
and the Cambodian genocide leaders (educated in Paris with mentoring by the
Egyptian Samir Amin). Very many of the
genociders have been military men: Napoleon the corporal, the Argentine
colonels, General Rios Montt in Guatemala, Idi Amin in Uganda, and many
more. Leading in mass killing is, of
course, the job of military officers.
Usually,
the ideologues of these exclusionary ideologies are not themselves
killers. Karl Marx dreamed revolution,
but actually spent his time studying and writing in the magnificent reading
room of the British Museum. Friedrich
Nietzsche for Germany and Gabriele d’Annunzio for Italy were the major thinkers
behind fascism, but they led scholarly lives.
It was left to lieutenants, and lieutenants of lieutenants, to become
the hard-nosed opportunistic toughs that led the movements and were also the
initial followers and fighters. They
were often animated more by hatred and ambition than by attention to doctrine.
These
leaders all shared a quite specific ideology of the purity and superiority of
one group over the abysmal badness of another, with the further concept that
all members of each group have those respective essences. This can be broken up into 20 specific ideas,
carefully extracted from an enormously extensive analysis of the rhetoric of
genocide leaders in 20 of the major historic cases by Gerard Saucier and Laura
Akers: “tactics/excuses for
violence, dispositionalism/essentialism, purity/cleansing language,
dehumanization, dualistic/dichotomous thinking, internal enemies, crush-smash-exterminate-eliminate
[language]
, group or national unity, racialism in some form, xenophobia/foreign
influence, uncivilized or uncivilizable, attachment/entitlement to land, body
or disease metaphor, revenge or retaliation language, traitor talk (treason,
treachery, etc.), conspiracy, subversion, something held sacred,
nationalism/ethnonationalism, threat of annihilation of our people” (Saucier
and Akers 2018:88).
They
add some other frequent themes, including “placing national security above other
goals,” wanting to move fast and thoroughly, and thinking “individuals must
suffer for the good of the collective” (Saucier and Akers 2018:90). They find
all of these in many cases, from Hitler’s and Stalin’s rhetoric to the less
widely known writings of the Serbian and WWII-Japanese leadership and the
propaganda of mass murderers of Indigenous people in Australia and the United
States. Dehumanizing terms like “rats,”
“cockroaches,” and “insects” appear to be universal. One can, for instance, note the Communist
Chinese leadership’s invocations against Falun Gong and dissidents as “rats”
and “subversives” (Cheung et al. 2018).
The
worst genocides are usually associated with extreme ideologies: Leninist
communism, fascism, extremist religion, or nationalist and ethnic
fanaticism. Extremist ideologues must be
a strange combination to succeed: ideologically zealous, yet utterly amoral and
opportunist in the ways they take power (Dikötter
2019 provides valuable case studies).
More pragmatic military dictators like Egypt’s, and economic hardliners
like Pinochet in Chile, usually kill their opponents and anyone suspected of
opposition, but do not engage in the vast orgies of extermination that almost
always follow from ideologues taking power.
They too are opportunist and amoral, but they usually make little secret
of it.
On
the other hand, the people must be susceptible.
As Mao Zedong used to say, “a spark can ignite a prairie fire,” but that
depends on the availability of dry grass.
Humans are easily enough turned to evil to give any credible leader a
chance. Understanding such events
involves working back from the event to the direct perpetrators and their
mindsets, and then on to the back stories.
The casual tendency of modern historians and other scholars to attribute
causes of historical events to abstractions (“the economy,” “politics,”
“culture,” “climate”) is wrong. Marx is
often blamed for it, because of vulgarization of his theory of history, but he
was careful to specify that real people must lead the revolution, even if it is
“inevitable” sooner or later because of economic forces. Marx was also aware that those economic
forces were themselves caused by the choices of real people. Other thinkers from Ibn Khaldun to Max Weber
and Anthony Giddens (1984) have made the same general point: structures emerge
from individual actions and interactions.
There is no definite link
between genocide and any particular economic system, organization, interest, or
condition. Capitalist, socialist, and
communist countries have all done it.
Claims that genocide is most likely during economic downturns or is
associated with deprivation do not hold up (Anderson and Anderson 2012; Nyseth
Brehm 2017a, 2017b). International war
generally dominated mass bloodshed before 1945, but since then genocide has far
overshadowed it, causing more deaths than all wars, murders, and crimes
combined. One suspects this has
something to do with the dispensability of labor. Kings of old could not afford to decimate
their own work force. Now, with rapid
population growth and machines displacing workers, governments can deal with
problems by thinning out their own people, saving the price of war.
Genocides fall into three
types: settler, consolidation, and crisis genocides (our classification, but see
Waller 2016 for much fuller but similar typology). Settler genocides occur when a large,
powerful society takes over land from small or scattered groups, especially
when the powerful society is technologically advanced and the smaller victim
groups are less so (“Whatever happens, we have got / the Gatling gun and they
have not”—Hilaire Belloc; also quoted as “Maxim gun”). The most famous cases are the United States
(Dee Brown 1971; Madley 2016), Brazil (Hemming 1978), and Australia (Pascoe
2014), but the same story can be told of societies from Russia to China to
Japan (Kiernan 2007). It goes far back
in time. Ancient Babylon and Assyria
exterminated captives. The Romans and medieval
Europeans exterminated rebellious subject peoples and took their
possessions. The Bantu took southern
Africa from the Khoi-San with attendant exterminations. Settler genocides depended on convincing a
large part of the citizenry to kill the Indigenous peoples, and to threaten
protectors and dissidents into silence.
A particularly good study of this is Benjamin Madley’s study of
California in the 19th century (Madley 2016).
This counts as genocide
only if the victims had been conquered and subjected. Extermination of enemies who are fighting
back with everything they have is normal war, not genocide. The dividing line is obviously blurred, but
extremes are easy to see; the wars with the Apaches and Comanche (Hämäläinen 2008) in the
United States and Mexico in the 1870s were initially fair fights with little
quarter given by either side, and thus not genocide, but the extermination of
the Yuki in California in the mid-19th century was genocidal
massacre of helpless conquered people (Madley 2016; Miller 1979).
Modern genocides fall
into four categories: communist, fascist, military dictatorship, and random
cases of rulers who lack ideology. The
last are usually military, since military men have an advantage in seizing
power, but almost as often they are democratically elected politicians. Sometimes an initially able ruler becomes
more and more extreme (or even demented) with age. The one common thread is that they come to
power by marshaling hate.
Some genocides have
direct corporate backing. American
corporations acting through the CIA established genocidal regimes in Guatemala,
El Salvador, and Chile. European
colonial powers sometimes established murderous successor regimes in liberated
colonies, or, conversely, set up a hopeless government that soon fell to
genocidal rebels. Former colony status
is a fair predictor of genocide.
Many genocidal regimes
have survived and flourished despite mass murder because states support
business interests that are benefited by the regimes in question. Cases range from early fascist Italy under
Mussolini to more modern states such as Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea. The oil industry is notorious for this, but
armaments merchants are interested, for obvious reasons. One also recalls “blood diamonds,” blood
coltan (columbium-tantalum ore, source of conflict in DR Congo), and other
commodities deeply stained.
Plantation slavery or
serfdom is one back story. Developed in
ancient Mesopotamia, it was the first institution based on cruel treatment of
disenfranchised multitudes by ruling elites.
It grew steadily, especially in the west, peaking in the Atlantic slave
trade and the indentured-labor plantations of Asia in the 18th and
19th centuries. It led to a vast amount of murder.
Consolidation genocides
are the commonest and often among the worst.
They occur when a rather shaky totalitarian regime based on exclusionary
ideology takes over full control of a country.
They usuallyoccur in that
situation, but the kill totals range widely, from rather small-scale
politicides (like Marcos’ in the Philippines and Pinochet’s in Chile) to vast
mass murders like Mao’s in China. The
scale depends on the extremism of the new government, especially its
exclusionary ideology. Ideology was not
a huge factor in the pragmatic (though murderous) Marcos government; at the
other extreme, the indiscriminate hatreds of the Nazis led to the vast
massacres of the Holocaust.
Crisis genocides occur
when genocide is brought about or exacerbated by war, either international or
civil. Very minor local rebellions can
serve as excuses for already-planned genocides, as in Guatemala in the 1980s
(where violence continues; Nelson 2019), or international war can vastly
escalate already-ongoing genocides, as in Hitler’s Germany in the 1940s. Sometimes consolidation and crisis occur
together, as in Cambodia in the late 1970s, producing the most extreme of all
genocides.
Almost all genocides fall
into one of these three types. The only
exceptions are cases in which an extreme (if not downright psychopathic)
dictator continues to kill whole populations without let or stay. Stalin and Mao are the major cases in
history, but other apparently demented monarchs from Caligula to Tamerlane
might be mentioned.
Genocides
range greatly in the numbers and percentages of people killed. The Cambodian genocide, which killed perhaps
¼ of the total population, is unique.
Rwanda’s genocide killed 10% of the population—a million people—in only
100 days, a rate of killing calculated at 333.3 murders per hour, 5.5 per
minute (Nyseth Brehm 2017b:5). Most
genocides are fortunately smaller; many are “politicides,” confined to classes
of political enemies of the dictator.
Mere political killings do not count as genocides, but mass political
murders by people like Agustin Pinochet of Chile and Ferdinand Marcos of the
Philippines threw far wider nets. Not
only actual opponents, but families of opponents, ordinary protestors, children
who seemed somehow opposed to the regime, and random suspects were killed. The scope of genocide depends on the size and
range of targeted groups, which in turn depends on the extremism of the
exclusionary ideology of the leaders.
Hitler targeted a huge and, at the end, almost random-looking assortment
of peoples. Pinochet narrowly targeted
suspected liberals and leftists.
Recent
attacks on “social media” for being platforms that amplify hatred (e.g. Zaki
2019:146-150) made me aware of an important and previously neglected fact: the
greatest genocides, the ones in which whole nations seem to have gone mad and
collapsed in orgies of blood, were propagated by print media and radio. The first, the Turkish massacre of the
Armenians and other Christian minorities, was even prior to radio. The others—notably Germany and central Europe
under Hitler, the USSR under Stalin, China under Mao, Nigeria in the Biafra
War, and the Indonesian, Cambodian, and Rwanda-Burundi genocides—were driven by
newspapers, radio, and public appearances.
Social media allow discussion, argument, persuasion, and grassroots
movements. Radio in totalitarian
societies is the ultimate in faceless, top-down communication to people who
have no way of answering or commenting on any scale. Public appearances by
leaders, and propaganda pictures and films, are not much better: they show the
leader in crisp uniform, from a distance, generally high above the masses. It is surely significant that there have been
no huge, out-of-control genocides in societies with good social media. The worst recent genocide in terms of mass
participation by ordinary people is that in Myanmar, where access to modern
media is limited. Even TV has the value
of showing the leader up close, making him look less than respectable. But the real value of Facebook, Twitter, and
the like is that allow us to answer back.
They are often compared to face-to-face encounters, to the disadvantage
of the social media, but the real comparison is with the passivizing and
alienating radio and its cousins.
Genocides
have become much commoner and bloodier since 1900. Earlier genocides were largely religious
persecutions (such as the Inquisition) or settler genocides. Since 1900, genocides have targeted wider
groups, often huge segments of society.
This tracks the decline of community and the rise of mass hierarchic
society, as we have noted.
Through
history, genocidal regimes just kept killing till conquered by outsiders or
popular movements. Then they often
returned to bad ways unless they underwent decisive political changes—sometimes
forced on them by conquest, as with Germany and Japan after WWII. Slavery, though not
genocide by our definition, is very close to it, and requires a similar
mentality: the basic idea that one whole group of humans does not deserve human
consideration. By establishing that
mind-set, it helped the progress to modern genocide. The slave trade was notoriously bloody.
Genocide
and war always include far more than mere killing. Victims are routinely tortured. Women and girls are almost always raped. People are burned or buried alive. The deliberate sadism goes beyond anything an
ordinary creative torturer could devise; there have been instruction books on
torturing for centuries, and there are now websites on the “dark web.” Ordinary people are as prone to do all this
as the leaders themselves. Similar
findings are common in studies of warfare, criminal gangs, and perhaps above
all the whole history of heresy persecution in religions. Even domestic violence often involves
unspeakable torture and humiliation of spouse, children, or other family
members.
Ordinary people caught up
in even the most mundane street gangs soon learn to commit unspeakable acts
without second thoughts. Psychological
explanations of this range from direct explanations in terms of conformity,
anger, learned hate, and social antipathy (Baron-Cohen 2011; Baumeister 1997)
to the elaborate Freudian-Lacanian framework of Edward Weisband (2017,
2019). Animal models (of which there are
many in Clutton-Brock 2016, esp. chapters 8 and 13) suggest that competition
for control of resources and of mates and mating bring out the worst in all
mammal species, turning otherwise meek and inoffensive animals into
demons. Human domestic violence usually
(if not always) turns on control and relative power issues (B. Anderson et al.
2004). Rage over shakiness of control
certainly lies behind much genocide and genocidal behavior. Exploring the full scale of this phenomenon,
and of other causes for rage, remains an urgent task for the future.
The universality of the
phenomenon, especially perhaps in street gangs, suggests that it is all too
normal a part of human potential, but many of Weisband’s cases (such as the
Nazi death camp leaders) seem to be genuinely psychotic or brain-damaged. Whatever the explanations, the performative
sadism of human violence is a particularly horrific thing to find so
universally.
Genocide
(aside from settler genocide) is a particularly interesting case because ethnic
genocide is a relatively new form of evil.
Outside of religious persecutions—the real font of genocide–huge-scale
elimination of vast numbers of peaceable fellow citizens, simply because they
fall in some arbitrary category, is new enough that people have not adjusted to
it as a matter of ordinary life since time immemorial (as slavery was
considered to be). Conforming to
genociders is, or was in the early 20th century, a new way to be
bad.
The
Enlightenment gave rise to ideas of peace and freedom. War was reduced, and slavery slowly but
surely was outlawed everywhere. However,
the Enlightenment was founded not only on rapid expansion of trade, commerce,
communication, and science, but also on the slavery and exploitation that it
eventually fought.
As
the world filled up in the 20th century, problems of overpopulation,
pressure on resources, and competition for goods became more salient. Leaders by this time tended to be old and not
battle-hardened, so they did not always deal with such problems by
international war, as almost everyone had done before 1800. Often, either during war or instead of war,
the modern leaders turned on sectors of their own people, waging genocide
campaigns. Wars and slaving were
partially replaced by internal mass murder.
Genocide developed from religious persecution and settler colonialist
practices.
Genocide,
like other violence, must ultimately reduce to hatred. The government must be able to whip up mass
hatred, to get support and help in its project of mass murder. To the extent that people are hateful and
angry, they are susceptible to this persuasion.
On the other hand, they may simply be “following orders” and “doing
their job,” becoming callous to the whole enterprise (Paxton 2005, Snyder
2015). The genocidal leader or leaders mobilize an insecure or downward-mobile
majority, or fraction of the majority, against the most salient or disliked
minorities.
Genocide
seems to sum up the other forms of violence.
Like war, it is often about loot and land (Kiernan 2005). Like intimate partner violence, it always
involves some issues of control and insecurity about control and power. Like civil war, it often begins with
rebellion, driven by class or religious or ethnic conflict. Finally, leaders of genocidal regimes are
often classic bullies, a point elaborated below.
Mass
Killing in General
The
forms of mass killing are international war, civil war (which differs from
interpolity war in causes and usual course; see Collier and Sambanis 2005),
revolution and rebellion, genocide, structural violence on large scales, mass
poisoning by pollution, denial of medical care, and mass starvation through
refusing to take action on agriculture, welfare, or food security (on famine as
mass murder, see Howard-Hassman 2016). Large-scale
human sacrifice, once a major part of religion and kingship, has fortunately
been eliminated, but sacrificing millions to the cults of guns, automobiles,
and oil continues. These form something
of a continuum. Genocide sometimes grows from bureaucratic neglect.
These
all have different risk factors.
International war is hard to predict and almost always multicausal. The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-1748) was not
just about Jenkins’ ear. Usually, desire
to capture a neighbor’s territory and resources, a desire to support one’s own military
machine and sometimes one’s armaments industry, pressure by hot-headed males
hungry for glory and loot, claims of wounded national pride, and ideological
differences with the enemy are all involved.
Traditional or manufactured hatreds are always conspicuous. Small incidents are typically taken as
excuses. (In the case of Jenkins’ ear,
the war was a complex fight between Britain and Spain over New World
territories and other issues). Nations
such as the medieval Turks and Mongols may have war as their major economic
activity and even their whole lifeway.
Rivalries within families forced rivals to compete to see who could
amass the most loot and glory (Fletcher 1980:238).
War seems to have been
around forever, if one counts the local raids and small wars typical of
small-scale societies. War seems to have
been especially common in chiefdoms and early states. Population growth, rivalry for land and loot,
and hierarchic institutions had run ahead of peace-keeping mechanisms. Typically, neighbors come into conflict over
land and resources, but such conflicts can almost always be settled by
negotiation. When they get out of
control, however, traditional rivalries may develop, as between France and
England through much of history. Then,
honor, nationalism, and eventually real hatred come into play, increasing the
danger. Specific histories are almost
invariably complex and highly contingent on hard-to-predict events.
With
the state, maintenance of order slowly developed. Even so, the incidence of violence and war
varied widely within tribal and early state societies. Just as there are violently aggressive people
and saintly ones, there are bloodthirsty and pacific groups. Particularly interesting are profound changes
over time. Scandinavians changed from
Vikings to democratic socialists (Pinker 2011).
English changed from Shakespeare’s blood-drenched warriors to today’s
peaceable folk. Germany changed from the
most demonic country in history to leader of a peaceful Europe in only one
generation. Most dramatic was Rwanda,
where gradual increase in hate and violence built up to the genocide of 1994
that killed 1/10 of the population—but then ended suddenly and was followed by
amazingly peaceful, tranquil, well-regulated recovery (as shown by brief
research there by ourselves, and much more detailed ongoing research on the
ground by Hollie Nyseth-Brehm).
Lies
are universal in war; “truth is the first casualty,” and George Orwell’s
analyses remain unsurpassed. People
believe lies against all evidence when their political beliefs are served
thereby, as several modern studies have shown (Healy 2018). Patiently pointing facts can work, but only
when the truth is inescapable and unequivocal (Healy 2018). The endless circulation of repeatedly
discredited fictions about Jews and blacks is well known.
The ability of people to
change dramatically from war mode to peace mode, from bad wolf to good wolf, is
truly astounding. Recent studies have
shown that this is heavily contingent on social pressure. Michal Bauer and coworkers (2018) found that
in an experimental setting, Slavic high school students in Slovakia were twice
as likely to play hostile toward Roma in a game than toward other Slavic
students—but only if someone started it.
They would all play peacefully unless someone made a hostile move, but
if that happened all the Slavic students generally joined in. It was easy to flip the group from tolerant
to ethnically discriminatory.
Today,
a range of violent engagements are common.
International war is still with us, though current ones all grew from
local civil wars. Civil wars abound, and
merge with local rebellions. Civil wars
stem from rebellion, revolution, or coup, or—very often—from breakaway
movements by local regions, as in the United States’ Civil War (Collier and
Sambanis 2005).
Criminal gangs dominate
whole countries; the governments of Honduras and El Salvador are particularly
close to their gangs. Gangs kill for
loot, rivalry, “honor,” turf, women, and other usual causes. Individual murder for gain, revenge, or hate
blends into gang killings and then up into militias, armies, and nations; there
is no clear separation. A murder in a
gang-dominated country like El Salvador may have individual, gang, and national
overtones.
Finally, ordinary,
everyday murders are usually over issues of control. The commonest murders are within the family;
next, within the neighborhood. The mass
murders of unknown (though usually local) victims that dominate the media are
relatively rare, though much commoner in the United States than in most
countries.
Genocide continues, in
Myanmar, Sudan, South Sudan, and several other countries. China is committing genocide against its
Uyghur population; it has imprisoned a million and killed countless more (Byler
2018; Stavrou 2019). China is also
repressing Tibetans, Mongols, Kazakhs, and Hui, apparently for no reason other
than a desire to crush religious and cultural minorities, since China’s
world-leading security and surveillance system has surely established these
minorities are not a security risk. Turkish
repression of Kurds and Brazilian massacres of Indigenous people have now
reached genocidal proportions. Violent, genocidal
or potentially genocidal regimes now control about 1/6 of the world’s
countries. It is highly contingent. In many cases, the dice could easily have
rolled the other way. Evil ranges in
extent; Hitler had real power, his American imitators very little before 2017. The degree of evilness is not well correlated
with its success.
Today, with warfare
constant and technologically sophisticated, militarism is on the increase,
dictatorships are becoming common again (as in the mid-20th
century), and whole societies are becoming militarized. An important special issue of Current Anthropology, the leading
anthropological journal, is devoted to this; an important introduction by the
issue editors, Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteson (2019), details the rapid
rise and current pervasiveness of the new hi-tech militaristic world and
worldview. Military bases around the
world have led to virtual slavery of local hired workers, as well as
dispossession of local farmers and others (see also Lutz 2019; Vine 2019). Besteman’s article (2019) details the
progressive conversion of the world into an armed camp, with the rich routinely
attacking the poor nations—no new thing that, but more and more a worldwide
unified effort, rather than a country-by-country issue. Gusterson (2019) recounts the use of drones to
create terror; there is no one to fight—only a strange, buzzing object that
brings random death and chaos. As
Gusterson shows, drones are claimed to hit actual individual terrorists and
military targets with pinpoint accuracy, but of course they do no such thing;
they are used to terrorize whole populations with large-scale random strikes on
soft targets. Militarized cultures
develop in zones of war and conflict, as they have throughout time (e.g. Fattal
2019; Hammami 2019).
Another
set of cases of people turning violent and destructive is provided by the
well-known cycles of empire. Every
preindustrial state had cycles of rise and fall, usually at vaguely predictable
intervals, with a 75-100 year period and a 200-300 year period being
common. The great Medieval Arab thinker
Ibn Khaldun (1958) first isolated, described, and explained these. Recently, Peter Turchin (2003, 2006, 2016;
Turchin and Zefedov 2009) and I (Anderson 2019) have elaborated on Ibn Khaldun’s
theory. There is thus no reason to go
into it here; suffice it to say that internal processes make dynastic crises
inevitable, over the long run, in such societies. At such times, rebellion, local wars,
banditry, and sometimes international wars break out, and societies often
dissolve into chaos. Basically, it is a
process in which a society based on positive-sum games (cooperation,
law-abiding) dissolves into negative-sum games, in which groups and power brokers
try to take each other out.
On rare occasions, a
whole empire may completely collapse, as Rome did in the 5th
century. This represents yet another
society-wide set of cases of fairly rapid change from peace and order to
violence and mass death.
Slavery
At
the slave museum in Zanzibar, built on the old slave quarters there, one can
see the hellholes were slaves were confined, read their stories, and see many
excellent exhibits with contemporary accounts, drawings, and even
photographs. The most disquieting, and
the most pervasive, message is that the slave trade was an ordinary business,
like selling bananas. Hundreds of people
routinely raped, murdered, tortured, brutalized, and oppressed their fellow
humans, for eight hours a day (or more), simply as a regular job. These slavers no doubt felt like any other
workers—bored, annoyed by trivial problems, angry at the boss every so often,
but indifferent to the subjects of their effort. They were not singled out for being violent,
or psychopathic, or intolerant; they were simply locals who happened to be
available. Anyone could do it.
Mistreatment
of enslaved people involves minimalizing them—not denying their humanity, but
denying that it matters. They can be
treated brutally because they do not count.It is perhaps harder to imagine the
mind-sets of people who worked in the slave trade, day after day, for a whole
working lifetime, than to imagine the mind-sets of genociders. Today, most people in developed countries are
repelled even by bad treatment of farm animals.
I remember when people treated animals worse than they do today, but
even in my rural youth, animals were never treated as badly as slaves were
treated in Zanzibar, Byzantium, the American South, and other places where
slavery occurred. The animals needed to
stay healthy to turn a profit. By
contrast, the whole goal of slaving is to reduce humans to helpless, terrified
victims, through intimidation and brutalization. Their health was a secondary concern at
best. It was easier to get new slaves
than to deal with well-treated ones.
Slavery
has cast a long shadow over America, influencing American politics profoundly
to this day (Acharya et al. 2018). Many,
possibly half, of Americans believe slavery was happy blacks playing banjos and
occasionally picking a bit of cotton under the benevolent eyes of the
plantation owners. The rest usually
think of slavery as the work of a few utterly evil men, like Simon Legree of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The fact is that slavery involved thousands
of men and women brutalizing other men and women, simply as a regular job,
carried out with varying degrees of racist hate but with little thought about
the whole issue. In America the
brutalizers were white and the victims black, but in most of history—and today
in countries like Thailand and Ukraine—the slaves were the same race and very
often the same culture and society as their oppressors. Roy Baumeister, in his book Evil, comments on how repugnant most
people find evil acts, but how quickly they get used to them and see them as
routine. There is no evidence that
slavers found even the initial phases of their work particularly
unpleasant. They put in their eight
hours (or more) of rape, torture, and murder with a “just doing a job”
mentality.
John
Stedman wrote a classic 18th-century account of the horrors of
slavery in Surinam (Stedman 1988 [1790]).
Stedman was a mercenary in the service of the plantation owners, so at
first he was biased in favor of slavery and against slaves; his horror at what
he saw convinced him that slavery was an evil practice. He reports a great deal of real hatred by
slaveowners of their slaves, and a great deal of torture simply for torture’s
sake, often because of extreme (and not wholly unjustified) fear of slave
rebellions, and the fear-driven belief that only brutality could prevent
those. His writings became foundational
to the antislavery effort, first in England, then worldwide. Most interesting, though, is his extremely
extensive documentation (confirmed by every other early report) of the
matter-of-fact, everyday, routine brutality.
It simply never occurred to most people of the time that this was
monstrous.
One
also recalls John Newton’s conversion, at about the same time, from slaving
captain to extremely repentant Christian; after years of depression, he felt
divine forgiveness, and wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace,” which, somewhat
ironically, became a favorite of African-American churches. As with resisters of pressure to commit
genocide, repenters of slaving are rare in the archives.
Slavery
in traditional societies (from the Northwest Coast of North America to
pre-slave-trade Africa), was sometimes less murderous and torture-filled. But it was never other than cruel and
oppressive. All records from all
societies speak of rape, terrorizing, and brutalizing. Yet, no one in history—not Buddha, not
Confucius, not Jesus—opposed slavery as an institution, until the Quakers in
the 18th century concluded it was against God’s law. The tide then turned with striking speed. Enslavement of Europeans was basically over,
outside the Turkish Empire, well before 1800.
Enslavement of Native Americans was theoretically banned in the Catholic
countries, and was actually reduced to a rare and local phenomenon by
1800. Enslavement of Africans continued
well into the 19th century, being legally abolished between 1820 and
the 1880s.
Illegal slavery continues today. The Council on Foreign Relations (2019)
estimates that there are 40.3 million slaves in the world. Few are chattel slaves like those in
Zanzibar; most are forced prison laborers (e.g. in North Korea), persons
enslaved for debt, or sex slaves (including forced marriage sufferers). Sex slavery, with all the attendant horrors, is
carried out in the familiar spirit of “all in a day’s work,” by thugs and pimps
from Thailand to Hollywood. Reading
reports of child sex slavery shows how low humans can sink, all the time
thinking they are doing what culture and economics require. As always, there is no evidence that most of
these people are especially evil to begin with.
Some child-sex slavers are clearly psychopathic, but others simply drift
into the life and do what they believe is necessary. Many were sex slaves themselves.
Structural Violence and Callousness
Millions
of deaths today come simply from the bureaucratic attitude that people are
merely things to move around, like rocks.
One of the most chilling books I have read is The Future of Large Dams by Thayer Scudder (2005). Scudder spent his life studying refugees from
huge dam projects. In almost every case,
people displaced by big dams were simply ordered to move. Their homes were bulldozed, their livelihoods
flooded. There were usually token
“relief” efforts, but these were so trivial as to be more insulting than
helpful. Millions of refugees were left
to shift for themselves, and in poorer nations that meant many of them
died. Scudder bends over backwards to be
fair, which makes the stories sound even worse; one cannot write him off as
biased.. The bureaucrat perpetrators are
cut from the same cloth as the cold “doing my job” slavers and Nazi
executioners. There is a huge subsequent
literature on dams and displacement; suffice it to cite Sunil Amrith’s Unruly Waters (2018), which puts India’s
and China’s megadams in historical context while describing their social and
ecological devastation. Almost always,
the displaced are poor, and often from minority groups, while the benefits go to
the relatively rich: landlords, urban power-users, and the like.
Similarly, pollution is
generated by giant firms producing for the affluent, but the pollution is
almost always dumped on the poor and vulnerable (Anderson 2010 covers this
issue in detail). The populations
sacrificed for the greater good of the giant firms are the stigmatized ones; Erving
Goffman’s classic work Stigma (1963)
is highly relevant.
Related
are the horrific famines invoked by governments against their own people, as
described in State Food Crimes by
Rhoda Howard-Hassmann (2016) and for specific, particularly horrible cases by
Anne Appelbaum (2017) for Ukraine in the 1930s and Hazel Cameron (2018) for
Zimbabwe in 1984. Not only totalitarian
governments, but the British in 1840s Ireland and 1940s Bengal, and most
settler societies in their campaigns to get rid of colonized peoples. In the Irish potato famine, aid was denied
although Ireland was exporting food and England was rich (Salaman 1985;
Woodham-Smith 1962) Many countries have deliberately
invoked famine as a form of state policy.
The Holodomor in the Ukraine and Russia in the 1920s was an extreme case
(Howard-Hassman 2016). America’s 19th-century
extermination of the buffalo was explicitly done to starve the Native
Americans, and thus was genocidal.
Johan
Galtung (1969) coined the term “structural violence” to describe destruction by
the cold workings of the social system, ranging from the results of
institutionalized bigotry to bureaucratic displacement and refusal to provide
famine relief. Structural violence is
usually a matter of passing public costs onto those held to deserve no better,
usually poor and vulnerable people.
Again, ethnic and religious hate is very often involved. The targeted victims—selected to pay the
costs of industrial development, public works, crop failures, and the like—are
almost always poor, and very often from minority groups. Robert Nixon has used the term “slow
violence” for this.
There
is, however, a range from clearly and deliberately murderous and unnecessary structural
violence, such as the Holodomor and the Ethiopian famine under the Derg, down
to the tragic results of incompetent and irresponsible planning. Famines before 1900 were usually due to
genuine crop failures in societies that did not have adequate safety nets, and
often could not have had. The gradation
from such tragedies to deliberate mass murder by starvation is not an easy one
to unpack. There will always be
controversial cases. Lillian Li’s
classic Fighting Famine in North China (2007) goes into detail on a
society that was desperately short of food but did have a well-developed safety
net; the famines reflected a complex interaction of crop failures, local
violence, and government success or failure at deploying their extensive but
shaky relief infrastructure. Such cases
remain outside the scope of this book, which deals only with cases such as the
Holodomor and the buffalo slaughter, in which famine was deliberately created
for genocidal reasons. On the other
hand, massive displacement of people without preparation for resettlement or
rehabilitation is herein considered intrinsically genocidal, even if done—or
supposedly done—for good economic reasons.
I
hereby introduce the word “bureaupathy” to describe the associated attitude and
mindset. It is a mental state as sick
and destructive as psychopathy and sociopathy.
It is quite different from greed; the bureaucrats are usually following
orders or truckling to rich clients, rather than enriching themselves. It does, however, merge into corporate
murder-for-gain, which is done with similar cold-blooded indifference. Tobacco companies continue to produce a
product that causes up to ¼ of deaths worldwide, and no one in those companies
seems to feel either genocidal hate or moral compunction. Similarly, big oil and big coal preside not
only over thousands of pollution-caused deaths per year, but over the creation
of a global-warmed future that will lead to exponentially increasing deaths. Unlike the innocent, uneducated rural
American voters, oil executives know perfectly well that climate change is
real, and what it will cost. They read
the journals and are trained in science.
Many documents, leaked or quite open, show they are aware. They continue to produce oil and lie about
its effects on health and the ecosystem.
Hate vs. Greed
This
alerts us to two very different kinds of harm.
Hatred causes genuinely gratuitious harm: no one benefits. In fact, the hater usually harms himself or
herself just to hurt others; suicide bombing is the purest case. It is a negative-sum game: both sides lose. Selfish greed, however, does benefit the
doer; by the definition used here, it harms the other people in the transaction
more than it benefits the doer or doers.
Big dams benefit the rich and urban, but usually hurt the displaced
people and the total economy more. The
cost-benefit ratios of big dams are notoriously bad. More pure cases of selfish greed, such as
drug gang violence and medieval Viking raids, are even clearer: the thugs get
some loot, but the entire polity suffers, especially but not only the looted
victims. Professional gambling is
another case in point: the house always wins in the end, since it is there to
make a profit. Casino owners get
rich. They do it at the expense of victims,
often nonaffluent and often compulsive, who are ruined and often commit
suicide. The total cost-benefit ratio is
negative. But the victims choose to
gamble, so it is hard to stop the industry.
In this case, as in “the right to bear arms” and many others, individual
liberty is traded off against social costs.
Simple
rationality—ordinary common sense—would stop hate as a motive for harm. Stopping greed is more difficult, especially
when the greedy have the power to force their will on the rest of society, as
oil interests do today. From a
regulator’s point of view, there is also the problem of defining exactly where
reasonable cost-benefit ratios turn to unreasonable ones. Big dams do sometimes benefit the whole of
society, or at least they have in the past.
Simple morality directs that displaced persons should be compensated,
but other cases of “takings” are less clear.
If some suffer because they were selling poisons and the poisons are
finally banned, should those sellers be compensated? Or penalized for selling the poisons in the
first place? Much of politics is about
such issues, which seriously problematize the whole issue of evil.
In
war, genocide, and murder that most harm is usually clear-cut. So much, however, is due to greed—the entire
tobacco economy, most of the oil economy, most of the dam-building, and so
on—that looking far more seriously at cost-benefit accounting is a major need
for the future. On the other hand, the
role of hate, or at least of infrahumanization, in even these cases cannot be
underestimated. The case of dams is,
again, the best example: those displaced are almost always poor and rural, and
thus “do not count.” They can be ruined
and even reduced to starving to death, without any of the rulers or engineers
or construction bosses caring—sometimes without even noticing. The oil industry, also, typically dumps its
pollution on poor rural areas, such as rural Louisiana and the Indigenous
communities of Canada. When oil pollutes
a well-to-do urban area, there are protests and political and legal
action. Moreover, oil, tobacco, and
other harming industries have made it a practice to whip up hatred to get the
public to oppose valid science, as will be discussed below. Thus, hate, or at least discounting whole communities,
is central to the wider and more general applications of greed.
How Much Violence?
Several recent studies
attempt to quantify deaths by violence in human societies. Stephen Pinker (2011) famously concluded
people kill much less than they used to.
This is apparently wrong (Fry 2013; Mann 2018), but small-scale
societies kill at a relatively high rate.
Many small-scale farming societies, especially chiefdoms, are
particularly bloody. The human average
seems to be about 1% dying by violence per year, but it varies from insane
meltdowns like the 100 Years War, the fall of Ming, and the Khmer Rouge
genocide to total lasting peace.
In
a recent comparative study of war, Kissel and Kim (2018) define it as organized
conflict between separate, independent groups.
They note that the terms “aggression” and “war” cover a vast range of
very different behaviors. “Coalitionary”
killing of enemies is confined to ants and people and chimpanzees and maybe a
few other mammals; only humans do it on any scale. The genetics of aggression are as ambiguous
as ever. They note some archaeological
massacres, including one in Kenya 10,000 years ago, and cannibalism evidence in
many areas of the world—possibly during famines. They see a big change after agriculture and
settlement growth, but more in the size and organization of war than in the
commonness of aggressive killing. They
see war as cultural.
A
recent study by Dean Falk and Charles Hildebolt (2017) finds a wide range, from
small-scale societies that have essentially no violent killings to those where
a large percentage of deaths are violent.
Variation is much higher than among state-level societies. In general, it appears that small-scale
societies do have a somewhat higher percentage of violent deaths than large
state societies, but the margin is not great (if it exists at all). The genocides, slaving deaths, and mass
murders of modern states go well beyond Pinker’s estimates (Mann 2018). In few societies is murder and war the norm;
such a society would quickly self-destruct.
In fact, there are records of societies that did so. Something very close happened to the Waorani,
but they were persuaded by missionaries to become more peaceful (Robarchek and
Robarchek 1998). There is a range in states from Afghanistan and ancient
Assyria to relatively peaceful Tokugawa Japan and Yi Korea, or, today,
Scandinavia and Switzerland. Most states
through history have been undemocratic and repressive, with many political
murders.
Among the Enga, one of
the most violent societies in Falk and Hildebolt’s sample, powerful self-made
leaders—“big men”—often whip up war for their own advantage, but may also make
peace for the same reason; the oscillation from peace to extreme violence that
has characterized Enga society is heavily determined by these self-aggrandizing
maneuvers (Wiessner 2019). Popular will
often forces peace on disruptive young men or would-be leaders, however.
An “average” is hard to
calculate and probably meaningless, since most societies swing back and forth
between war and peace, conflict and stability.
The average may be close to urban America’s less privileged
neighborhoods.
Since
death is forever, the consequences of murder are irreparable, while good is
easily undone. (The same goes, in
general, for environmental damage; it is rarely, if ever, fully reversible.) A society requires countless small good acts
to make up for a terminally bad one.
Human nature must average positive to keep societies functional.
Human
tendencies to defend social position, defend the group, and defend or seize
land and resources continue to keep violence at a high level in most
societies. From the books cited above, a
clear pattern emerges of why people kill.
As individuals, if not killing in simple defense of self and loved ones,
they kill either for gain (as a paid job or for loot) or for social
control. Most often, they kill to
maintain social position: control over a spouse, “honor” in local societies,
revenge on a neighbor, dominance over minority members, or control of a personal
position of some kind. Even psychopaths
who kill compulsively usually wait for such opportunities. Probably most killing is done for
“defense.” Even aggression in war
becomes “preemptive strikes.” Genocide
is occasioned by extreme fear of minorities.
Targets
change over time. In agrarian societies,
the groups were very often rival branches of ruling families, clans, or
lineages. There was also, usually, an
opposition of “us” versus “barbarians,” i.e. semiperipheral marcher states or
semiperipheral invasive groups. In the
west, intolerant monotheist religions powered up hatred of other religions and
of “heretics,” and this tended to spill over into hate of all “others.” Opposition of men vs women, old vs young, and
rich/powerful/elite vs poor always create tension points. Toxic conformity takes over.
Gavin
de Becker (1997) provided many accounts of psychopaths and mass murderers. All turn on the obsessive need of the killer
to control someone—the woman he is stalking, the parents who have tortured him
growing up, the owner of a valued good who has tried to protect it.
Killers
in such situations either commit suicide or are fairly easily caught, but
gangsters who kill randomly may not be.
In particular, many gangs in the United States and elsewhere require a
new recruit to commit a murder, as a rite of passage. Such initiates seek out homeless mentally ill
individuals who will not be missed (or even identified, in many cases) and
whose death will not be investigated seriously.
This murder-for-position leads to further crime. In the United States, a killer usually is
jailed eventually, but in much of Latin America he (or sometimes she) will
often be accepted by society and escape the law.
As
groups, humans kill largely to maintain the power of the group over perceived
and hated rivals. These structural
opponent groups may be traditional enemies, new rivals, or ideological or
ethnic opposites. The hatreds lead to
international war, religious strife, civil war (most often between regions),
ideological murders and genocides, and other types of group violence. War for land is also extremely frequent. This led Ben Kiernan to title his great study
of warfare and genocide with the old Nazi phrase Blood and Soil (2007); he saw identity and land as the two great
reasons for mass killing. Nationhood and religion, both sources of a fictive or
socially constructed identity, are deadly, much more so than actual blood
relationship. I am far from the first to
remark on the human tendency to kill real people in the service of vapid
dreams.
War
for loot (portable wealth) seems largely limited to Viking raids, Turkic wars, Caucasus
Mountain feuds, and banditry in general.
It is the moral norm, and often the livelihood, of classic “barbarians,”
for whom it is a way of life rather than considered an evil or an exception. On
the other hand, wars to acquire land and mineral resources, to help one’s
national armaments industry, and to support its military, are universal throughout
history. Still, group hatred remains one
great reason for war, just as individual social control is apparently the
commonest reason for murder. Greed, even
for land, is controllable; the deadly mix of social fear, social hate, and need
for social control is the real “heart of darkness” within humans.
People Almost All Join In
One
thing is common to all genocides and wars:
Some individual or individuals whip up hatred, and the public goes along.
Usually, the leaders are desperate for power and are not particularly
restrained by morals. The masses,
however, can be almost anyone, anywhere, any time, though most sources agree
that genuinely threatening and unsettled conditions make it easier for tyrants
to whip up enmity. There are on occasion
mobs that spontaneously riot and destroy minority neighborhoods, but even these
normally have a single instigator or small group of instigators.
Normally,
this involves a flip from peaceful, economically rational behavior to
behavior that is violent, destructive, and economically, personally, and
morally irrational according to normal standards of the group and of
humanity. The bad wolf suddenly takes
over. Genocide leaders are men—they
are almost all men—who are geniuses at making people do this psychological
flip. They can manipulate social
fear, using a mix of charisma and exaggerated group rivalry. They can whip up the hatred that is latent in
people, and mobilize it. They are
masters of redefining groups to make them smaller, tighter, more defensive,
more closed. They can get people to
circle the wagons. They can make people
see it is an “exception” when moral rules are broken to harm a rival group,
something people all too often figure out without help (Sapolsky 2017,
summarized p. 674). The human ear and
brain reduce their processing of ordinary peaceful messages, and become more
sensitive to ominous messages and less sensitive to people or to rational
considerations; people can be reduced to blind rage (Monbiot 2019).
It
is particularly clear that a certain type of narcissistic, cocksure, extremist
leader can often manage to take advantage of human loyalty, religion, or
ideology to reduce a whole nation to near-hypnotism, adulating him (he is
always male—so far) with worshipful adoration.
Frank Dikötter
(2019) has investigated this in the case of several 20th century
dictators, including Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, and found many common
threads. All consolidated power
ruthlessly and came more and more to depend on a cult of personality. They became strongmen, above the law, above
tradition, above any restraint—even the restraints of their own claimed
ideologies. The more they did, the more
the loyal citizens adored them, until they miscalculated and caused actual ruin
through war or economic collapse. The
sad fact is that the tendency of humans to conform with society and follow its
leaders—usually useful traits, preventing chaos—can be and often is misused in
the most horrific ways.
In
all genocides, the mass of the population is susceptible to messages of hate. It is astonishingly easy to make ordinary
“decent” citizens into mass murderers.
People go along with the evil leaders. The public follows the leaders as loyally as
they do in international wars or in actual defense of the nation. The leaders are power-hungry and hateful
individuals, but their followers are not; yet their followers do appalling
things on command. Detailed interviewing
over time in Germany, China, the USSR, Rwanda, and other states showed that
people were swept away by the rhetoric, and then strengthened in murderous
resolve by the fact that everyone else was involved in the killing. Most people simply did what they were told, or
what their neighbors were doing. They
often took a sort of pleasure or satisfaction in doing it, but often found it
simply a job that had to be done. It is
often pointed out that Hitler killed only one person: himself. It was the people “just following orders”
that did the real work.
This
mass conformity is very extensively documented. (Particularly good recent reviews of it are
found in Paxton 2005, Snyder 2015, Staub 2011, Tatz and Higgins 2016, and
Waller 2016.) It seems particularly
common where hatreds are traditional, as with the Jews in “Christian” Europe,
but it is reported everywhere. The same
is true of criminal gangs, slave procurement, police work in less lawful parts
of the world, and indeed every situation where ordinary people get caught up in
violence. They almost always conform
(see esp. Baumeister 1997; Waller 2016).
Finally,
the testimony of many anthropologists (e.g. Atran 2010, 2015), psychologists
(Baumeister 1997), criminologists (De Becker 1997), and other experts all confirm
that perfectly normal people can and do become terrorists and murderers in any
social situation that puts a high value on such behavior as serving the
group. Scott Atran’s accounts of Islamic
terrorists are particularly revealing: the terrorists and suicide bombers are
usually young persons who have experienced traumatic events in their own small
worlds. They are not particularly
violent, certainly not psychotic. They
are very often recruited through intensive influence by leaders of local extremist
organizations—leaders who rarely endanger themselves.
Otherwise,
worldwide, accounts of recruits to violent gangs often speak of neighborhoods
where the only alternative to membership in a violent gang is being killed by
one. Criminals who are not part of gangs
are far more apt to be genuinely demented—usually psychopathic. Even among such loners, however, writers like
Roy Baumeister and Gavin De Becker stress the number who seem superficially
normal. For the record, the pirates,
smugglers, and sometime killers I knew on Asian waterfronts in my youth were
largely a perfectly normal lot; they got caught up in an ugly world and had few
or no alternatives. By contrast, the one
American mass killer I have known was a deeply troubled individual, bullied and
treated cruelly for his obvious mental issues until he finally snapped.
There
are, in short, some people whose inner demons drive them out of control—though
they can be identified and stopped (De Becker 1997). Far more common are ordinary individuals: we
normals who have within us the two wolves, waiting for food. The relevant works are surprisingly silent on
what makes one or the other wolf take over.
The old Victorian clichés—coming from bad seed or a broken home, falling
in with bad company, taking to drink—are echoed to this day in one form or
another. They have much truth, and we
now know more, but there is still much to learn.
Older
literature often described such behavior as regression to “animal” or “savage”
behavior, but no other animal does anything remotely close. Nonhuman animals fight and kill when
threatened or when vying for mates or territory (Clutton-Brock 2016), but they
rarely kill without those immediate motives, they rarely torture (though cats
and many others will toy with prey, cruelly by our standards), and they
certainly do not make social decisions to starve millions of their fellows to
death.
“Savages” in the old sense of the term do not
exist and never have. The small-scale
societies of the world do about the same things that modern states do, but on a
very much smaller scale, and they lack the technological ability to carry out
the mass tortures and murders so common now.
They could not force mass starvation on their societies even if they
wanted to. Claims of greater violence
among early, small-scale societies and early states, e.g. in Pinker (2011), are
based on outrageous sampling bias (Fry 2013; Mann 2018). Pinker compares the most warlike of
documented small societies with the most peaceful modern ones, which does show
we are capable of being better than we often are, but says nothing about what
social levels are most murderous.
In
fact, virtually anyone can be converted,
rather easily, into a monster who will torture, rape, and murder his or her
neighbors and even family members for reasons that no rational person could
possibly accept after serious consideration. Religious wars over heresies provide extreme
cases. In such conflicts as the
Albigensian Crusade, the 13th-century genocide that gave rise to the
infamous line “kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out,” probably not one in a
thousand participants could explain the differences between Catholic and
Albigensian Christianity (see Anderson and Anderson 2012). Yet the murders of neighbors and friends went
on for decades. The same endures today,
as in the persecution of Shi’a by ISIS (Hawley 2018).
Such
phenomena raise the question of how and why normal, peaceable human beings can
so easily flip into genocidal states, and then back into peaceful states after
the genocide is stopped. Many of the
most horrible genocides were committed in countries long known for the
tranquility, peacefulness, cooperativeness, and even tolerance of their
citizenry. Cambodia and Rwanda were
particularly clear examples. On the
other hand, some genocidal countries had a long and bloody history of
independence and conflict. No pattern
emerged from this line of enquiry.
In
most genocides, those who resisted and worked to save victims were
astonishingly few. Tatz and Higgins
(2016) have recently collected the data from the Holocaust and other genocides. They find that even when there was no penalty
for refusing, ordinary people went along with mass murder. This was as true in the United States and
Australia in the 19th century as in Hitler’s Gemany and Pol Pot’s
Cambodia. It is sobering for modern
Americans to read how otherwise normal, reasonably decent, “Christian”
Americans could perform the most unspeakable and unthinkable acts on Native
Americans—often neighbors and (former) friends—without a second thought (see
e.g. Madley 2016). Colin Tatz’ harrowing
summary of settler genocides in Australia reveals the same (Tatz 2018). Nor did more moral citizens do much to
restrain the killers. The “Indian
lovers” like Helen Hunt Jackson and James Mooney who agitated to protect Native
Americans in late 19th century America were few.
Hollie
Nyseth Brehm (2017b), in a particularly thorough analysis of the Rwandan
genocide, found that killing was clearly top-down-directed, with a
concentration around the capital and major cities and among well-educated (and
thus elite) people, but also was commoner in areas with low marriage, high
mobility, concentration of Tutsi, and political opposition—especially by Hutu
themselves—at the grassroots. The areas
in and around the capital, Kigali, were far more deadly than areas at the
northern margins of the country. This is
the opposite of the pattern seen in settler genocides, where murder was far
commoner on borders where settler populations were expanding at the expense of
Indigenous people.
Accounts
from China’s Cultural Revolution indicate that people were swept up in mass
hysteria, but were also afraid of appearing to be neutral, since lack of
enthusiasm in persecuting victims led to substantial trouble, up to being made
a victim oneself. A few of the many
memoirs indicate that the writers were unreconstructed Maoists, but the vast
majority worked under orders, from fear or social pressure or conformity. Many repented, and write agonizing stories of
their internal sufferings as well as the sufferings they inflicted and endured.
Anyone, Anytime, Can Turn Evil
The alternation between peace and
rage is typical of animals, especially carnivores; we see it often in dogs and
cats. Chimpanzees show it too. Humans are different in two ways. First, many humans are always “on the fight”
or “in your face,” seemingly looking for imagined slights, threats to their
honor, and excuses for a fight. This is
both individual and cultural.
Arguably the biggest cause of
slights, anger and hate is ranking out: arrogance, putting others down, open
insulting superiority. This is particularly touchy if A really does outrank B
and has to show it, as in the military, in hierarchic business firms, and in
traditional societies with hereditary nobility.
A display of modesty can go too far, but a display of arrogance is
disastrous. Soldiers and bureaucrats
have to game this. It is a minefield,
even more than romance, let alone ordinary civility. Every day brings new outrages by minorities
insulted—sometimes unintentionally—by people in power. The sheer advantage of the priviledged, in
everyday discourse, makes even “niceness” seem a putdown. As with other forms of slight and offense,
the Scottish ballads and Shakespeare’s plays are full of this: people are
outraged at failures to recognize superior status, but even more outraged at
having their noses rubbed in someone else’s social superiority.
Some cultures and
subcultures teach violent response to offenses as normal behavior (Baumeister
1997). Such “honor cultures” always track
societies with a bloody, unsettled, poorly controlled past. Killing, however, goes far beyond such
societies. Humans fall into rage states
not only when fighting immediate rivals for food or territory or mates, as dogs
and cats do, but also over issues that do not directly concern them: war with
remote enemies, malfeasance in distant countries, terrorist attacks in far-off
cities, political injustices to other groups of people. Humans specialize in offense, outrage,
antagonism, and hate, and will take any excuse.
Antagonism
is the opposite pole to Agreeableness on the Agreeableness scale of the widely
used Big Five personality test.
Worldwide, people range between the two extremes, and there is a
substantial inherited component, though much (I believe most) of one’s level of
agreeableness/antagonism is learned.
Highly antagonistic people are, of course, heavily overrepresented among
doers of evil, and are very susceptible to inflammatory rhetoric (Kaufman
2018).
People,
even quite antagonistic ones, are usually peaceful in ordinary everyday life,
and even helpful, generous, and tolerant.
Many are curmudgeons, even snappish or bigoted, but at least not
violently cruel. It takes some effort to
make them do deliberate harm to those who have not harmed them.
However,
it does not take much effort. Following
discovery of this fact among Nazi survivors, psychologists experimented with
students, seeing how easy it was to make them be cruel to other students. Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments with
faked electric shocks, Philip Zimbardo’s with students acting as jailers and
prisoners, and many subsequent experiments showed—to the horror of
psychologists and the reading public—that it was very easy indeed.
Zimbardo’s
experiment with a mock prison, at Stanford, had to be stopped within a week,
because the students took their roles too seriously (Blum 2018 criticized this
experiment, but has been effectively answered by Zimbardo, 2018). This led to major reforms of experimental
ethics, as well as to much soul-searching (Zimbardo 2008). Contrary to published accounts, Zimbardo did
not initially allow the “prisoners” to leave the experimental situation, and in
any case privileged white and Asian young men (as these students were) hardly
provide a realistic prison situation, given America’s racist and brutal prison
system (Blum 2018). However, Zimbardo’s
main finding stands: people, even the “best” young men, can turn into evildoers
with astonishing ease if they are following orders.
People
flip easily from a normal state—mild and peaceable—to an aroused state of
anger, hatred, aggression, brutality, or rage.
There is a continuum, but phenomenologically it often feels as if we are
dominated by either the good wolf or the bad one—not by an intermediate,
neutral wolf. Our enemies are not always
external. Suicide is the commonest
homicide. Next most common is killing family members.
We
have a choice. We must choose to be
angered, and can always choose to “turn the other cheek.” A punch in the face is hard to ignore (though
some can manage it), but by far the most anger we feel is over trivial slights
that can easily be ignored, or over social issues that may not concern us
directly. I am much more frequently
angered by reading about injustice, murder, or war in places I have never been
and involving people about whom I know nothing than I am by threats to myself. Reading the political literature, one
realizes that some people are outraged by the very existence of
African-Americans somewhere, or by the fact that not everyone worships the same
way. An excellent column by Ron
Rolheiser (2018) talks with some ironic detachment about the human proclivity
to moral outrage. Humans love to work
themselves up into anger, or even hysteria, about perfectly trivial issues
irrelevant to their own lives. Most of
us in the scholarly world know teachers who turn red in the face at such things
as bad grammar in student papers.
Indeed,
almost all the evil discussed herein is deliberately
chosen because of outrage over something that does not directly or seriously
concern the chooser. The Jews were
not really destroying Germany, nor were the Tutsi causing much trouble in
Rwanda, nor were the victims of Mao’s purges doing anything remotely worthy of
national outrage and mass murder. All of
us have encountered a great deal of everyday prejudice, bigotry, and open
hatred of people for being what they are, as opposed to what they may have
done. This too has been studied; Gordon Allport
(1954) reviewed early sources. Since
then a huge literature has accumulated (see below).
Robert
Louis Stevenson’s story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is uncomfortably compelling. We sense, somehow, that we could all go
there. Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase
“the banality of evil” (Arendt 1963) is also compelling. Indeed, evil is banal, for the very good reason
that it is usually done by the kid next door, or his equivalent.
Peace
came to Colombia after more than 50 years of conflict between the
government—often via paramilitary gangs—and FARC, which began as a rebel
organization but became largely a cocaine ring.
The paramilitary groups were little if any better. Both sides accommodated to and dealt with the
organized drug cartels. Thousands of
people were involved, and they committed the usual torture, rape, and murder
associated with such activities. With
peace came rehabilitation. Sara Reardon
(2018) investigated the process. She
quotes one of the rehabilitation psychologists, Natalia Trujillo: “I realized
not all of them are sociopaths. I realized most of them are also victims.” In
fact, it is obvious from Reardon’s account that the vast majority were closer
to victimhood than to pathology. They
were local people, some originally idealistic, swept up in a nightmare. Many were forced to fight to save themselves
and their families. Most of the combatants
have returned to ordinary life with varying degrees of success; some have been
killed by revengeful farmers and others who were devastated or had loved ones
murdered. Unfortunately, but predictably, the peace did not hold.
The way that ordinary people
can be caught up in senseless civil war is clearly shown. Similar stories from Liberia, Sierra Leone,
and other civil wars, back to the United States’ own, show this to be typical.
In
short, the vast majority of killing and harming in the world is done by people
“just following orders.” They range from
people mindlessly conforming, or even hating what they do, to enthusiastic
perpetrators who needed only the excuse.
Especially successful are orders to kill or oppress minorities or to
ignore their suffering when displaced.
Orders or requests to care for people and help them meet far more
resistance. The United States has faced
continual protests and objections over its exiguous and miserable government
safety nets, but no trouble finding soldiers for wars in the Middle East, and
Trump had no trouble whipping many of his followers into frenzies of violence
and hate. For better or worse—usually
for worse—people are easily mobilized by antagonism, but difficult to mobilize
by religious teachings of love and care for fellow humans. People are too apt to be spontaneously
antagonistic and destructive, simply due to overreaction to the negative. They hate trivial enemies, callously neglect
valuable but less-noticed people, and take too little account of the good.
The average human is
pleasant, smiling, friendly, and civil most of the time, but when threatened or
stressed he or she becomes defensive.
This usually begins with verbal defense or with passive-aggressive
sulking. It escalates if the threat escalates—usually
matching the threat level, but often going beyond it, in preemptive strike
mode. This is a necessary and valuable
mechanism when genuine defense is needed.
The differences between
people and cultures then matter. The
average human seems easily persuaded to wad up all frustrations, irritations,
threats, and hurts into a ball, and throw that ball at minorities and
nonconformists. This displacement and
scapegoating comes up over and over again in all studies of human evil,
especially genocide.
The
world is far from perfect. Wars, crimes,
and genocides happen. We must deal with
them. We are rarely equipped with
perfect ways of doing this. Cool,
rational action in the face of hostility requires both courage and the
knowledge of what to do.
Failing
that, action is difficult. The most
available and simple option is to follow the orders of those who do know, or to
conform with cultural norms that provide strategies for dealing with problems. The next most available option is to maintain
a front of hostility: to be touchy, aggressive, or fearful. Ideally, one can seek out the knowledge to
cope better, but this requires effort and time.
One can also flee, hide, become a hermit, act as virtuous as possible in
the hopes that virtue will prevail, or simply die.
Recognizing
this choice matrix makes the victory of the bad wolf more understandable. Facing a hostile world, people are prone to
let the bad wolf roam, or to follow the orders of those who do.
The model that
emerges, then, is one of ordinary people dealing with ordinary everyday
frustrations, slights, trivial hurts, and difficulties, who can easily be
persuaded by extremist leaders to direct their frustration at scapegoats. Scapegoating minorities to maintain control
by venting diffuse anger is the food of the bad wolf. Violence comes from directing diffuse
hate to a specific target. This is the
common theme of the books on evil listed at the beginning of the present
work.
Such violence sums up
into war and genocide when human agents with their own damaged agendas are
swayed evil leaders who are willing to go beyond normal social rules. This is the human response that evil leaders
from Caligula to Hitler to Trump have whipped up. The immediate cure is minimizing offense-taking,
but the ultimate cure is finding enough good in the world to balance out the
offenses.
Often, though not always,
these leaders, in turn, are the creatures of landlord or rentier elites wishing
to maintain control over income streams and resources. The deadly combination of propertied
interests, evil leaders, and frustrated masses is the common background of
modern mass killings.
Part II. Roots of
Human Evil
1. Human Nature?
Speculations
on human nature have taken place throughout the ages. The classic Christian and Buddhist views are
that people everywhere are basically good; evil is a corruption of their nature
by bad desires. The problem, according
to Buddhist theology, is giving way to greed, anger, and lust. The Christian tradition is similar; “love of
money is the root of all evil,” according to Paul (I Timothy 10). Most Confucians follow the great Confucian
teacher Mencius in seeing people as basically prosocial, corrupted by bad or
inadequate education. Many small-scale
and traditional societies hold that people are basically sociable and
well-meaning, but must develop themselves through spiritual discipline and
cultivation. Quakers speak of the “Inner
Light.” Modern biologists and
anthropologists have found it in the social and proto-moral inclinations now
known to be innate in humans.
Conversely,
the commonest western-world view is probably that of Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas
Hobbes and Sigmund Freud: people are basically evil, selfish, competitive, and
out for themselves at the expense of others.
This view goes back to the ancient Greeks; Marshall Sahlins (2008)
provides a full history of it. Social
behavior must be forced on them by harsh training. Hobbes saw “man in his natural state” as
being in a permanent condition of “warre of each against all” for resources
(Hobbes 1950 [1657]:104). Freud had a
darker view: Innate human nature was the
Id, a realm of terrifying lust, murderous hate, and insatiable greed. Both men thought “savages” showed “man in his
natural state”; they believed travelers’ tales rather than real descriptions,
and thought “savages” were bloodthirsty, cruel, and driven by the lusts of the
moment, with no thought of the future.
In fact, even without modern anthropology, they should have known from
actual accounts that small-scale societies are about as peaceful and orderly as
our own.
These dark views come
from traditional folk wisdom, which incorporates a good deal of cynicism based
on the common observation of people hurting themselves to hurt others
more. A worldwide folktale tells of a
man who is granted one wish (by an angel, godmother, or other being) but on the
condition that his neighbor will get twice what he gets; if the man wishes for
a thousand dollars, his neighbor gets two thousand. The man thinks for a while, then says “Make
me blind in one eye!”
Machiavelli,
Hobbes, Freud, and their countless followers assumed that society will force
people to act decently through powerful discipline. This is impossible. One cannot make mountain lions form social
contracts, or teach crocodiles to cooperate.
An animal that is naturally individualist, each animal competing with
others, cannot create a society capable of enforcing rules. Joseph Henrich (2016), among many others, has
pointed out that only an animal with cumulative culture, natural sociability,
and an innate tendency to cooperate could have social norms and expect
conformity to them. Hobbes, Freud, and
others expected far too much of human rationality. Rationality is notoriously unable to restrain
emotion. Ask any teenager, or parent of
one.
A
serious cost of the Hobbesian view is that by assuming people are worse than
they are, Hobbesians excuse their own tendencies to act worse than they
otherwise would. Hobbesian views have
always been popular with hatemongers.
The
other classical and mistaken view of humanity is the rational self-interest
view. The briefest look at humanity
instantly dispels that. People do not
act in their self-interest, and rarely act rationally in that restricted sense
(see e.g. Kahneman 2011). The
“irrational” heuristics that people use can be highly useful as shortcuts,
creating mental efficiency (Gigerenzer 2007; Gigerenzer et al. 1999), but they
constantly cause trouble when cool reason is needed. Human limits to rationality are now so well
documented that they need no further notice here.
The
rationalist view is a far more positive view of humanity than Hobbes’ or
Freud’s. It does not give much space to
evil; evil would occur only when it really pays in material terms, which is not
often. Unfortunately, irrational evil
appears much commoner in the real world.
Tyrants may often die in bed, but they often do not. Suicide bombers and other front-line fighters
for the wrong are obviously not advancing their rational self-interest. Straightforward shortsighted but “rational”
calculation does explain some bad acting, but does not explain people going far
out of their way to be hateful and cruel, or the common human tendency to resist
improving themselves and their surroundings.
Over the 5000 years of recorded history, countless people around the
world have chosen, over and over, to suffer and work and make themselves
miserable simply to hurt others.
Technology has often developed for war.
Rational choice could be believed as a general motive only because hate,
vengefulness, overreaction to slights, and irrational hate of nature are so
universal that they are not even noticed, or are considered “rational.”
The contrasting view also goes back to the
ancient Greeks, who wrote of human abilities to love, cooperate, and found
democracies. Christianity later built on
a view that people could love each other; the line “love thy neighbor as thyself”
goes back to Moses. However, few could
see humanity as innately good, or believe in virtuous utopias. There were always a few, but on the whole
belief in a “noble savage” view is largely a straw man. Rousseau did not believe any such thing (the
phrase actually comes from John Dryden), nor do most of the others accused of
having it. In so far as it is taken
seriously, it does not survive the many accounts of war in small-scale
societies. Even relatively “noble”-believing
sources (e.g. Fry 2013) cannot gloss over the frequency of killing in almost
all societies.
A
more realistic, but still dubious, take on humans comes from the
Zoroastrian-Manichaean tradition. This
tradition sees correctly that people are a mix of well-meaning, helpful,
prosocial good and cruel, brutal evil.
It further holds, less believably, that the good comes from the
immaterial “spirit” realm, evil from the flesh.
This view, which entered Christianity with St. Paul (see his Letter to
the Romans), lies behind the extreme Puritanism of much of western society—the
view that sees sex, good food, good wine, and dancing as Sins with a capital
S. Everything of the flesh tends toward
corruption. Good sex is the door to
hell. “The fiddle is the devil’s riding
horse,” according to an old American saying.
I was raised in a time and place when this view was widespread. The social revolution of the 1960s cut it
back sharply, but it keeps resurfacing. Yet, a great deal of human good comes via
those “sins.” Condemning these is
regularly used to distract people from the real sins: cruelty, oppression,
gratuitous harm, selfish greed, hatred.
A
deeper problem with the Manichaean view is that people are usually neither
saintly nor demonic. They are just
trying to make a living and then get some rest and relaxation. Their forays into proactive goodness or
proactive evil are extensions from ordinary low-profile getting along. This
leaves us with the Native American folktale: the two wolves, like the “good and
bad angels” that folk Christianity took over from Manichaean belief, are
symbols of the prosocial and hostile sides of humanity, of working with people
versus working against them.
In this sense, people are
not bad or good; they are good to kin and culturally constructed fictive kin,
bad to rivals, and neutral to everyone else.
There is a very slight positive bias, enough to have saved the human
race so far. But people will kill vast
numbers of distant strangers without thinking much about it, as King Leopold of
Belgium did—indirectly—in the Congo.
In general, people are far
better than the savages of Hobbes and Freud, but not as good as idealists or
rationalists assume. The hopeful dreams
of “positive psychology” and “humanistic psychology” have turned to dust. Ordinary everyday human life is full of
minor slights and disrespects, and of misfortunes interpreted as personal
attacks when they were not meant as such.
It is also full of minor kindnesses and helpful moves. From this constant low-level evil and good,
it is easy to move suddenly and unexpectedly to much greater evil or good. We
are always poised near the edge of flipping into violence or heroism. Everyday hurt and disrespect can be exploited
by evil leaders who whip up hate and deploy it against their victims—usually
the weak. Everyday good and care can be
stimulated by situations or by moral suasion, and people can be heroic. Often
the contrast is between “realism”—the cynical realism of evildoers—and hope,
often the unrealistic idealism of the best. People must often choose the ideals
or be lost to the cynics.
At
worst, intergroup competition leads to cruelty, viciousness, nastiness, greed
(here defined, recall, as hurting others by taking their goods for oneself,
without fairly compensating them), and other vices. We are still not sure how much these are inborn
tendencies—like minimal morality—and how much they are learned. Most authorities think they are learned. Others concentrate on the learned aspects. However, broad capacities to fight, hate, and
destroy are clearly innate in all higher animals. Humans seem to have more of these innate
cruel tendencies than do other animals, at least as far as “proactive” violence
goes. But real wolves—as opposed to the
ones inside us—have their own fights; normally peaceful and calm, they erupt
into violence when a new wolf threatens an established pack, or when a bear or
human or other enemy attacks (Clutton-Brock 2016). Dogs, domesticated descendants of wolves,
still engage in “resource guarding”; an otherwise peaceful dog, especially if
leashed, will attack anyone that seems to menace its owner. We are a predatory mammal; we can be expected
to act accordingly.
We
are gifted by our mammalian heritage with the ability to love, care, fear,
hate, and fight. These we share with all
higher mammals. We are also gifted with
the uniquely human ability to form complex, diverse social and cultural systems
that construct care, fear, aggression, and other natural drives in ways that
can amplify both good and evil out of all bounds.
People
are abjectly dependent on their societies.
We live in stark terror of rejection and ostracism. They therefore overreact, negatively, to any
challenge to their social standing.
Therein lies the problem of the human condition.
2. Evolution?
Any
animal must divide its attention between avoiding threat and getting
necessities of life. Thus, all animals
have a fight-flight-freeze response repertoire for dealing with the former, and
ways of dealing with the latter to obtain food, shelter, territory, reproduction,
and other needs with minimum danger.
They may be jealously protective of mates and homes. Animals compete for these, and social animals
compete for place in the group. Humans,
with far more complex social lives than other animals, add socially constructed
identifications with groups, their basic principles, and their identifying
flags (from skin color to religious beliefs).
Overreaction to threat is
selected for; thinking a poisonous snake is a rope is far less adaptive than
thinking a rope is a snake (to use the classic Indian example). Failure to find food in a day means a better
hunt tomorrow, but failure to identify a deadly threat means no tomorrow ever
again, for oneself and often for one’s genetic investment in young. Even plants react with fear; a chainsaw can
end in a few minutes a few centuries of investment in growth.
This is the ultimate
biological substrate of human reactions, including the human tendency to
overreact to perceived (and even imagined) threat. Humans seem about half dedicated to crushing
opposition, from criticism to competition, and half dedicated to peacefully
obtaining what they need and wish.
Feedback in perceived threat—deadly spirals—is made probable by the need
to react to even mild threat as potentially serious. Contingent variation in personal,
situational, and cultural factors prevents better prediction than a rough
50-50.
It is now well
established that humans are innately “moral,” in the sense that they have
natural predispositions to fairness, generosity, tolerance, welcoming,
acceptance, sociability, friendliness, and other social goods. (There is now a huge literature on this; see
e.g. De Waal 1996; Bowles and Gintis 2011; Henrich 2016; Tomasello 2016, 2019.) It is basically a rediscovery of what Mencius
knew in the 4th century BCE. People
are naturally interested in the world and the other people in it. More neutral are anger at real harms, and
desire to satisfy basic wants, including a desire for pleasure and beauty. Bad traits that appear universal, but
possibly not inborn, include hatred of nonconformists and structural opponents,
a tendency to grab desired stuff from others, a tendency to resent real or
imagined slights, and above all weak fear.
Excessive need for
control is notably a part of the picture, especially in intersex violence. In many species of mammals, will kill other
males and even their own female companions to maintain it (Clutton-Brock 2016:
Heid 2019 for applications to humans).
Intraspecific aggression and violence are universal in higher animals,
highly structured, and shaped by evolution (Clutton-Brock 2016). Even meerkats,
regarded by many humans as particularly cute, are murderous to rival groups;
females will hunt out and kill pups of neighboring packs (Clutton-Brock 2016:303).
The rapid transition from harmony, empathy, playfulness, and cooperation to
cold-blooded murder of weaker “others” is not confined to humans, or even to
large predators like wolves.
A few recent writers have
made important contributions to the study of human nature as producing good
(prosociality and cooperation) and evil.
Two stand out in particular for very recent work: Michael Tomasello and
Richard Wrangham.
Michael Tomasello, in A
Natural History of Human Morality, postulates that morals evolved in three
steps. First came natural sympathy,
developed from the loving emotions that all higher mammals feel for their
mothers and siblings; these are extended to other kin and ultimately to any
close associate, in human society.
Infants display this from birth.
Second, as humans evolved cooperative hunting and foraging, they learned
to respect, help, share with, and support their partners. Apes do not do this; they may co-hunt but
they do not share or cooperate more than minimally. Wolves and meerkats do, however. Third, and uniquely human, all social groups
have cultural moral repertoires. They
have long lists of “oughts,” almost always said to be divinely sanctioned.
Tomasello follows almost
everyone in arguing that the human tendency to cooperate evolved in
foraging. Cooperative animals could hunt
big game, find isolated honey trees and share the news, and work together to
catch fish. A bit of evidence he misses
is the parallel with wolves. Canids
scaled up from fox-like animals to hunt big game. However, their need to run fast denied them
the chance to develop the formidable claws that allow cats to be solitary
hunters of big animals. Wolves thus
learned to cooperate to chase and bring down large animals. This skill is seen today in the incredible
skills of herding dogs at coordinating their efforts. They not only have to know exactly what each
other dog is thinking and planning; they have to put themselves in the
positions of the humans and the sheep. I
once watched two shepherds and some muttish sheepdogs negotiate a herd of sheep
through a difficult traffic intersection in the Pyrennees. The shepherds did almost nothing; the dogs
had to work together, trusting each other to keep order in a deadly environment,
while understanding what the shepherds wanted and what the sheep would do. They managed this three-species balancing act
perfectly.
A good Kantian, Tomasello
looks to abstract rules founded on basic principles of cooperation and
mutualism. Tomasello is fond of citing
Christine Korsgaard for this approach, and she does indeed argue powerfully for
the Kantian view (Korsgaard 1996).
Kantian “deontological” ethics deduce rules from basic principles. In contrast, utilitarian “assertoric” ethics
hold that ethics are practical solutions to everyday problems (see e.g. Brandt 1979). It is fairly clear, ethnologically, that both
these methods of creating moral rules happen in the real world, and every
culture has a mix of high abstractions and pragmatic rules-of-thumb. Moral philosophers tend to emphasize one or
the other.
No other animals have
anything remotely like cultural rules that regulate whole large groups that are
not only not face-to-face but many involve millions of people who never meet at
all. As Tomasello points out, children
raised in human families learn these rules very early, but family pets do not
(Tomasello 2016:154, 2019; pets do learn to act differently in different
cultures, but only through simple training).
Tomasello admits that he emphasizes conformity and cooperation and that
people are frequently immoral (Tomasello 2016:161), but does not take into
account the actual alternatives within moral systems that allow people to
murder each other for purely moral reasons, from Aztec human sacrifice to
capital punishment. In a later
publication (Tomasello 2018) he admits that conflict must have had something to
do with shaping human moralities. Tomasello’s
Rousseauian view keeps him from addressing hatred, but one can assume, from his
work, that nonhuman animals can’t really hate; it takes too much long-view and
abstraction.
Tomasello sharply
contrasts apes and human infants. Even
before they can talk, human infants show a vibrant sociability more complex
than chimpanzees. By the time they are
three, children have reached not only a level of social sensitivity that
outdoes the ape; they also can thnk morally, reason according to what they see
others doing and thinking, and react on the basis of knowing that others will
expect moral or conventional or socially appropriate responses. Apes barely do anything like this; they show
awareness of others’ thoughts and fear of punishment and domination, but they
do not understand abstract social rules.
By the age of six, human children are rational, reasonable beings who
know how to apply the moral and pragmatic rules of their cultures (Tomasello
2019).
In fact, going Tomasello
one better, those of us who have raised children in other cultural settings are
aware that children know by three that there are other sets of social rules,
and by six they are masters of language-shifting, rule-shifting, and
norm-shifting depending on what group they are with. It was almost spooky to watch my young
children quickly learn that a mass of undifferentiated words must be separated
into “Chinese” (tonal, rhythmic, spoken with those outside the family) and
“English” (a very different-sounding language used with the family and a few
friends).
Tomasello continues to
see humans as basically cooperative, helpful, generous, and moral (according to
their societies’ codes, but never normalizing hurt or cruelty). They show astonishing levels of fairness by
three years of age, in contrast to apes, who simply grab anything they want
from weaker apes. He has plenty of
evidence, and has shown that such virtues are universal among children. However, much of his sample derives from child-care
centers in college towns, and this gives it a rather irenic balance. We who grew up in what my wife calls “the
real world” are aware of less harmonious child environments. They force children to choose right from the
start between the two wolves.
Recently,
Richard Wrangham has brought this issue to the foreground in his book The Goodness Paradox (2019). He contrasts reactive aggression—ordinary
anger and rage leading to violence—with proactive aggression, which evidently
started out as hunting, but was retooled far back in our evolution to become
planned, deliberate, often cool-headed violence. Compared to other primates, humans have much
less reactive violence. We are far less
violent than chimpanzees, in particular.
Even the peaceable bonobos rival us.
On the other hand, we display far more proactive violence—our raids,
wars, genocides, organized crimes, and the like are at least planned and
premeditated, at worst truly cold-blooded rather than passionate.
He then questions how we
could have evolved to do this. His
answer lies in our ability to cooperate to take down excessively violent
individuals. Even chimpanzees do this to
some extent. Humans do it quite
generally. Anyone reading old
ethnographies and accounts is aware of the extreme frequency of stories of a
psychopathic or hyperaggressive man (it is almost always a man) being quietly
eliminated. Often, four men will go out
hunting, three will return, and no questions are asked. Wrangham follows Christopher Boehm (1999) in
seeing this sort of take-down of a dominant or domineering individual as basic
to traditional societies.
Wrangham hypothesizes
that this happened enough to influence human evolution. It selected against reactive aggression, but
selected for proactive aggression. Other
factors, such as the needs of foraging and food preparation, selected for
cooperation. Once cooperation was
established and used in proactive aggression, it was available to allow a group
to devastate the neighboring group that shows less solidarity in war.
This theory is neat,
consistent, and plausible, but there is no real evidence for it. No one has counted the number of males
eliminated by cooperative execution.
Moreover, Wrangham weakens his argument by showing that cooperative
execution is very often—perhaps usually—invoked against nonconformists, often
meek and innocent ones, rather than against bullies and psychopaths. In fact, it appears from the accounts that
bullies and psychopaths very often invoke the violence themselves, and execute
the weak—especially weak potential competitors.
This would select for violence,
not against it. It seems that we will
have to get better data, and to explore other possibilities.
In any case, Wrangham
seems to have at least some of the story.
Truly inborn is a strong tendency to form coalitions that act against
each other and, in the end, against everyone’s best interests. Samuel Bowles and others have explained this
as developing in feedback with solidarity in war. Those who stand together prevail, wipe out
the less cooperative enemy groups, and leave more descendants (Bowles 2006,
2008, 2009; Boyer 2018; Choi and Bowles 2007).
This is known as “parochial altruism.”
Individuals may not be locked in “warre of each against all,” but groups
very often are. Richared Wrangham
(2019:133-134) dismisses this, finding too little evidence of self-sacrifice
for the group or large-scale pitched battles in hunter-gatherer warfare. This is not exactly relevant. The only requirement is for groups to be
solidary and mutually supportive; individuals do not have to go out of their
way to sacrifice themselves. Moreover,
Wrangham has not adequately covered the literature. There is much evidence for large-scale
raiding, small but bloody battles, and defensive aggression among hunter-gatherers
(see e.g. Keeley 1996; Turney-High 1949).
Serious and dangerous war is found in all the well-studied sizable
nonagricultural groups, such as the Northwest Coast, Plains, and California
Native peoples. Wrangham was apparently
misled by his focus on tiny hunter-gatherer bands that do not have the manpower
to support large wars.
A different view is
provided by Samantha Lang and Blaine Flowers (2019). They begin from the other extreme: the
phenomenon of individuals caring for others who have terminal dementia and thus
can never pay back any debts (material or psychological) to their
caregivers. The vast majority of such
caregiving is within the family—60.5% from children, 18% from spouses, most of
the rest from other relatives—but even this is “irrational” in economic terms,
and even in biological terms, since it costs the caregivers and prevents them
from investing more in their children.
Moreover, the residual 5% of care is often given by devoted volunteers,
who simply want to help others. They note
that all this can simply be seen as an “exaptation” from inclusive fitness—if
we are selected to care for kin, we have to care for all kin—but also note that
no nonhuman animal is known to do this (though there are some anecdotal records
of group-living predators supporting disabled members).
Yet another view comes
from work of Oliver Curry, Daniel Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse (2019). They hold that people evolved through
cooperation, and that cooperation was then constructed as morality. In their “morality-as-cooperation” theory,
there are seven basic values:
“Allocation of resources to kin (family values)…, coordination to mutual
advantage (group loyalty)…, social exchange (reciprocity)…, contests between
hawks (bravery) and doves (respect) [that is two things]…, division
(fairness)…, possession (property rights).”
These they break down into a list of specific values that are very
widely held; for instance, family values start with “being a loving mother,
being a protective father, helping a brother, caring for a frail relative,”
(Curry et al. 2019:54). They look at 60
societies around the world, finding all that are well reported have some form
of all these, except for fairness, which is spottily attested.
To a biologist, the only
reasonable explanation is that selection originally operated as it does in all
higher animals, through inclusive fitness:
mutual care is deployed among families to maximize genetic success over
time. This then can be extended along
ever-wider kinship lines, and to increase in scope to include in-marrying
spouses (typically women, in traditional human societies, though in many
agricultural societies it is the men that move). Then further increase of scope takes in whole
communities, perhaps via in-laws and distant cousins. The defining moment (or long period) in the
history of humanity was when we extended kinship to include culturally
constructed relatives. This in turn
derives, at least in critical part, from the need to marry out—not only to
prevent inbreeding but to build solidarity with neighbor groups.
By this time—the time in
the past when kinship extended so widely—the link with genetics is essentially
lost. The huge groups characteristic of
modern human societies can form. We can
freely adopt strangers’ children, marry people from other countries, and devote
our lives to helping humanity. However,
perhaps the most universally known social fact is that we continue to privilege
close family members, and to build solidarity by self-consciously using family
terms: Bands of brothers, church fathers and mothers, sisterhoods, fellow children
of Adam and Eve. A very widely known
proverb (I have heard and seen it in countless forms) summarizes the normal
human strategic condition: “I against my brother; my brother and I against our
cousin; my cousin, brother, and I against our village; and our village against
the world!” The closer we are to others,
the more solidary we feel with them.
Aggregating along kinship lines allowed Genghis Khan and his followers
to build world-conquering armies by widely extending kin claims and tolerance
of difference. On the other hand, the
closer we are to others, the more they can hurt and anger us. They are around us more, and we are
psychologically involved with them.
Their opinions matter, and their help is necessary.
Solidarity
in the face of attack by an enemy group is a human norm. It is probably an evolved behavior, selected
for by that situation occurring frequently over the millions of years. Samuel Bowles (2006, 2008) held that it came
from the tendency of larger groups to kill out smaller ones. Since these groups had cores of relatives,
kin selection operated, and gradually wider and wider circles of kin would be
solidary, as people evolved or learned the ability to demand loyalty, detect
disloyal members, and punish them. By
that model, violence against outgroups would have evolved along with detection
and punishment of nonreciprocity within groups.
So long as it is actual defense against an attacking enemy, group
loyalty in violent confrontation is a matter of necessity.
Most
groups are peaceful internally but often at war with neighbors. These are impossible to explain from old,
simplistic models of human behavior. How
could Hobbesian savages or Freudian ids differentiate so cleanly? How could virtuous “noble savages” be so
bloody to their neighbors? The only view
of humanity that allows it is one in which humans are usually living ordinary
low-key lives, but can easily be motivated to support their group in conflict,
and somewhat less easily motivated to be peaceful and proactively helpful.
This
makes evolutionary sense. Groups need to
exchange mates, to avoid inbreeding.
This means that selection cannot totally favor one’s own genetic
investment all the time. In fact, there
is a paradox: one can maximize one’s own genetic advantage only by having
children with a genetically quite different mate. The classic arguments for genetic
determination of selfishness all founder on this rock. On the other hand, groups also compete for
scarce resources, such as hunting grounds.
If there is enough food, larger groups will outcompete smaller ones, and
will also have enough genetic diversity within themselves to allow
endogamy. The ideal group size seems to
be around 50-100, which, in fact, is the size of the usual human face-to-face
group (Dunbar 2010). Such groups tend to
be parts of larger associations, typically around 500, a figure consistent from
the number of speakers of a given language in hunting-gathering societies to
the number of Facebook friends that a moderately sociable person has; very
often, the groups of 50 are exogamous, but the groups of 500 are largely
endogamous (Dunbar 2010).
In
modern societies, groups cross-cut each other, and an individual may have one
reference group that is “neighbors,” another for “workmates,” another for
“religious congregation,” another for “hobby,” and so on. This makes it possible to shift groups and
loyalties, a point highly relevant to genocide, where an individual can
suddenly change from highlighting “neighbors” to highlighting “ethnicity” and
killing such neighbors as are suddenly shifted from one to the other. Such individuals often shift back after the
genocide. This is notably attested for
Rwanda (see e.g. Nyseth Brehm 2017a, 2017b).
Recently,
Mauricio González-Forero and
Andy Gardner (2018) set out to test what model fit best with what we know of
the evolution of the human brain, which more than tripled in size in a mere 2
million years—incredible speed for the evolution of a basic organ. These authors needed to take into account the
origin and dispersal of humans from east Africa between 150,000 and 70,000
years ago. Their enterprise was highly
speculative, involving assumptions that may be wrong, but at least they had
considerable data on the genetics, dispersal rates, and behavior of the humans
in question. They conclude that
conflictual models of human evolution are not supported. Conflict is too costly. Animals that fight all the time would not
develop large brains—in fact, they probably would not survive at all. Human conflicts are indeed costly, reducing
cooperation even against the others (Aalerding et al. 2018; see also De Dreu et
al. 2016).
Simple sociability as a cause of
complex behavior is even less well supported.
They found that highly social animals generally have smaller brains than
closely related, less social species. Care
substitutes for thinking. They conclude
that only ecology can account for it. A
positive feedback loop exists between finding more and better food and having a
bigger, better brain. More brain enables
us to find, select, and prepare highly nutritious food. Humans have adapted increasingly over time to
seek out rich patches of good food.
Graeber and Wengrow (2018) hold that
humans probably evolved in larger and more complex groups than usually thought,
and that problems of equality and conflict are endemic to such groups, which
then develop ways to cope. Such coping
may be successful or may not be. As I
have pointed out (Anderson 2014), an animal that can find rich patches of food
can support a large group. Best of all,
we can talk, and thus tell the group that there is a dead mammoth behind the
red hill, or a lion in wait beyond the stream.
González-Forero and Gardner have
not explained how humans became so violent.
The obvious answer, avoiding the high costs of conflict, is that humans
evolved to move rapidly into new habitats, displacing smaller groups they found
in the way. The resulting gains would
outweigh the costs of conflict. This has
happened countless times in history; it surely happened countless times in
prehistory. Human hatred of opponent
groups and disregard for nature must come in part from predatory expansion.
People also have rather poor innate
controls on killing off their food supply.
Most human groups have learned how to manage sustainably, but they often
overshoot, and in any case the learning was originally done the hard way, if
local myths and stories are any guide.
Traditional peoples usually have tales of overhunting and then starving. Children are told such stories with the
morals clearly spelled out.
The
nearest to a common thread in the evolution of human badness is “my group and I
at the expense of others.” One’s group
usually comes first. Cross-cutting and
nested allegiances make groupiness problematic, however, affording hope for
more solidarity.
The imperative human need
for society—without which we cannot normally survive—makes ostracism and
rejection the most frightening of possibilities. People become defensive at the slightest
hint of it. Antagonism, aggression, and
stark fear result. Anger and insecurity
lead to defensiveness and sour moods.
3. Human Variation
All humans must satisfy
basic physiological needs, including genuine physical needs for security, control
of our lives, and sociability. Beyond
that, people are highly variable. They
vary along the now-classic five dimensions of personality—extraversion,
openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neurosis—from total introverts
to total extraverts, from rigid closure to expansive risk-taking, and so
on. Some of this is known to be highly
heritable. Much is caused by culture and
environment. Early trauma actually
changes gene activity (epigenetics).
Even gut microbiota are credited for affecting behavior.
From what has been said
above, one would expect the most relevant variation to be in weakness, insecurity,
and tendency to anger, and that is what we find. The combination makes people defensive. They become the people who “have a chip on their
shoulder” and “have an attitude.” Being
weak and insecure makes one highly reactive to threat or harm, and apt to be
passive-aggressive about it. Being
insecure and angry leads to the barroom brawler and similar folk characters. Being weak, insecure, and angry, whether
dispositionally or situationally, leads to overreaction: escalation of
defensive behavior, often to violence. Note that “situationally”; individuals
can be very different at different levels of threat and harm. Yet disposition always matters. Some people have enough strength of character
to stay unbroken in tyrants’ prisons. At
the other extreme, the tyrants themselves are often living proof that a weak,
insecure, hostile person who has assumed total power will still be weak,
insecure, and hostile.
Beyond that, whether they
are violent are not depends on what they have learned—culturally, socially, and
personally. Individuals violently abused
in childhood very often become violent adults.
Mass murderers and major bullies are virtually 100% certain to have been
abused physically (see Batson 2011; Baumeister 1997; Zaki 2019; and other
sources on the good). Similarly,
cultures constructed by people who have long been weak, insecure and subject to
abuse (and thus anger) naturally put a high value on defensiveness and
“honor.” Such is the history of the
border-warrior cultures at the fringes of old and oppressive civilizations, of
oppressed subcultures within dominant cultures, and of subcultures of anomie
and alienation.
Conversely, the more
people are self-confident, secure, and self-controlled, whether dispositionally
or situationally, they can damp down responses to challenge, and react
rationally and coolly. The human average
seems to be toward the more weak, insecure, and angry end, if only because we
all start that way as infants.
Self-efficacy (Bandura 1982) must be learned and developed.
Competitive distinction
is challenged easily, and social disrespect and slighting become pretexts for
revenge up to and including deadly force.
Anti-intellectualism follows when people insecure about their own lack
of self-improvement and education are rendered really uncomfortable about it,
either by direct insults or by seeing better-qualified but “inferior” people
rise. Much of America’s all too
well-known anti-intellectualism and anti-“elitism” comes from people in dominant
groups who see people from less prestigious groups moving up the educational
and cultural ladders.
Deviation from the
mythical-average person described above occurs because of cultural and social
teachings, specific insecurities, general perceived level of threat, and
personality traits such as openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. More specific learned themes, such as how to
show anger, how to be violent, and whom to hate, then come in as the final
stage of shaping the bad and good wolves.
A
few resist the pressures to kill during mass genocides. They have strong internal controls on
aggression. Others are less constantly
moral, but most humans have a great deal of innate empathy—abilities to feel
others’ emotions and sensations, understand them, and act accordingly (Denworth
2017).
Some
few, on the other hand, seem genuinely evil.
They seem almost incapable of acting without harming someone. These are generally called sociopaths or
psychopaths: people who appear to have
been born without a moral compass and without a way of acquiring one. Others seem moral enough most of the time but
apt to lapse into uncontrollable violence.
These are not insensitive individuals.
Unlike autistic people, who are usually well-meaning despite lack of
social abilities, psychopaths and hyperaggressive persons often seem to have
preternatural social skills. “A person
with autism spectrum disorder has little ability to assume the perspective of
someone else. Psychopaths, on the other
hand, understand what others are feeling but have a profound lack of empathetic
concern” (Denworth 2017:61; cf. Baskin-Sommers et al. 2016). They may have anomalies in neural connections
in the brain. Serious killers may be far
more troubled than ordinary psychopaths.
The one mass murderer I have known was both mentally deficient and
severely disturbed. By contrast, people
I have known who killed in war were perfectly normal. They were also traumatized by the
experience.
Sociopaths
seem residents of a different world.
They lie without a second thought, and, even when it clearly is against
their better judgment, they seem to prefer dealing treacherously and unfairly
with others. Ordinary rational
self-interest simply does not work for them.
I have known several who regularly wrecked their lives by wholly
gratuitous betrayal. They simply could
not understand why betraying others brought outrage. On the other hand, one of
the sociopaths I knew was a prominent politician, and—though rather notorious—has
never been singled out as being worse than many colleagues.
Psychopaths
and sociopaths are, in fact, notoriously successful in business and
politics. Published descriptions of
genociders make many of them seem psychopathic, but tests are obviously lacking.
There
are also extremely aggressive individuals, sadists, and others who verge on
psychopathy; most have a background of brutal abuse in childhood, by parents
and peers, or of major trauma. Some may
simply be “born that way,” others appear made by environment; a harsh, hostile,
critical environment worsens all.
Mass
shooters are so common in the United States that profiles of them have been
assembled by researchers. The shooters
are very often white supremacists targeting ethnic minorities (Cai et al. 2019). Jillian Peterson and James Denaley (2019)
report a more specific set of findings: “First, the vast majority of mass
shooters in our study experienced trauma and exposure to violence at a young
age. The…exposure included parental
suicide, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence and/or severe
bullying….Second, practically every mass shooter…had reached an identifiable
crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting.” This included things like job loss and
relationship failure (often, I take it, related to progressive alienation of
the shooter). Third, most of the
shooters had studied the actions of other shooters”—they were diligent
students. “Fourth, the shooters all had
the means to carry out their plans.”
They could get guns, including illegal guns, though most simply bought
guns at the store or used ones already in the home. “Most mass public shooters are suicidal, and
their crises are often well known ot others before the shooting occurs. The vast majoirty of shooters leak their
plans” but are not taken seriously, nor are they reported to authorities.
Most
people, however, are peaceable, empathetic, and reasonable most of the
time. We can arbitrarily guess that at
most 10% of humanity are deeply evil—not always acting badly, but doing evil on
a regular enough basis to produce serious net harm to their communities. This 10% figure is supported by crime rates,
vote totals for extremist candidates, and common experience. Others show social dominance orientation (see
e.g. Altemeyer 2010; Guimond et al. 2013), looking favorably on high levels of
social and economic inequality in society and to patriarchal social
organization. Dominance is not a human
need, but certainly is a widespread want, and the simple desire for it is a
major source of evil. Most mammals have
dominance hierarchies. Humans are
notably lacking in innate tendencies in that direction (Boehm 1999), but very
often develop them anyway, especially via top-down hierarchic systems.
These
dubious actors can be balanced by the best 10% or so: the individuals who never say an unkind word,
are unfailingly sensitive and considerate, give gifts and donations freely and
save little for themselves, and devote their lives to careers in healing,
teaching, charity, and aid. The sad
evidence of the genocide literature suggests that even such people can be
corrupted, though only with difficulty.
The reasons for such variation in mentality are partly unknown, partly
developmental. The latter shall be
discussed below.
The
other 80% (approximately) of us are the people within whom the two wolves
constantly compete. Common experience
suggests that there is a straight and unbroken continuum from the most evil
through the bloody-minded to ordinary middling souls, and then to the 10% who
are near sainthood. There are continua
from acceptance to rejection of groups, from positive to negative-sum gaming,
from laudable ambition to power-madness, from necessary defense against enemies
to defensiveness based on cowardly fear.
It is hard to cut these continua.
Defensiveness attenuates
as it moves up toward actual strength and reasonableness, the cures. It also attenuates if people collapse into
total fear. It moves outward to callousness
and then thoughtlessness. The core mood
is more or less that of a child’s temper tantrum: a mix of violently negative emotions from
which fear, anger, and rage slowly differentiate as the child grows or as the
adult gets better control.
The
common ground is simple: wanting social and economic security, especially in
social acceptance and position. What
matters is how rationally and cooperatively one seeks to satisfy those wants.
One
might think of a continuum from a clearly demented psychopath (like Mexico’s
drug-gang leaders) to an ordinary criminal gangster, then to a schoolyard bully
grown up to be a spouse abuser, then to an ordinary person who grumbles and
scolds and occasionally fights but rarely harms anyone, and then onward to a
basically good and honorable soul who loses her temper on frequent occasions
but does no worse than that, and finally to a truly virtuous individual—say,
the leader of a charitable medical group.
I have observed this continuum everywhere I have been, and through
literature and psychological studies we can be sure it is essentially
universal. People everywhere range from
very bad to very good, as they range from passive to active and from weak to
strong (the classic three dimensions of agentive evaluation; Osgood et al. 1957).
Common
experience also teaches that those of us in the 80% tend to weasel good and
bad. We drive too fast. We eat at cafes that underpay their staff. We take advantage of cheap deals when we know
there is some dirty game on. We skimp on
public commitments. We spend too much
time giving nibbles to the bad wolf while trying to serve the good one. We shirk, laze, dodge responsibilities, and
commit the “deadly sin” of sloth. We
are, in short, frail and fallible humans—and require strong social standards backed up by law to keep us on the
straight and narrow path (as discussed at length in Henrich 2016). Religious and moral ideals must be enforced
by social conventions. Most of us have
experienced life in communities where traffic laws were laxly enforced, and
have seen ordinary “good” people slip into more and more dangerous driving
until accidents make the police take better note.
Allow that people are, on
average, 50% good and 50% bad. (Again,
these are guesses. We have no real
measures.) The worst 10% can win by
mobilizing the 40% who are worse than average but not totally evil, and then
getting enough of the relatively good to make a majority. In fact, Hitler was elected with a bare
plurality, not a majority, and the same is true of many elected evil
leaders. Trump was elected by 25.7% of
the voting public, with almost half of registered voters not bothering to vote
at all.
Half good, half bad
predicts the institutions we see in societies: they are meant to preserve the
good, and to redirect the bad to fighting “the enemy” rather than the rest of
us. And they never work perfectly.
People
vary from best to worst along several dimensions. The most important of these from the point of
view of explaining evil are agreeableness vs. hostility, tolerance vs. hatred,
peacefulness vs. violent aggression, help vs. gratuitous harm, reasonable vs.
unreasonable, open-minded vs. closed, and charity vs. greed. Behind these are deeper continua: Individual
to group; weak to strong; attacking weak to attacking strong; courageous to
cowardly; greed to defensiveness; rational to irrational. People can hate those richer and more
powerful, or—more usually—the weaker.
They can be cold and callous or savagely furious.
All these are related. All are consistent with the “Big Five” and
“Hexaco” personality theories. The Big
Five personality dimensions—extraversion, openness, conscientiousness,
agreeableness, and neuroticness—are predictive: individuals low on
agreeableness and high in neuroticness are more apt to do evil than those who
are the reverse. People very low in
openness become conservatives, and thus often involved in fascism; those very
high in openness may become left-wing rebels.
There are, however, good or evil persons who are at the best or at the
worst ends on many or all measures. Social
pressures as well as personality are determinative. The Big Five (or Six) do not directly predict
levels of violence, aggression, competitiveness, or hatred. Genocide and other extreme mass-level evils
come from hatred, so it must be considered the worst of the lot, and though it
is probably commoner among the less agreeable and more neurotic it is well
distributed over the human species.
Degree of scapegoating, and targets of scapegoating, are also hard to
predict from basic personality factors; they are social matters, largely
learned, though the tendency to scapegoat others seems part of human nature.
Greed
is often regarded in the US as the worst of sins, a belief going back to Paul
on love of money. However, selfish greed
succeeds in mass politics only when it marshals support through whipping up
hate. The few rich must have the support
of millions of less affluent; these can be persuaded to act and vote against
their self-interest only by making them sacrifice their own self-interest out
of intemperate hate. We have seen this
in every genocidal campaign in history, as well as in almost all wars, and many
political and religious movements.
Moreover,
greed is often a social hatred issue; it is not really about material wealth,
but about rivalry for power—for control of people and resources. The normal expectation if one wants a
material item (for itself) is to cooperate with others to work for it, or at
least to work for others in a peaceful setting.
Smash-and-grab is not the normal or widely approved way to get goods. Neither is crime, ordinary or white-collar. The rich who desire endless wealth are not
after wealth; they are after social position and social adulation.
Really
extreme, high-emotion evil thus usually comes from social hatreds—whether due
to psychosis, greed for position, “honor,” extreme defensiveness, extreme need
to control others, extreme sensitivity to slights, or—most common and deadly of
all—displacing hatreds and aggressions onto weaker people or onto defenseless
nature. When not feeding from those troughs, the bad wolf tends to go to sleep,
leaving the field to the good wolf.
In
other words, people will kill in competition for goods, but more usually
negotiate; they kill for land in wars, but tend to negotiate there too. They kill in competition for power, which is
more dangerous since positions of power are necessarily limited. Above all, they kill for reasons of social
standing and honor.
Genocidal
killing goes further: it is usually focused on religion or political
ideology—givers of fundamental morals and of security. Where ethnicity is more the source of basic
values, ethnicity is the ostensible cause.
A pathological leader, or indeed almost any dictator, will be sure to
stress the links, identifications, group memberships, and reference groups that
provide the best opportunity for stirring up hatred and violence. This is the secret to extremist leadership:
make the most deadly links the most salient.
Recruiters for jihad, for instance, stress the Islamic, and specifically
Wahhabist, identification of people who might otherwise see themselves as
French, or Moroccan, or factory workers, or soccer players, or any of the other
cross-cutting loyalties we all have. A
genocidal leader will also do best to appeal to a majority that feels itself
threatened or downwardly mobile.
The
reasons for violence and evil are, in order, security, power, greed,
prestige/standing, and psychopathy (or basic aggressiveness), plus the critical ingredient: violence
and/or cruelty as preferred coping strategy. Anger and hate are the mediators, and hatred
is generally defensive. Even callous
bureaupathy has to start with someone who makes a deliberate choice to destroy
poor people to give more money to rich people.
Personal factors involved
are concerns of power, control, social place, and greed and other wants. The social and cultural contexts are
all-important, telling individuals whom and how much to hate. The worst individuals seek out each
other. They also seek out the worst
cultural and social values and attitudes.
This produces a strong multiplier effect, highly visible in right-wing
social movements. Cowardly
defensiveness, gain (not just greed but even routine jobs), power and control
needs, and innate aggression levels all play into such attitudes.
The same individual who is an
angel of help and mercy within his or her group can be a formidable soldier, a
suicide bomber, or a crazed killer when group defense is involved. In fact, the same individual can be
alternately angel and devil to his or her own significant other, as many
stories of domestic violence tell us.
Revenge
is often the most terrible of motives.
People tend to be at their very worst when thinking they are revenging
selves for slights, disrespect, or actual harms. This is when they cheerfully torture and
murder. Thus all genociders wind up focusing on a story of their group being
victimized by the opponent group or groups.
This is absolutely key to understanding genocide and extreme violence.
Revenge
is often for betrayal. Betrayal is
another common response of the human animal to threat and fear. Suspected betrayal can bring about real
violence. A vicious cycle can be
established, as in Shakespeare’s Othello.
Finally, different forms of violence
seem to accompany different personality profiles. Mass shooters are typically alienated young
males, usually right-wing. Domestic
violence is associated with high control need, as noted. Bullying, as we have seen, is associated with
glorification of physical strength and devaluing of intellectual qualities as
well as weakness. Sheer aggressiveness
can be a separate personality trait, as can the closely related “oppositional
personality disorder.” Spread over these
types are the general qualities of alienation, excessive control need,
excessive antagonism, resort to violence as first resort, and brooding or
ruminating about real and imagined wrongs.
These are the real foods of the bad wolf—the human qualities that we
must address to give the good wolf a chance.
4. Cultural Variation
Cultures
also vary. “Culture” is a general term
for learned, shared knowledge and behavior within social groups, above the
family level. Cultural knowledge is
constructed over time by interaction between group members. It can change rather fast, as when a
particularly violent period such as WWII forces people to confront issues they
often try to avoid.
Since humans will
inevitably compete for scarce resources, conflict is inevitable. All societies know theft, violence, and
treachery. All condemn these and have
mechanisms for coping with them. Especially
touchy are issues with affection, social support, and control. These may or may not really be limited, but
people often perceive them so. Power is
particularly problematical, since there is less and less “room at the top” as
one ascends a hierarchy. Conflicts,
especially over power and control, tend to escalate, creating fear and
stress. These in turn make people
defensive, leading to still more conflict.
We need not be Hobbesian to see that conflict is likely in the human
condition.
This being the case, all
cultures include a great deal of shared and often widely-accepted knowledge
about anger, violence, conflict, conflict resolution, and other relevant
matters (Beals and Siegal 1966). All
cultures include canonical rules for dealing with conflict and violence. All cultures have storylines and plans about
these matters. All cultures include
stories people tell to provide models of how to deal with violent conflict. Children are raised on stories explaining how
to defuse a fight. Adults go on to Homer’s Iliad, Shakespeare’s history plays, China’s Three Kingdoms Story, Japan’s Tale
of the Heike, and on down, from these epic works to the latest Hollywood
action movie. People constantly refer
back to these model cases. Genocide
stories, especially the story of Hitler’s Holocaust, have become part of the
world’s knowledge pool.
Knowledge
from one realm is freely adapted to others.
We draw on knowledge of ancient history to understand modern war. We draw on knowledge of animal conflict to
understand the deepest roots of our own.
Drawing with the best judgment on the widest set of data is an ideal to
strive for, but biases—often culturally constructed—interfere. Clearly, changing cultural plans for dealing
with violence, dissent, and conflict is basic to understanding such processes
(Beals and Siegal 1966).
A pattern broadly visible
in eastern Asia is one in which both individuals and societies can flip from
extremely peaceful to extremely violent and back to peace. Chinese dynasties exhibit this pattern:
during times of strong government, they were very peaceful and orderly, but in
dynastic breakdown periods, violence became universal and appalling. Japan had similar flips, for example from the
rather calm Ashikaga shogunate to the civil wars of the 16th century
and then the peaceful and orderly Tokugawa shogunate. A modern case is Cambodia. The Cambodians were famously peaceful. They dropped rapidly back to peaceful
behavior after the meltdown in the 1970s that killed some 25% of the
population. Rwandans moved from genocide
to peace and order with surprising ease.
Like Cambodians, they are usually gentle and tolerant people, far from
the western media stereotypes of “savage tribal Africans.”
Still
other societies have chronic low levels of violence, fluctuating but never very
high. Still others, especially in the
Middle East and northern Africa, have fluctuated over time from constant
low-level violence to major outbreaks.
Some few, such as the Waorani of South America, are or were almost
continually violent. Clayton and Carole
Robarchek studied the Semai of Malaysia, among whom violence is condemned and
virtually nonexistent, and then for comparison studied the Waorani, who were
rapidly killing themselves out until missionaries persuaded them to be more
peaceful (Robarchek 1989; Robarchek and Robarchek 1998). The societies turned out to be strikingly
similar in economy, child-rearing practices, and other behaviors; they differed
in that the Semai dealt with conflict by flight and avoidance, the Waorani by
almost immediately escalating to violence.
Mountainous
borderlands tend to be famous for violence.
Think of the Caucasus and the Appalachians. Fertile plains are more easily pacified, both
because farmers have more to lose and because control is easier to exert. People in any setting may change. The Scottish borders that were once infamous
for violence—immortalized in some of the world’s greatest ballads—are now among
the most peaceable places on earth. We
have already noted the example of the Vikings, to say nothing of the
now-peaceful Waorani. When threats from
stronger neighbors were constant, and internal problems could not be solved
because of constant trouble, these societies were violent. When security within and without was
possible, they pacified.
A different way of
looking at society and culture concerns the form of economy. Overall, rentier societies, especially those
with servile labor, produce right-wing politics; ones dominated by secondary
and tertiary industries and hopeful workers often produce left-wing
activity. The United States has generally
been hopeful, so votes progressive in bad times, but often right-wing in good
times, to keep taxes low and industries growing. The rise of southern-style politics in the
United States, and its spread to the northern midwest, tracks the rise of
primary production and declining but still powerful heavy industry, and the
rise of giant firms vs decline of small ones.
In short, cultures and
societies, like individuals, respond to insecurity by becoming more defensive,
and to physical threat by becoming more violent. With confidence and security—from strength
and from secure leadership—they can and will change rapidly in more peaceful
directions. Of course, such facts deal a
death blow to the myth of “human nature.”
If Hobbesian devils can convert to Rousseauian angels in a few years,
and if whole societies can suddenly become violent and as suddenly stop, where
are the primal drives?
Societies must also find
ways to deal with the formation of sub-societies with different rules: feuding,
mafias, corruption, etc. Then there are
two variables: how well the society can enforce the rules, and how well its
members want to. The rich and powerful
are above the law to some extent in most societies, and they may be perfectly
happy to let mafias terrorize the general populace. On the other hand, a society as totally at
the mercy of gangs as El Salvador and Honduras are today, or as riven by
religious and tribal conflicts as Afghanistan, cannot long survive with a
crisis.
Social
differences are often in the cultural construction of bullying, power-jockeying,
and hatred. These can become idealized
and culturally taught, via religion and other ideologies. Nazism is the most obvious and extreme case
of a culture constructed from such bases, but it is only the most extreme of
many movements. World religions
eventually construct power via hierarchies, initiations, and other
institutions. All cultures construct
aggression through ideas about war and defense.
Religion usually includes peace, harmony, and nonviolence among its
ideals, but it is also the source of foundational beliefs and foundational
morals for many or most societies, and the most important source of security
for many believers. Devout believers who
depend on religion for both certainty and security often feel deeply and
directly threatened by challenges to their faith. The same goes for true believers in any
comprehensive ideology, from communism to fascism. Gods are usually either benign or a
human-like mix of creative good with all-too-human foibles (like Zeus and
Coyote), but all religions also postulate a vast host of evil spirits who mean
nothing but harm: demons, devils, bad winds, ghosts, demiurges, and countless
more. These projections of human fear
and hate into the supernatural realm fit Durkheim’s view of religion as the
collective representation of the community (Durkheim 1995 [1912]); they are the
community’s worst—and most often hidden—feelings, displaced outward.
Many
of the cultural groups that committed the worst genocides were famous for their
obedience to authority: Cambodians, Rwandans, Chinese, Germans, Indonesians…the
list is long. Many warlike and
independent groups also became genocidal, but the link with obedience is clear
enough to be thought-provoking The great
genocides—ones in which the populace in general seems to have gone mad with
blood—were generally in such societies, though the Turks and several other
exceptions can be mentioned.
Since
overreaction to negatives is the general problem, it follows that culture can
establish the idea that one should overreact. This regularly occurs in cultures of “honor”
(Baumeister 1997; Henrich 2016).
Defensiveness can seem moral in highly unstable societies.
Cultures
provide scripts and storylines and schemas for action. These cultural models (to use the
technical term) provide canonical ways to deal with or adapt to life. Most of them are adaptive and valuable, but
every bad type of action has its model too.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism drew on centuries of pogroms and massacres, well
scripted and following a set of plotlines.
Contemporary Islam provides accessible models for suicide bombing. In the United States, there is now an all too
well-known cultural model for mass shooting, followed in one form or another by
hundreds of alienated, angry, often sulking individuals—most of them young men
and many of them white supremacists or similar right-wingers (Cai et al. 2019). There is another cultural model for spouse
abuse; similar models of mistreatment exist in most other cultures. Other cultural models exist for criminal gang
behavior, robbery, suicide, and other violent acts. A desperate person needs only to activate the
model. He or she will learn what weapons
to use, how to obtain them, how to deploy them, and what to do next. Planning is simple and kept to a minimum.
We
have also seen above how social and cultural pressures act on everyone—even the
least alienated, and indeed especially the most conformist and
well-socialized—to get the vast mass of individuals to go along with genocide. Here, direct social pressure, including
threats of ostracism or worse, is added to the cultural models.
In
ordinary everyday violence, the bad wolf wins when a particularly susceptible
individual—aggressive, alienated, or simply angered beyond bearing—is subjected
to social pressure to act violently, and has an available cultural model of how
to do it. In war and genocide, everyone
is expected to join in and do their bit, and almost everyone does. In bullying, terrorism, and domestic
violence, only some do; they are alienated or desperate for control, and they
nurse their sorrows until an available cultural model becomes salient. Terrorists are usually persuaded by intense
pressure from their social group. In all
cases, violence depends on a prior development of anger, hate, and need to
assert control. Individuals get into a
tighter and tighter spin of negative emotions.
An agent-based approach (in the tradition of Ibn Khaldun and Max
Weber) allows us to see that humans do not just reflect their culture. They balance family, cultural group,
subcultural group, father’s people, mother’s people, spouse’s people, immigrant
neighbors, and last but not least their own interests as individuals. People are constantly faced with moral
choices of whom to go with and how much to cheat selfishly.
The hardest problem is how to deal with social criticism and
disrespect. The descendant of
territorial defensiveness in animals is human defensiveness about social place
and social position—“honor,” “face,” etc.
(Humans are not territorial in the sense most mammals are. We socially construct space in all manner of
free-form ways; see Lefebvre 1992.)
The great Greek tragedies, the best of the medieval epics, the
Scottish tragic ballads, and equivalent literature around the world (including
many Native American tales), reveal people in crisis situations, where they are
forced to reveal their deepest selves.
In the crises when ordinary life is disrupted, individuals are forced
into extreme good and evil behavior.
Many of these dramas turn on inescapable conflicts between two loyalties. Often, as in Scottish ballads and many Native
American stories, the drama turns on loyalty to true love versus loyalty to
family. The heroes and heroines are powerful, but
have the costs of their virtues, the fatal flaws that comes with their
power.
These stories may be the best ways to understand humanity and its
conflicts. Great literature strips off ordinary everyday conformity and reveals
the bare human in full glory or vileness.
Greek tragedies do this. So do
Medieval epics, Chinese classical stories, and other great works. Folk literature always contains such stories.
They are critically important for understanding humanity. First, they show that people are agents, not
mindless slaves of genes or culture or society; everyone has to deal with and,
hopefully, resolve such conflicts. Second,
they show that cultures are not homogeneous, and mindless conformity cannot
work indefinitely. There are cultural
models of different loyalties: loyalties to different groups that often come
into conflict. There are tradeoffs
between long-term and wide-flung interests and short-term narrow ones. There are conflicts over allocating
resources.
An inevitable conflict often
recorded in song and story is between security and advancement. Advancing in society requires taking some
risks. People usually and naturally act
to minimize risk for maximum advancement, but there are plenty of exceptions,
and they are often the leading entrepreneurs and inventors. Managing to try to make advancement
opportunities more secure is a major part of economic behavior for many of
us. Cutthroat competition is thus
stressful.
The conflict most relevant to the
present book is the one between loyalty and morality. When dictators whip up their populations to
commit genocide, this conflict becomes agonizing. Most people choose loyalty, as we have
seen. Many are perfectly happy with
it—they wanted to eliminate the minorities anyway—but many are not at all
happy, and have to be steamrolled into it.
Already noted is the inevitable conflict over rank and the resulting
problems with arrogance, humility, ranking out, and insult.
These songs and stories turn on
courage and on failure, on individuals against the world, and on opportunity
and challenge. They are the corrective
to dismissing and devaluing people. The
hero powerful against the storm, especially if the hearer or reader can
identify with that hero, is humanity in compelling form and inescapable
predicament.
In modern society, traditional folk
and elite societies, communities, and cultures are thinned down or extirpated. People are left to the tender mercies of
vast, impersonal governments and firms.
This not only disempowers them; it also robs them of those canonical
stories that once modeled behavior in conflicted times.
This out-of-control
inequality, and above all the sheer bigness, makes people feel weak, out of
control of their lives, and lacking in self-efficacy. They become timid, and succumb all the more
easily to toxic conformity and obedience.
Lost are such empowering and strengthening cultural forms as great art
and literature, and even ordinary civility and decency. Weakness and fear makes people desperate for
security, including material security; the result can look like greed, but is
actually cowardice.
6. Explaining
It: Fight, Flight, Freeze
People
are usually sociable, but react to threat as all large, strong animals do, by
fighting back. They are stressed not
only by direct threat, but by threat to their social position, and their sense
of control of their lives (Bandura 1982, 1986; Langer 1983).
The
fight-flight-freeze response is wired into the nervous systems (Sapolsky 2017,
2018). Faced with superior strength and
an escape route, an animal will flee; with no escape, it will freeze; if it is
cornered and attacked, it will fight, even against superior strength. This response is mediated through the ancient
limbic system in the lower back part of the brain. A threat is first processed by the amygdala,
which recognizes and catalogues it (the amgydala being also a center of memory,
as well as the center of much emotionality).
A message goes to the hypothalamus, where the center of the
fight-flight-freeze response occupies a small group of nuclei that release
aggressive behavior, including speeding up the heart, raising blood pressure,
and directing blood toward appropriate muscle and nerve systems (thus away from
functions like digestion). This area
sends messages down to the pituitary gland, attached to the bottom of the
hypothalamus. Hormones are released from
the anterior pituitary, and circulate through the body, stimulating—among other
things—release of adrenaline and cortisol from the adrenal glands (Fields
2019). Adrenalin and the bone-derived
hormone osteocalcin drive the actual physiological responses that are the core
of the fight-flight-freeze response (ScienceBeta 2019).
All this is under varying
degrees of control from the frontal and prefrontal cortex—very little in a
lizard, a great deal in a well-socialized human. In a human, “the frontal cortex makes you
do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do” (Sapolsky 2017:45,
emphasis his). That can mean doing what
is reasonable (foregoing a reward now for a bigger one later) or what is social
(foregoing a theft because it is morally wrong). Conversely, stress disorients. Sustained stress and fear lead to chronic
biologic responses that impair judgment and lead to heightened responses
(Sapolsky 2017:130-1360).
Under such conditions,
animals and people can flip almost instantly from peaceful, calm behavior to
extreme violence. This is the
biological substrate of the change from good wolf to bad wolf.
Humans have considerably
complicated the response. We are faced, more than other animals, with a
tradeoff between reacting emotionally and rationally. The medial frontal cortex, home of social
emotionality, dominates empathetic and sensitive choices, and—with other
regions—cognitive empathy (Kluger et al. 2019; Lombardi 2019). The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is more
involved with “cool, utilitarian choices” (Kluger et al. 2019:12). The ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrates
many of these, and processes morality and its social applications, as well as
cognitive interaction choices. It is
conspicuously absent in reaction of psychopaths to others’ pain (Lombardi
2019:20). More interesting, in
psychopaths, is their lack of connection between the reward processing center
of the brain—the ventral striatum—and the center for examining outcomes and
consequences, including emotional ones, in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex
(Lombardi 2019:29). A quite different situation is found in people on the
autism spectrum, who may be socially challenged but are generally well-meaning,
trying hard but often failing to be social; damage to the anterior cingulate
cortex is suspected. It seems that
differences in brain regions and connections lie behind a great deal of human
good and evil. This does not explain why
the same individual can transition so rapidly from one to the other.
In people, because of the
necessity to prioritize dealing with threat, hate is all too often stronger
than love, viciousness stronger than caring, defensive resistance to change
stronger than greed or desire for self-improvement. Chronic threat and stress crystallize the
fight response into hatred, the flight response into escapism, and the freeze
response into conformity or apathy. One
result is that polls often mispredict how people will act: people generally
answer that they want more wages, or better health care, or other positive
things, but then vote or act their hate.
This led to massive misprediction of the 2016 election results.
Flight can thus be into
video games and daydreams, freezing can be labeled “depression” or “laziness”
by psychologists or judgmental peers, and fighting is usually verbal rather
than violent. Still, all the limbic
responses are there, underlying the prefrontal plans and cultural instructions
that introduce the complexity. (Much of
what follows is derived from, or at least agrees with, Beck 1999 and Staub
2011; Gian Caprara [2002] has critiqued Beck’s model for being too narrow and
not covering a wide enough range of situations and contexts, so the model is somewhat
expanded here, following Caprara.)
The
most basic root of aggression is fear (on which see LeDoux 2015). Any animal capable of fighting will fight
when threatened or attacked, if there is no alternative. Animals also fight for resources: for mates above all, but also food, space,
and other necessities. This may involve
fear of loss of necessary resources, but often—especially with mates—it is
simply fighting to win desired goods.
Sheer discomfort—sickness, hunger, loss—can also make most animals more
aggressive or fight-prone. The order
is: Stressors; feeling of inadequacy or
frustration; defensiveness; then, if the bad wolf wins, hatred and aggression.
Grief
can also be a source of stress and thus of violence. The role of grieving in motivating suicide
bombing has been addressed by Atran (2010).
In many cultures, from Appalachia to New Guinea, grief over previous
killings leads to revenge, and is expected to do so.
The
human difference is that humans are compulsively and complexly social (Henrich
2016). They live by, through, and for
their social systems: families, communities, neighborhoods, networks, and—in
the modern world—states. Humans feel
fear when these communities are threatened.
Even humans not at all involved in a community will often feel fear or
anger over seeing it attacked. People
willingly die for their communities. We
routinely observe the heroism of soldiers sacrificing themselves in war,
parents dying to save children, suicide bombers blowing up supposed enemies
(Atran 2010; Bélanger et al. 2014), and even gutter punks dying for their drug
gangs.
Such
fighting, fleeing, and freezing are structured along social lines. The usual human condition, socially
constructed on the innate bases described above, seems to be kind, friendly,
and warm to one’s in-group, hospitable to strangers, hostile to opponent groups
in one’s own society, and deeply hostile to individuals in one’s own society
who seem to be a threat to one’s control or to society’s most fundamental beliefs.
The real problem is threat to social place and position, which can lead to
anything partner abuse to international war, depending on the scale. Threats to social beliefs lead to savage
persecution of “heretics.” Heretics and
minority religions are the victims of many of the very worst massacres. They usually live mixed in among the orthodox. Perhaps the intimacy is related to the
extreme violence of such persecutions. Cognitive dissonance can make people act worse
than they might.
It
is also universally known that people are most easily united by being
confronted with a common threat, especially a human threat—an invading army, looting
gangs, or simply those “heretics.”
Leaders and would-be leaders thus tend to seek or invent enemies.
Existential
threat—simple fear of death—also exacerbates hatred. In a fascinating study, Park and Pyszczynski
(2019) found that making fear of death salient to experimental subjects made
them become more defensive about their group identification and core values, and
more intolerant and antagonistic toward others.
They found, moreover, that mindful meditation could reduce this, and
eliminate it in practiced meditators, providing a rather unexpected and
potentially important weapon against hate.
Thus,
natural human tendencies to deal with fear by fighting or escaping can be
mobilized by leaders. All they need to
do is mobilize fear—whether it be fear of war, or economic problems, or change,
or minority groups getting ahead, or any other stress—and convince an increasing
sector of the population that this problem can be handled by removing some
group. Typically, people will redirect
anger they feel against targets unsafe to criticize, or even just anger from
stubbing their toes or having problems with the house, into hatred. Hate of the strong is unsafe to act out, so it
is displaced onto the weak. Scapegoating—hating
people or groups through displacement—is the most cowardly of the defense
mechanisms. Intolerance is a close
second. Denial, rigidity, and low-level
escapism are among others.
Doğan and collaborators (2018)
have found, studying modern Ethiopian societies, that war is much less likely
in egalitarian groups, because everyone is at risk and no one gets a huge chunk
of the spoils. In hierarchic societies,
the leaders are less at risk (young men do the dying) and yet get
disproportionate shares of the loot, as well as increased power. So they are happy to invoke war. The current world situation, where national
leaders are not only safe from fighting but often have never served in the
military, is an extreme case of this.
There is a whole
decision tree in the fight-flight response.
Responding to stress, people must decide—at some level, usually
preattentive—to fear it or not. They
then decide which of the three possibilities to choose, and at what level of
response—from verbal confrontation to murderous attack. They must then decide where to direct their
efforts. If they fight, they can direct
action against actual enemies, as in war and revolution, or displace action
against weaker parties instead of against the actual threat. This is a strikingly common response among
some animals, notably baboons. It is
clearly related to human bullying, and thus to the hypertrophied bullying that
is genocide.
The
basic principles of a cognitive-emotional explanation of evil can be summarized
as follows. First (and in this case
going back to Freud’s defense mechanisms), people tend to blame other
people—not fate, not the structures of the economy, not the weather, and most
certainly not themselves—for whatever goes wrong in their lives. The root of much evil is the belief that we
can fix our problems by controlling or eliminating other people, rather than by
rational means. This is particularly
true of people who have weak confidence in their control of their lives and
situations. (See especially Bandura 1982
on self-efficacy, and the rational-emotional psychology of Albert Ellis, e.g.
1962; the cognitive-behavioral work on evil of Aaron Beck 1999; also Baumeister
1997; Maslow 1970.)
Antagonism is the general cover term for
the usual sources of evil. It is usually
mindless, coming from culture, conformity, or orders. Its natural basis is the normal “fight”
response to threat, but it is increasingly distorted by weak fear, especially
when weakness is part of cultural norms.
The daily kibble of the bad wolf is frustration, resentment of trivial
or imagined slights, everyday irritation, rejection, disempowerment,
harassment. This is especially true if
one assumes the slights and minor rejections are due to malignant intent (Ames
and Fiske 2015). The raw red meat that
gives it strength and power to take over is social hate.
Political anger—which
appears to be the main anger in modern societies—is most certainly decided on:
one learns who to hate and persecute and how angry to get, and one must decide
to follow the leaders in this. The steps
one’s mind goes through in dealing with stress involve decisions at every
point. First, one must identify
something as a threat. Then one must
decide whether to react with flight or fight.
One must decide how much flight or fight to apply.
This requires attention
to what is actually causing the threat.
If one is being chased by a bear, no questions need be asked, but
dealing with widespread social problems is something quite different. Reasonable alternatives include distancing
oneself, resenting silently, turning the other cheek, being as pleasant or
fearless as possible, and just bearing hardship. From there, the next step is to actual
caring: helping, enjoying, working.
A more important
realization is that we are dealing with two phenomenologically different kinds
of emotionality. The fight-flight-freeze
response, and the fear and anger that are part of it, are normal. Quite different is the weakness and
consequent out-of-control fear that comes from personal lack of confidence,
lack of support, and lack of courage. Cowardly
emotions differ from these normal equivalents.
Honest fear in the face of a real threat is not the same as irrational
panic in the face of a trivial one. Real
anger—wrath at actual injury—is different from the fearful anger of a person
who has no confidence in his or her ability to control a situation, and
therefore hysterically overreacts.
Carelessness from sheer inattention to detail is not the same as defiant
sloppiness or toxic irresponsibility.
Love is not the same as dependence and controlling clinginess,
especially since the latter competes psychologically with real caring interest
in the other person.
In violence in general,
but especially in genocidal movements, these play out in different ways. The initial leaders and revolutionaries are
hard-nosed fighters, animated by hatred and opportunism but not scared of
anything. Very often they have been
devalued through no fault of their own: they are poor, or from marginal regions
(Napoleon’s Corsica, Hitler’s Austria, Stalin’s Georgia), or they are short or
disfigured, or something of the sort (cf. Dikötter 2019 for several cases). Far-right-wing acquaintances of mine (I have
known hundreds, over a long life) follow a pattern: they arr males, from the
dominant reference group (white in the US, land Cantonese in Hong Kong, and so
on), but neither affluent nor well-educated nor very successful. Accounts suggest that this is typical. Such people, from Napoleon to my
acquaintances, become resentful toward society, and make up in anger and
oppositional stance what they lack in social prestige. They are anything but weak and fearful. (This compensation theory of problematic
behavior has a long history and literature.
It has been abundantly qualified and nuanced; the simple form is not a
total explanation. See our usual
sources, notably Baumeister 1997, Beck 1999.)
The vast majority of
genociders and other killers, however, are weak and defensive—low in
self-efficacy, in Albert Bandura’s terms.
(See the thorough and insightful discussion of such matters in Bandura
1982, 1986.) They are the conformists
who require only social pressure from the leaders to turn murderous. Individual sense of weakness is much less of
a problem if the self-doubting person feels he or she has family or community
support. This should be obvious, but
requires some reflection. The kind of
support, the areas in which one is supported or not, and the people doing it
(family or friends or the wide world), all matter greatly. We all are weak at times, and defensive at
times. Most, perhaps all, of us feel
weak and defensive in the face of overwhelming threat or stress. It always sets a limit on our coping.
An important and
thoughtful recent study by Robert Bornstein (2019) puts this in real-world
situational perspective. Studying
domestic abuse (my prime model for genocide), Bornstein found sky-high rates in
two mutual dependence situations. First,
when a man is dependent on a woman for personal validation and she is dependent
on him for emotional and financial support, he feels a powerful need to control
her and she finds it very hard to escape.
Second, when adult children are dependent for financial support on an
elder who is dependent on them for physical care, elder abuse is highly
likely. In these cases, the problems of
lack of control and desperate need to assert it become obvious.
My sense is that the real
back story of genocide and similar mass killing is precisely this weak
defensiveness. Ordinary fear and harm
lead to the ordinary fight-flight-freeze responses. Weak defensiveness leads to a quite different
cluster of behaviors: above all
scapegoating and bullying, of which more below, but also to passive-aggression,
taking extreme offense at trivial or imagined slights, extreme jealousy and
envy, petulance, silent resentment, and similar mechanisms. Brooding about these is the real food of
the bad wolf. If I am right, the
back story of mass violence is the ability of strongman leaders who brag of
being above the law to mobilize latent weak defensiveness, resentment, and
frustration, and turn it against scapegoats.
They are the constituency that votes for such men, the passive citizens
that allow coups by such men, and then the obedient subjects of such men.
The worst of it is that
the more overwhelming the situation, the more weak and defensive we all
get. Hard times and strongmen bring out
the weakest and most defensive side of people.
This is the key reason why they are so easily mobilized to break from
passivity to hatred of scapegoats. The break point where the good wolf gives
way to the bad wolf, in every studied case of large-scale genocide and mass
murder, comes when the leaders get enough power and social visibility to
exploit weak defensiveness and other hatreds to flip the masses into genocidal
mode. As so often, Rwanda provides a
particularly well-studied case (see Nyseth Brehm 2017a, 2017b, and references
therein).
This explains the rarity
of people like Oscar Schindler standing firm against genocide. It requires a level of self-confidence,
self-control, and community-supported morality that very few of us have.
This is one half of the
explanation for political extremism. The
other will be discussed below: the conflict between groups that feel they are
downwardly mobile and those that are moving up.
This classic Marxian conflict drives much of world politics today.
It
is notoriously easier to unite people against a perceived enemy than for a good
cause (Bowles 2006; Henrich 2016). Thus,
evil tends to win, in the “real world.”
The larger the organization the more dangerous this tendency
becomes. An empire or a giant firm will
attract the power-hungry, and they will often rise rapidly, since they are
unencumbered by the scruples that restrain most of us. Since people follow their leaders, history
shows that people are considerably worse in aggregate than they are as
individuals.
People often unite more
easily against good others than against evil ones, because it is easier to go
after weaker and milder than against the powerful and brutal. Moreover, being good tends to be a small-scale,
personal activity, while hatred gets extended to whole classes of people. The weaker, more salient, and more physically
and socially close perceived enemies are, the easier to go after them. So evil often starts with domestic
violence. Even more often, it starts
with attacks on weaker neighbors or on oppressed minorities. Actual enemies are often the last to be
attacked, since they will fight back. It
is easy to unite people through conformity to exclusionary norms (Henrich 2016). Tolerance and openness, however, are a bit of
a psychological luxury; they sharply decline when people feel their mental
energy is exhausted (Tadmor et al. 2018).
Still more of a luxury is actual enjoyment; one must be out of threat
zone to relax enough to cultivate the arts of life.
The worst problems occur when power-mad
people figure out how to use morality to sell their drive for power. Religious hatred is the commonest way,
but nationalism, militarism, and communist and other revolutionary ideologies
have done as well. In the United States
we have seen hatred justified by opposition to illegal immigrants, by appeals
to law and security, and even by opposition to “hate speech,” which seems always
defined as strong speech by one’s opponents.
The
rich often want power and status, not money per se. (What follows is a skeletal outline of
material on power reviewed in Anderson and Anderson 2012, 2017; see also
Traverso 2019.) They thus will play
zero-sum and negative-sum games with the rest of us, because they want relative
positions. They want to be powerful more
than they want money (not that they mind having more of it also). Critical
is that Success, or Power and Control, or Wealth and Status, is their whole life
involvement, not just one thing they want.
Thus
we may say that evil is usually done for four reasons: callousness toward people who “don’t count”;
anger toward people who do count—very often loved ones and family that one
wishes to control but cannot control; hatred toward specific groups, almost
always scapegoated minorities; and hatred of actual enemies. Greed as a factor may lie behind these, but
it generally acts through them; the selfishly greedy dehumanize or disregard
their victims. This produces some
ambiguity. In a war, one must maximize
killing of the opposition, including civilians and ordinary unfortunates
drafted by evil but personally safe overlords.
Another
major background factor in evil is negative-sum gaming. This often involves seeing the world as
steadily declining, such that one can do better only by taking from
others. It views resources as
limited. This view tends to come from a
focus on social power and status, where positions really are limited and one is
controlling or controlled; economic welfare is more easily spread or increased
for all, but it too often involves competition over limited goods. Often, people who feel the world is getting
worse see themselves as hopelessly downward-bound; they see no way to slow this
except by taking more and more from weaker people and groups. This was visible in much of the voting for
Donald Trump. His backing was
concentrated among people who saw their groups as downwardly mobile. They saw their best hope in getting what they
could, while they could, at the expense of other groups. Fear is abundantly obvious in such cases. The resulting policies are hardly helpful;
taking oneself down to take others down even more—the suicide bombers’ logic—is
ruinous in the long run.
Hate
is successful at unifying society, blinding people to ripoffs and corruption,
getting otherwise unmotivated people to fight for their exploiters, and
otherwise allowing evil people to get the mass of ordinary people on their
side. The main generalization is that
the more deeply important a social identification is, the more hatred it can
mobilize. Religion so often leads to
especially irrational and extreme violence because it is about basic
issues. Yet, far less important matters
can cause fighting; even sports team rivalries may lead to war (Anderson and
Anderson 2012).
The
range of behaviors goes on to touchiness about “honor,” overattention to
negativity, holding people to ridiculous standards, rage, overcontrolling,
dominating, domineering, general antagonism, inimical attitude, and finally
violence and murder. Common or universal
is an attitude that everyone’s bad traits are what count; their good does
not. People become rigid and judgmental.
Minor slights become cause for murder. These can be at individual or group levels. Mass shooters fit the profile: alienated,
usually young, males, dealing with threats to personhood or social place by
indiscriminate murder-suicide. Ability
to think rationally or morally suffers in proportion. Ability to enjoy and love suffer too (Bandura
1982, 1986).
The
common ground here is insecurity leading to irrational levels of harm to the
“threatening group” or “the competition.”
The worst and commonest reason is direct threat to one’s personhood. Following that come desire for wealth, power,
control, prestige, status, lifestyle.
Always, in group hate,
there is either a massive devaluing of certain groups or a general
defensiveness, and usually both. The
front story is actual evil or good; the mid story is the emotions and feelings
that motivate; the real back story is destructive competition versus
cooperation. The ultimate back story is
individual defensiveness, weakness, neurosis-psychosis, and other psychic
factors.
Sidebar
The basic axioms of
authoritarianism are:
Since I’m in power, I’m
better than you.
My first need is to
keep you under control.
Your differences from
me—especially in such basic matters as religion and ethnicity—are bad:
threatening, inferior, inappropriate, offensive.
You must be kept weak.
Since raw fear is the
easiest and most straightforward way to do this, torture and cruelty are
central elements of power and discipline.
But, since those attract resistance, in time they must be softened by an
ideology of “good” and “ideals” plus development of a socio-political-economic
structure that keeps the weak down.
The rulers, or would-be
rulers, are the Chosen People.
“Progressives” are often as bad in this regard as other bigots.
I’m more powerful than
you, so I make the rules. This holds all
the way from “I’m the mom, that’s why” up to the dictator level.
If
people learn rational or common-sense ways of coping with fear and threat, they
are less likely to fall into hatred and toxic conformity. If they do, however, they may become
authoritarians. The “authoritarian
personality” created by Freudian mechanisms (Fromm 1941) has not stood the test
of time, but “authoritarian predispositions” leading to an “authoritarian
dynamic” are now well attested and studied (Duckitt 1994, 2001; Stenner
2005). They are called up or exacerbated
especially by normative fear: fear of the breakdown of the social norms that
give what the authoritarian mind considers necessary structure to society. These norms typically involve norms that keep
minorities and women “in their place,” and otherwise create a rigid top-down
order. Learned helplessness (Peterson et
al. 1993) often leads to toxic conformity.
Authoritarian
predispositions and behaviors may include devotion to strongmen, hatred and
fear of homosexuals and other norm-benders, love of stringent punishment for
lawbreakers (especially those low on the social scale), militarism, and similar
conditions. There is, however, a great
range of ideology here, from the near-anarchist violent right wing to the
genteelly hierarchic older businessmen of a midwestern suburb. It seems likely that we are dealing with
several different responses to weakness in the face of threat, the common
denominators being a need for a strong-man leader and a need for underlings to
blame and oppress. Authoritarianism is
surprisingly common within societies and surprisingly widespread over the world
(Stenner 2005).
This
rests on several observations about human responses to threat and stress. Three other important ones deserve
attention: People hate in others what
they dislike in themselves (especially if they feel guilty about it); they like
in others what they want for themselves; they use their strengths to make up
for their deficiencies. These are all
involved in bullying and authoritarianism.
Bullying can have permanent negative effects on bullied children’s
brains (Copeland et al. 2014).
The
problems usually follow from cowardice and hostility, which reinforce each
other. In an isolated person, they come
out as giving up, or as setting oneself against the world. In the far commoner case of a social person,
they come out in displacing aggression against the weak. Fear forbids aggressing against actual
offenders (if there are any); antagonism is displaced downward, to
scapegoats. This usually leads to
bullying them. Of course, as Robert
Sapolsky points out, “You want to see a kid who’s really likely to be a mess as
an adult? Find someone who both bullies and is bullied” (Sapolsky
2017:199). That probably describes
virtually all serious bullies.
Bullying involves
belittling them: regarding them as low or worthless. Underlings use malicious gossip to get back
at powerful bosses. “I’m better than you” and “I’m worse than you” are bad
enough, but the worst is “I’m worse than you, so I have to pretend I’m better,
and if in power I have to bully you.”
The classic bully is resentful toward the world at large. He attacks both the weak (“contemptible”) and
those in authority; he revels in breaking laws and conventions (Sapolsky
2017:199). Bullies resent civility; it
interferes with their activities, and they brand it as “weakness.” They resort to lying and “gaslighting” as
routine methods of manipulating others, and to insults. They tend to be violent and unpredictable.
A
standard bullying routine is to insult the victim, then take any response as an
“offense” and “slight” that justifies attack.
Imagined slights are quite adequate.
The genociders’ version of this is the attribution of all manner of
horrific but imaginary sins to the targeted group; Hitler’s claims about the
Jews are the most famous in this regard, but all genociders—at least all those
with a recorded history—do it. Genocide
is bullying writ large.
Another
very common aspect of bullying is that bullies are adulated as “strong” and
“independent” by those who would love to be bullies but are too personally
weak. They become groupies, followers,
toadies. Women who are afraid to be
violent themselves, but would love to be bullies, find male bullies irresistible,
leading to a remark attributed to Henry Kissinger, “power is the best
aphrodisiac.”
Evil
people, from ancient Greek demagogues to Hitler and Trump, can most effectively
get the least competent of the tier-just-above-bottom to hate the bottom
tiers. Failing that, they can always
whip up nativistic hate of foreigners, especially immigrants.
Most
movements that end in authoritarianism and genocide start by recruiting bullies
and haters, then gather momentum. Not
until they win, and succeed in turning the polity into a dictatorship or
turning a local community into one defined by hate, can they recruit the vast
mass of ordinary people. However, there
are cases in which many followers are genuine idealists, not bullies, and then
the picture is complicated by the restraint introduced by the idealists. Stalin in the USSR was infamous for purging
his movement of these idealists, leaving only those who were either bullies or
saw repression as simply a necessary job to do.
Following,
again, Baumeister (1996), Baron-Cohen (2011). Beck (1999) and others, we can
identify several subtypes of persons who despise or hate downward. The widest and most general category is those
who simply believe in the necessity of hierarchies and of maintaining those
hierarchies through keeping those below firmly in their place (as described by
Haidt 2012, and argued, in effect, by Aladair MacIntyre 1984, 1988). An extreme form is the strongman philosophy
that argues for rulers being above the law, or being the law, and often acting
outrageously simply to show they have the power; this was the classic attitude
of European royalism, and is similar to the politics of modern strongmen. At the other end of power distribution are the
weak and timid souls who desperately try to maintain their position by keeping
firmly down anyone that seems to be below them.
Opposed
to these views are two types of philosophy.
First comes abjuring all anger and negative judgment, as advocated by
many religions. The second is directing
one’s anger against the powerful, especially the powerful and lawless or
harming, as advocated by revolutionaries.
This latter allows anger to be directed upward rather than scapegoated
downward in a social hierarchy. This is
not necessarily a good thing, as we know from the sad ending of many
revolutions.
We
have now come to the core of what feeds the wolves. The bad wolf is fed by fear socially
channeled into scapegoating and bullying; by culture and society based on
top-down power that is poorly restrained; and by personal grievance and offense
coming out in hate and irrational harm.
This may be deployed in the service of greed, sadism, defense, or
“honor,” but the basic animal is the same.
The good wolf is fed by the opposite: dealing with problems as
rationally and peacefully as possible, in a society where equality and
tolerance are values. This too may be
deployed for gain or defense or any other purpose. The rest of this book will be dedicated to
unpacking that simple formula.
Fear
and fight lead to three overarching social vectors: ingroup versus rival group;
general level of hostility; and minimizing. These are called “othering” today, and often
considered to be a part of human nature.
This is not correct. The actual
direct causes of evil appear to be cowardice, hostility, and minimizing or
infrahumanization. The first two are
overreaction (overemotional reaction) to fear, threat, and hurt, with
structural opponentship (not just difference) seen as a threat. The common ground is seeing people, or some
people, as bad or unworthy. All or some people are to be bulldozed,
dominated, or preyed on—even family
and friends, let alone real opponents. (On discrimination, see Kteily, Bruneau,
et al. 2015; Kteily, Hodson, and Bruneau 2016; Parks and Stone 2010; Rovenpor
et al. 2019.)
The
third is failure to consider people as fully human, or even failure to consider
people at all. People become Kantian
objects (Kant 2002): mere numbers on a spreadsheet, dirt to be bulldozed out of
the way of construction projects, or underlings to be disregarded.
Such
minimizing can be aggressive. It can be
cold and calculating. It can be simply mindless—just not thinking of the
problems of the servants or workstaff.
It involves devaluing people: maintaining that they are unworthy of
attention, concern, or care. Sometimes
it involves not noticing people at all.
It tends to go with callous indifference, as opposed to hostility and
anger. Anger shows at least some respect
for the opponent; the opponent is worthy of being noticed and hated. Not infrequently, the opponent is even
considered superior, as when revolutionaries attack the state, or a David goes
up against a Goliath.
Othering
without much hostility is typical of traditional people; they know the “others”
are different, but have little to do with them.
Usually, strangers and travelers are welcomed, often very warmly. My wife and I have traveled the world and
almost never run into hostile reactions, nor have our students of all
backgrounds and economic situations.
Exceptions are neighboring groups, often traditional rivals for land and
resources. Hostility without much
othering—without displacing it to an outgroup—produces gangsters and aggressive
loners.
The
human norm seems to be occasional anger and aggression against even one’s
nearest and dearest, great aggressiveness against structural-opponent groups,
and indifference to the rest—the unknown multitudes out of one’s immediate ken.
One consoling lie that such people
tell themselves is that we live in a just world (Lerner 1980), in which people
get what they deserve. The poor are
lazy, the rich worked for their wealth.
People displaced by dams somehow deserve to be displaced. Genociders come to believe fantastically
overstated lies: the people they hate are truly evil, subhuman, the sources of
all ills. Thus, to the totally other,
evil is done from callousness: coldly planned aggressive war, bureaupathy. There is then a continuum through “different”
members of one’s own society—internal others—to family members. The closer people are socially, the more
hatred is necessary, or at least usual, before harm is done.
The
most clearly established fact is that infants are born with some degree of
innate fear of strangers, and the more different those strangers look and act
from the parents, the more the fear. Thus, some degree of “othering” on the
basis of appearance and voice sound is normal.
On the other hand, infants show acute interest in other people,
especially faces, toward which they orient (Tomasello 2019). They seem innately primed to recognize the
more universal emotional expressions: smiles, angry looks, and so on. Moreover, people differ at birth in how shy
they are and how aggressive they are.
These vary independently, apparently.
Infants react quickly to
smiles, reassurance, gentle touch, and other marks of friendship, and react in
the opposite way to frightening stimuli like shouts and rapid, dramatic
movement. Infants also look to their
parents for signs of how to treat the stranger.
They are extremely reactive to parental moves and voices; the parents
may be completely unaware of how strongly they are signaling the infant.
From
birth, people can react along a whole spectrum of ways, from initial fear but
quick reassurance and friendliness to initial fear made worse by scary
stimuli. This is rapidly exacerbated by
the reactions of parents, siblings, and soon other family members and
friends. Culture enters in right from
the start, by conditioning the reactions of all these important people in the
infants’ lives. By three or four,
children already know that certain recognizable groups are liked while others
are disliked. They learn gender roles,
clothing associations, and other quite complex cultural messages to a striking
degree (Tomasello 2016, 2019). Much of
this was learned quite unconsciously, with no one intending to teach, and
without the children realizing they were learning.
This
means that any group of people will show a variety of reactions, not notably
predictable. The most predictable thing
is that every group will have its structural opponent groups: groups that they
feel are competing with them for power, land, jobs, resources, social
recognition, political sway, poetry, art motifs, foods, and anything else that
people compete about. The word “rival”
literally means “sharer of a river bank” (Latin rivus, riverbank), in recognition of the universality of arguments
over water, especially for irrigation; in the western United States, “whiskey’s
for drinking, water’s for fighting,” as Mark Twain said. In the United States, the classic divide has
been white vs black, and in much of the US today “race” and “diversity” means,
basically, that antagonism. In Canada,
the same “worst structural opponent” attitudes are white vs Native American
(First Nations to Canadians). Blacks in the US and Native Americans in Canada
are notably overrepresented in “hard case” stories in the media. (This struck me when I compared Seattle and
Vancouver, BC, newspapers in the 1980s.)
Stories of substance abuse, crime, and welfare dependence often feature
photographs of them, even where they are a very small percentage of such “hard
cases.”
Going
back in history, one recalls the love-hate—mostly hate—relationship of England
and France, of France and Germany, of Germany and Poland, of Poland and Russia,
and so on forever. And throughout Europe
the Roma are victims of vicious prejudice; they are often the ones in the
hard-case stories in the newspapers, even when they are a microscopic
percentage of the national population.
To
my knowledge, every culture has prejudices like this. Moreover, as we all know, different
stereotypes go with different groups. To
white racists, blacks are “inferior” and “dumb,” “Mexicans” (by which they
generally mean anyone with a Latin American heritage) are “rapists” and
“criminals,” and so on. To many American
blacks, all whites are suspect and all or almost all are racist and
dangerous. These views are variously
nuanced. We have probably all
encountered racists who hate “blacks” but sincerely like their close friends
and neighbors who happen to be black: “He isn’t really a black guy, he’s old
Joe.”
One
reason for such self-contradictions is the degree to which “old Joe” conforms
to local norms and morals. A complex
field experiment in 28 German cities showed considerable bias against helping
hijab-wearing women, but the same woman without the hijab but still obviously a
Middle Easterner got about as little hate as a clearly native German woman.
Moreover, and more importantly, if the hijab-wearer helped protest littering
(by a confederate of the experimenters, of course!), she was helped in turn at
the same levels as the non-hijab-wearers (Choi et al. 2019). The general conclusion is that foreigners who
mark their “difference” from the host society are accepted if they mark their
“similarity” to the host society by proactive behavior.
Typically,
individuals who regard a group as low or despicable put up with its members as
long as they “keep their place,” but not when they try to assert equality or
rights. Racists who tolerate “old Joe”
do not tolerate Al Sharpton. Misogynists
may love their docile wives (in a patronizing way), but hate feminists. When I worked with fishermen in Hong Kong, I
found the same phenomenon: fishermen were regarded as lowly by most of the rest
of society, but were tolerated unless they tried to assert full equality. The psychology seems essentially universal in
stratified societies.
Relations
of power notoriously exacerbate hatreds.
This is so extreme, so obvious, and so universal that no one misses
it. Less obvious is the effect of
specific kinds of power. Blacks are notoriously
in a particularly bad place in American society because they were
enslaved. “Mexicans,” however, are the
structural opponents who are most devalued by South Texas white
racists, because of Texas’ history of breakaway
from Mexico and later oppression of Mexican workers.
Hard
times sometimes make hatreds worse, but sometimes draw the country together and
thus make hatreds recede somewhat; the Depression gave us Hitler in Germany and
the New Deal in the US. Good times can
make hatreds worse, especially if a large percentage of the majority is left
behind watching a tiny group get richer and richer, as in the US in the 1920s
and since 2016.
This
being the case, it is inevitable that politicians invoke hatreds and usually do
everything possible to whip them up and make them worse, the better to “lead”
the “people” against the “foe.”
To foreigners from realms
too distant to be actively stereotyped, most people worldwide are welcoming and
friendly. There is a range from
incredibly hospitable to quite suspicious and unfriendly. The former is usually found in stable, secure
communities. The latter response is
common in highly ingrown communities like the stereotypic European peasant
villages, but also in highly unstable and insecure communities
A
common claim is that religious hatreds are often the worst. This seems true especially in the
monotheistic “Abrahamic” religions, though it is more widespread than
monotheism. In so far as it is true (it
seems to be untested), the reason probably is that religion is about the most
basic values, hopes, dreams, and beliefs that people have. (It is not about how the world started! The world-origin stories are there just to provide
some validation.) In China and historic
Central Asia, much less intolerance was observed, because religions were not
given such narrow and dogmatic interpretation, and value sets existed
independently of faiths. On the other
hand, many of those who are extreme in religious hate are not deeply
knowledgeable about their religion (see e.g. Atran 2010 and Traverso 2019 on
Islam), and may fight only for meaningless tags instead of content, as Edward
Gibbon accused Christians of doing in the war between homoousia and homoiousia.
A
final generalization is that othering relationships and stereotypes change
fast. We have observed immigrant groups
to the United States get stereotyped by the media within a few years. We have observed the rapid demonization of
Muslims in the US.
The common theme of all
these matters, and of all evil, is rejection of people simply for being what
they are. In Paul Farmer’s oft-quoted
remark, “the idea that some lives matter less is the root cause of all that is
wrong with the world.” (This line is
very widely quoted, but I have not found a source citation.) They are condemned
simply because they are poor, or Jewish, or female, or black-skinned, or rich,
or any of the other things that give hateful people an excuse to dismiss whole
categories of humanity. However, extreme
rage and hate are very often deployed against wives, husbands, children,
parents, close friends, and other loved ones.
Family violence seems, in fact, to be a strikingly accurate small-scale
model of genocide. Assassination is even
farther from Farmer’s general case; it involves targeting people because they are important. Thus, while usually the targets of evil are
downvalued, sometimes they are targets specifically because they are highly
valued.
Othering
takes many forms. One recalls the
British stereotypes of “foreigners” and “savages” in the days of the British
Empire: French ate frogs and snails and were effeminate, Germans drank beer and
were big and dull, Italians were dirty and noisy and smelled of garlic, and so
on for every group the British contacted.
American stereotypes of the 20th century were usually
similar, though less well defined.
Children’s books reveal these stereotypes most clearly, and were one of
the main ways they were learned.
Political cartoons often trade on them to this day.
The
same general rules apply to hate and disregard for other lives—for animals and
plants. Cruelty to animals and
destruction of nature are common. The
mindset seems to be the same: either uncontrolled rage at the familiar, or
displacement of hate and fear to weak victims, or sheer indifference backed up
by social attitudes. The Cartesian idea
that animals are mere “machines” that have no real feelings has justified the
most appalling abuses.
Summing
up, evil occurs in four rough attitudinal clusters: negative stereotypy; callousness (cold
indifference, selfish greed, cold callousness, etc.); anger, rage, and hate,
variously directed; and psychopathy-sadism.
A
final part of the back story is that humans everywhere dislike
foldbreakers—people who conspicuously resist conforming to basic social
rules. Even people who are unusually
good may be disliked because being so good is “different” (Parks and Stone
2010). Usually, enforcing conformity
serves to make cantankerous or poorly-educated people fall in line. Very often, however, it simply makes people
hate anyone conspicuously unlike the herd.
Individuals (including geniuses and artists) or groups (Jews in
Christian countries, black people in white countries, and so on) are
targeted. A further cost is that
members of devalued groups lose their sense of autonomy in proportion to the
level of devaluing and repression of the group (Kachanoff et al. 2019). They become less able to help themselves,
precisely when they most need to do so.
Groups cope with
foldbreakers by trying to covert them, by ostracizing them, or by learning to
live with them (Greenaway and Cruwys 2019), but all too often by killing them
(Wrangham 2018). The group may even
break up, if foldbreakers form a large faction (Aalerding et al. 2018;
Greenaway and Cruwys 2019). All groups
experience conflict, all have conflict resolution mechanisms (Beals and Siegal
1966), but when mechanisms are ineffective genocide often results. Intergroup competition makes for solidarity—in
fact it is famously the best way to develop that—but intragroup competition is
deadly to solidarity, and must be resolved for a group to function, so
available methods are sure to be used—even if fatal to minorities. Intragroup deviants can be hard to spot,
which makes them particularly frightening to the more sensitive group members
(Greenaway and Cruwys 2019).
Particularly in danger are highly salient groups that seem relatively
wealthy or successful to majorities, especially if the majorities feel themselves
stressed or downwardly mobile. Jews in
Depression Europe, Tutsi in Rwanda in the difficult 1980s and early 1990s, and
any and all educated people in Cambodia in the 1970s serve as clear examples.
The level of sensitivity to intragroup variation varies
enormously from person to person, society to society, and culture to culture,
something little studied.
Anthropologists have documented intolerance to deviance and consequent
occasional breakup of communities among the Pueblo tribes of the southwestern
United States, among small southeast European villages, and among Middle
Eastern village societies, among others, while high levels of tolerance are
documented for some—not all—urban trading and commercial communities. More confusing still is a pattern, notable
among some religious communities, for extreme tolerance of many kinds of
behavior but extremely rigid observance of defining traditions of the
group. Intragroup deviance is a matter
that needs more theoretical attention. All religions attack the major evils,
but people do evil and then claim their religions made them do it. There are always excuses. Morality is never enough. But, with laws, people can create peaceful communities.
Evil is not necessary. It can be
reduced to low levels.
Critically
important is awareness that there is a
continuum from good to evil, and specifically from actual enmity to utterly
unprovoked genocide: from treating people with antagonism, as enemies, because
they actually are so, to treating them as enemies because they might really be
a threat, to treating people as enemies because they seem different and
numerous enough to seem a threat to fearful leaders, to treating any different
group as a threat simply because its difference is obtrusive or because it is in
the way of settlement or “development.” This
tends to correspond very closely with the continuum from courageous fighting
against attacking force to increasingly cowardly displacement of aggression to
ever weaker targets.
People
may believe that a currently weak group is secretly powerful, or might become
so, and could be a threat. Preemptive
strikes then occur. The Jews were a
small, innocent, relatively defenseless minority. Hitler directed against them all the anger
stirred up in Germany by the loss of WWI and the Depression, and then revived
and greatly extended the old image of the Jews as all-powerful and
all-destroying.
A
more local example is intimate partner violence. This almost always involves a man, usually the
physically stronger of the pair, beating a woman because he feels that he is
somehow losing control of her (B. Anderson et al. 2004). Very often, he feels generic anger against
the world, or against stronger people in his life, and takes it out on the most
vulnerable available person: wife, child, older parent. Domestic violence is extremely close to
genocide—it might even be called the individual-level equivalent (Anderson and
Anderson 2012, 2017).
Roy
Baumeister, in his book Evil (1997),
documents at length the unexceptional nature of people who do evil things. He also documents the degree to which they
self-justify: they think they are doing the right thing, or the reasonable
thing, or the expedient thing. They
rationalize to avoid guilt, and they use carefully disinfected language. Most commonly of all, they think or say that
they are only doing what everyone does.
In genocides and slave camps, they are right; everyone in their
situation is indeed doing it.
Baumeister
demolishes the old idea that evil people are those with low self-esteem; it
appears that the worst problem in that area is with people who have “high but unstable self-esteem” (Baumeister
1997:149; his emphasis). They are often
bullies, because they think highly of themselves but are insecure enough to be
wounded by challenges. People need some
degree of self-esteem and self-regard, so they concentrate on their strong
points and minimize others’ lives and endowments.
He
also debunks the idea that evil people dehumanize their victims. They most often see their victims as fully
human—just not deserving of normal consideration. In recognition of this, Castano (2012)
suggests the term “infrahumanization.”
Baumeister runs through the standard explanations for violence (“greed,
lust, ambition…” on p. 99—the classic land, loot, women, and power—as well as
sadism and psychopathy), only to show how inadequate they are; crime rarely
pays much, lust turned evil does not feel particularly good, and ambition
served by evil rarely ends well. Greed
to the point of ripping others off, or crushing them, is not usually profitable
in the long run. It is normally done
when society forces people into evil ways of making a living, such as raiding
in Viking days or slaving in the 18th century. He sees “egotism and revenge” as more
important (Baumeister 1997:128-168).
People committing evil are often showing off their ability to maintain
their power. “Threatened egotism”
(Baumeister 1997:377; Baumeister et al. 1996) is the deadliest of the factors
he lists.
This,
however, results from two things: basic predisposing factors of personality
(threatened egotism, sadism, psychopathy) and immediate triggering factors
(greed, idealism). Moreover, “greed” is
not desire for material goods; it is willingness to get material goods at the expense of other people, harming them
in the process. The same goes for
social position, social acceptance, and even desire for power and control. They are not bad in themselves, because they
can be, and often are, used for good.
They become evil and cause harm when they are won at the expense of others.
Those
triggers do not cause evil in people who are not in a state of hatred,
bullying, or overcontrolling others. In
people who have fed the good wolf, desire for material goods is satisfied by
working with others for the common good, or at least by healthy competition of
the Adam Smith variety; desire for social acceptance and approbation is
satisfied by being nice enough to be genuinely liked; desire for power and
control is satisfied by being a good leader and administrator. We all know people who are not particularly
nice or pleasant people, but who make good administrators anyway, simply
because it is the reasonable thing to do.
People are notoriously sociable, and do not need Immanuel Kant to
explain that good social strokes are, in the end, more rewarding for most
people than inordinate wealth or power.
We are left no closer to an explanation of why ordinary people without
the basic personality factors of a psychopath become genocidal or become
slavers.
Baumeister
also points out that much evil is done in the name of good—of idealism. He is, like Ames and Fiske (2015), far too
quick to believe that murderous “good-doers” (from the Inquisition to the Khmer
Rouge) believe what they say. My rather
wide experience of those who talk good but do evil is that they are usually,
and consciously, hypocrites. At best,
their willingness to do real harm in the name of imaginary good is hardly a
recommendation for their morals.
Idealism that involves little beyond torturing people to death hardly
deserves the name of idealism. It is not
an explanation for evil; it simply raises the question of why people sometimes
think that torturing is idealistic, or that idealism can reduce to murder.
On
the other hand, idealism that necessarily costs lives but really is for the
greater good, like the fight against fascism in WWII, can be genuine. Similarly, defensive war against invaders is
often a good thing. Of course, idealism can get corrupted fast, as
in the French and Russian revolutions. The boundary between good and evil is the point
at which a reasonable person, independently judging the situation, would judge
that there is clearly gratuitous harm occurring. Rationality is hard to achieve in this
world, but necessary in this case.
(Influence by Immanuel Kant, esp. 2002, and John Rawls, 1971 and 2001,
is obvious here; I am following them on “rationality” in this context, thus
avoiding the need to explain it.)
Acting
reasonably good seems the default option for most people most of the time. It is even difficult to make people into
killers. Not only the Nazis, but also
armed forces everywhere, have always had trouble accomplishing this (Baumeister
1997:205-212).
However,
even the most trivial differences in feeding eventually allow the bad wolf to
take over from the good one. The
strongest desire of humans is social belonging; therefore, people feel strong
needs to conform to social norms and to whatever social currents are flowing
(see e.g. the studies of Kipling Williams [2007, 2011] on ostracism). The currents are not always good ones.
Albert
Bandura’s book Moral Disengagement (2016)
points out that evil is often done for alleged moral reasons (as in religious
persecutions), or for openly immoral ones (as when a sadist psychopath kills),
but most evil involves some degree of moral disengagement: minimizing,
excusing, or justifying what is done.
Bandura covers the individual agency involved in this, and also the way
society magnifies that by marshaling euphemisms, blaming others, playing the
“you do it too” card, minimizing damage, dehumanizing or partially dehumanizing
victims, personally disengaging and becoming callous or escapist, causal
displacement, attribution of blame to the victims or to the wider society, and
above all justifying one’s behavior by claiming a higher morality. Bandura covers recent newsworthy events: gun
violence and gun culture, terrorism, banking crimes, pollution and
environmental damage, capital punishment, and others. He thus spares us (most of the time) the
citing of Hitler that tends to let moderns off the hook.
Moral
disengagement, victim-blaming, and self-justification are indeed typical of
almost all human activities that do harm and of almost all humans that harm
others. The problem with Bandura’s book
is that he lumps evil morality (fascist ideology, Communist extremism) with
disengagement, which is surely wrong.
Still, Bandura has done an extremely important task in covering with
great thoroughness the ancillary mental gymnastics that allow people to harm
and kill without much guilt. Moral
disengagement leads to bureaupathy.
Alan
Fiske and Taj Rai (2014) have argued that almost all violence is moral: it is
justified by the moral teachings of the society in question. They point out that violent behavior such as
blood revenge, horrific initiation rites, war, raiding, human sacrifice, brutal
discipline, and physical punishment have all been considered not only moral but
sacred duty in literally thousands of societies around the world. Steven Pinker (2011) reminds us that revenge
killings, duels, killing of one’s own disobedient children, rape and killing of
slaves, and many other forms of mayhem were not only accepted but approved in
western society—including the United States—well into the 19th
century. Disapproving of such behavior is
very recent. Antiwar sentiments are also
recent. Taking over land by
exterminating its occupants was universal, and broadly accepted, until the
mid-19th century.
Fiske
and Rai see societies as displaying relational models. These come in four kinds, which can all be
combined in one society:” communal sharing: unity… authority ranking:
hierarchy…equality matching: equality [Rawlsian fairness]… and market pricing:
proportionality” (Fiske and Rai 2014:18-21).
There are six “constitutive phases” of moral violence: “creation [of
relationships]… conduct, enhancement, modulation, and transformation [again of
relationships]….protection; redress and rectification…termination…mourning”
(sacrifices, self-mutilation, and the like as mourning rituals) (Fiske and Rai
2014:23-24). Violence follows the
models: a result of group solidarity (usually against other groups) in
unity-driven societies; keeping people in their place in hierarchic ones;
maintaining equity in egalitarian societies; and “an eye for an eye, a tooth
for a tooth” in market-driven ones.
Complex societies can be expected to have all four types of relational
models operating inside people’s heads and in the cultural spaces, and thus to
have violence for all those reasons and more.
Genocide,
as we have seen, is moralized as necessary to eliminate the loathesome and
hated groups within society. Aggressive
war is moralized by a felt need for land and loot—Hitler’s lebensraum, American settlers’ manifest destiny. Murder is moralized as honor killing, or
revenge, or any of many dozen other motives.
Brutal punishment is moralized as necessary to keep people in line and
maintain proper behavior.
Fiske
and Rai deal largely with cultural groups and cultural norms. Unusual events like genocide are not quite in
the picture, though, for example, Europe’s massacres of Jews go back many
centuries. Exceptional murder and
violence for gain or from psychopathy or sadism are explicitly exempted from
their theory, being immoral even to the perpetrators.
The
problems with this work are numerous.
First, and most obvious, there is no explanation of where such morals
come from, beyond the idea (almost universally agreed) that violence is
necessary to maintain any social order at all.
We are left wondering why honor killings, cruel initiation rites, rape,
incest, and the like are found in some places and not others. (As for the rites: John and Beatrice Whiting showed decades ago
that they are found in societies where all children, including boys, are raised
almost exclusively by women, and must transition to men’s roles at
puberty. They occur in almost all such
societies and in few, if any, others.
See Whiting and Child 1953.)
Second,
all societies, and especially all those more complex than a hunting-gathering
band, have multiple moral alternatives.
One does not have to be a violent barroom brawler in the modern United
States, even in the working-class white south (cf. Nisbett and Cohen 1996 on
honor and violence in that milieu). Very
few Middle Eastern Muslims become terrorists or suicide bombers, despite
western stereotypy. Intimate partner
violence is normal in some societies—19% of world societies, according to Fiske
and Rai (2014:160), a strangely precise figure—but is uncommon and a “marked
case” in most.
Third,
Fiske and Rai do not distinguish between genuine cultural rules, individual
moral poses, and outrageously lame excuses.
It is certainly a cultural rule almost everywhere to kill attackers who
are trying to kill you and your family.
It is a cultural rule in all civilizations that if you are a soldier you
must kill enemies when ordered. It is a
rule in all medically competent societies that surgeons can and should commit
“violence” to save their patients (as noted by Plato and Aristotle). It is an individual choice, not a rule, to
beat your wife and children, murder your rival, or commit suicide. Doing such things is sometimes done for
deeply held moral reasons (murdering your wife’s lover in many societies) but
is usually done for reasons that do not play well in courts of law.
Political
violence often is clearly due to hatred, however cloaked in rhetoric. Much becomes clear when one listens to playground
bullies (the following lines come from my own childhood): “He was littler than me, so I beat him
up.” “I’m torturing this squirrel to
death because it’s a varmint, it ain’t good for nothin’.” “I hit my little sister to make her shut
up.” Fiske and Rai quote a number of
young peoples’ justifications for killing that are no more persuasive, but
sounded moral in some sense. The
grown-up forms of such excuses, “all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men”
as G. K. Chesterton put it (in the poem “O God of Earth and Altar”), are no
less lame for being suave and phrased in proper political language.
My
personal experience with violence—and I have known murderers, pirates,
criminals, and other assorted perpetrators—is that almost all violence except obvious
self-defense or defense of one’s country and loved ones is justified by excuses,
and most of them are as lame as the schoolyard bullies’ offerings. Reading the genocide literature is
particularly revealing. The actual sins
of the Jews, Tutsi, Hutu, urban Cambodians, and so on were trivial or
nonexistent. The hatred was whipped up
deliberately for the basest reasons. The
high moral justifications were blatant lies.
How many followers believed them remains unclear. People usually say after a genocide is over
that they conformed out of fear. They
are usually unwilling to admit any further belief in the propaganda, though a
surprising number—including men of the calibre of Martin Heidegger and Ezra
Pound—stayed faithful to fascism all their lives, and there are similar loyal
Maoists in China today. (On the case of
Heidegger, see Pierre Bourdieu’s important work, 1991.)
We
are left with the near-universality of moral justifications for violence, but
with a range from genuine, deeply held moral belief through serious but
not-very-moral personal grievance down to the skimpiest of fig leaves covering
crude hatred, rage, and greed. Fiske and
Rai have done a major service in focusing on these justifications and on the
social poses that evoke them. The claim
that such moral arguments actually motivate violence must be evaluated case by
case.
The
roots of evil have a genetic component.
Psychopathy, sociopathy, and aggressiveness seem to run in families. The fight-flight-freeze response is universal
among higher life forms. In humans,
however, most evil is learned, as the enormous person-to-person, time-to-time,
and group-to-group variation shows. (Most
of what follows is derived from or paralleled in Beck 1999 and Ellis e.g. 1962,
with specifics about evil from Baron-Cohen 2011, Bartlett 2005, Baumeister
1997, Tomasello 2019, and other previously noted sources, tempered by my
experience as a parent. See also
Sapolsky 2017:222 for coverage of this material.) Most bad behavior is done in conformity with
one’s immediate social group. Most
humans start out neutral: tending to wind up about half good and half bad, but
actually winding up according to how they were trained. This, of course, is the
real message of our two-wolves story.
There
is a clear genetic drive in infants to explore, engage, learn, socialize,
communicate, and even create. Babies are
surprisingly interactive, and mostly in a positive way, trusting and smiling. They cry a lot when they are uncomfortable,
and can fear strangers, but they are basically a rather positive set of
humans. Allowing them to explore and
interact in a secure, supportive environment is the key to feeding the good
wolf pup.
“Learning”
may be too narrow a word for environmental influences. Trauma even generations ago can affect the
brain, via epigenetics. Trauma in the
womb and during birth can more directly injure brain tissue. One common result of such trauma is reduction
in control over violent emotions and actions.
It does not occur in all cases, but it is not rare. The exact location of the trauma matters, but
trauma is usually widespread enough to affect at least some relevant brain
centers. Fear is focused in the
amygdala, aggression more widely in the limbic system, but interpretation of
stimuli as frightening and reaction to fear by rational or irrational means are
distributed over the brain, typically following neural pathways from the
amygdala and other basal structures to the frontal lobes and the motor
centers. Eventually, all the brain is
involved. Any trauma can impact the
fear-aggression pathways somewhere. (See,
again, Beck 1999; Bandura 1982.)
However,
humans are tough. They can adapt to
terrible conditions, at least if they have support. Werner and Smith (1982, 2001) studied children
growing up resilient or otherwise. They
found that about ¾ of children raised in poverty and rough surroundings in
rural Kaua’i in the mid-20th century did perfectly well. These were the ones who had strong, reliable
families. Half the rest were redeemed by
institutions—good schools, the military, and the like. The final fourth were products of broken
homes, and usually of abuse and neglect.
Abuse teaches children to abuse, and neglect teaches them to
neglect. Those children lived rough
lives.
Resilience
comes at a cost. Further studies have confirmed Werner and Smith’s findings
about effective prevention, but have found that such resilience is accompanied
by emotional fragility, physical stresses of all sorts including cardiovascular
problems and metabolic syndromes, and sometimes a failure of resilience in key
areas. All are proportional to the
difficulty of coping with the stresses in question. Interventions are now able to help, but no
one gets away unscathed from a harsh background (Hostinar and Miller 2019; see
also Reynolds et al. 2019).
Infants have several
states, including sleep and rest; fretting and whining; temper tantrums; and
dependent loving and caring, combined with an exploratory interest in the
world. Adults break the fretting state
into whining and complaining. The
temper-tantrum state develops into fear, anger, and hate. Empowerment is always needed in education.
Infants start by feeling
generalized discomfort when scared, wet, cold, hungry, or otherwise needy. They cry for what they want. Failing in that, they can bear it or become
frustrated. Over the first two years of
life, frustration turns to anger. Good
parents teach children to bear when needs cannot immediately be met; bad
parents punish the child for whining. Young
children quite normally throw temper tantrums if they are tired, frustrated,
uncomfortable, scared, or in need of affection or a sense of control. Ignored, these taper off; punished, they turn
to lifetime anger. This turns to hate if
the child learns to hate from parents and peers. Meanwhile, better-raised children learn to
help, share, and be sociable.
Adults usually acts from
fear of losing social place, but the babyish causes—fatigue, discomfort, and
the rest—still operate. On the other
hand, children learn to reason, to think things through, to obey, to be
considerate, and to conform (for good or ill) at the same time they learn to
throw temper tantrums (Tomasello 2019). Security, especially security within a
supportive circle of family, is the child’s greatest social need. Children denied acceptance or other social
validation lose security and become fearful, often acting out fear through
anger.
A
human child with poor parenting may overcompensate, using learned but
ineffective coping mechanisms to deal with weakness and fear, because of
failure to learn other (and more appropriate) coping mechanisms. Since humans are supremely social animals,
the child learns to fear isolation, abandonment, hate, scorn. Physical fears become less important; in
fact, they are easily handled by a child or adult who feels that her social
group “has her back.”
Abusive
childrearing produces adults who make up for felt deficiencies by using what
they do have to bully others. The unintelligent
but physically strong schoolyard bullies beat up “smart kids” as a way of using
what they have—strength to deal with ego threats caused by what they lacked. The converse is the intellectual arrogance of
many a physically less-than-perfect academic. Weak fear due to failure to learn good coping
mechanisms leads to abject conformity, especially conformity to ego-reinforcing
notions like the superiority of “my” group to “yours.” White supremacists are often those who fear
or know that they have nothing else to feel supreme about. Children, especially if female, may be
exposed to sexual harassment, which is a form of bullying. (It is not
a form of romance or normal sexuality.
Men do it to dominate, control, and demonstrate power, not to be
affectionate.)
In
short, people begin as scared babies, who then, to varying degrees and in
varying areas of their lives, grow up. Most of us partially succeed and partially
fail, and that is a dangerous combination.
We are fearful and defensive because of the remaining weakness and
failure. We use our strengths to
defend—often to overdefend, and often to deflect our hostility downward, to
those weaker than we are. Caring for others is innate, but must be
developed, and ways to be caring and considerate must be taught (see esp. Tomasello 2019). All
cultures have rules about this, and all cultures have alternatives, including
“nice” ones for everyday and less nice ones for dealing with actual threats and
enemies. The capacity to harm is also innate, and can be developed; harsh,
unpredictable, gratuitously cruel environments bring it out. Children as adults pay it forward: they
often treat others the way they were treated as children. This tends to be a default option.
Learning when to use the appropriate
coping mechanism is thus crucial.Anything that empowers the growing child
to take care of her own problems, by teaching proper and effective responses,
feeds the good wolf. This means that the
child must be taught what to do—preferably as the situation unfolds; backed up
for doing it; and backed up further in case the response is inadequate.
If
the parent, peer, teacher, or elder then criticizes the child and takes over,
“fixing” the situation that the child has “ruined,” the bad wolf gets a huge
meal. Few things feed the bad wolf better than deliberately
weakening a child by telling her she can’t cope. The resulting frustration and weakening turn
into aggression eventually. Widespread
rejection follows, leading to still more anger.
Being
raised by one highly critical parent and another parent who retreats and
becomes passive is one common formula for producing a scared and defensive
child. Weakness and hypercritical
judgment very often go together, either in the same parent or in a couple; perhaps
hypercritical people attract weak spouses.
These couples can raise children who are hypersensitive and defensive,
feeling that even the tiniest slight is a total attack on their personhood. By contrast, if both parents are punitive but
reasonably strong as persons, the child usually turns out well enough, but can
become a bully; if both mild and gentle, the child becomes well-adjusted but
often frail in the face of the world’s harshness. Firm, but accommodating and open about communicating,
seems to be the ideal parenting stance, but research is ongoing.
A critically important point made by the
psychologists is that a typical young child comes to depend especially on one specific
immature defense mechanism, which then becomes the most stubborn and
intractable problem in adulthood—the one thing most resistant to psychotherapy
and life experience, and the one hardest to bring to full consciousness and
self-awareness. The bigot’s hatred and
overreaction to threat are often the products of such deeply entrenched
immature mechanisms. Psychologists also
find that it is challenges to precisely the most relied-on defense mechanism
that bring out the greatest fear, anger, and reactive defensiveness in
people. If your favorite coping
mechanism is racism, for instance, you will be more defensive about your racism
than about other defenses. Risk factors
include a Manichaean worldview, and the idea that hierarchy is automatically
appropriate and top-down control necessary.
In short, in ordinary life, much of the problem is that the default is
always to stay with early-learned responses instead of self-improving, and with
initial support groups instead of expanding one’s field to all humanity (on the
above matters, the classic works of Ellis 1962 and Maslow 1970 remain useful).
Conversely,
nothing feeds the good wolf better than praising the child for doing what she
could, while instructing her how to do even better next time. Wolves
feed on empowerment: empowering and supporting the child feeds the good wolf,
empowering other people at the expense of the child feeds the bad wolf. Empowerment means, among other things,
teaching coping strategies that work (Cattaneo and Chapman 2012). To work, they must be reasonable, which
random violence and other evil behaviors are not. (Adults can be coldly and rationally evil,
but that usually comes later.)
Self-confidence and self-control, in particular, are the basic
necessities to manage the weakness, insecurity, and anger that we have seen to
be basic in hyperdefensive and scapegoating reactions.
Somewhere
in between is providing support without teaching proactive coping
strategies. A child who knows her
parents have her back is in good shape.
But for coping methods she must rely on whatever methods are available. She must copy or improvise. These are rather random and unsatisfying
methods, especially since copying without real instruction is not often
successful. The essential pieces of the
strategy can easily be missed, or underemphasized.
Growing up with adult authority makes people tend
to defer, adulate, and obey upwards in the age and status hierarchy. This tends to cause them to displace hate
downward, scapegoating the younger and weaker.
Abusive, erratic, cruel raising leads to adulating strongmen; usual
parent-dominant tradional upbringing leads to conservatives. Good parenting leads to children who develop
into adults who can treat others as equals, and who are self-respecting and
self-reliant.
Supportive
and considerate parenting vs unsupportive and harsh parenting can be set up as
a 2 x 2 table. Supportive and
considerate is ideal. Supportive and
harsh was the traditional European and frontier American way; it worked, in its
way, for the time. Unsupportive and
undirecting yet gentle is more or less the classic “spoiling.” Unsupportive and harsh is the abusive
parenting that produces brutes.
The normal order of
learning a new skill is a very good one: from most simple and direct to most
abstract. Children learn to walk, talk,
play musical instruments, and do homework by gradual steps, from simple and
direct to abstract and complicated. This
is the way to learn civil behavior: from politeness formulas to basic
considerateness and sharing, then to basic principles. The simplest virtues are carefulness,
civility, mutual aid, sociability, considerateness, and generosity. Then they can move on to more abstract
virtues. Teenage angst and misbehavior can be cured or alleviated by giving
rights in proportion to responsibilities. In teaching, exposure to real (and realistically
taught) contexts (laboratories, field, great art) works; books and schoolrooms
are slightly above neutral. The result
is that raising a child to be caring and sociable, but also to bear stoically
the discomforts of life, feeds into a sense of justice, fairness, compassion,
and social decency. The family creates
the basic psychodynamics. The peer group
provides the ways to express those—whether through bullying, random violence,
and cruelty or through mutual help, support, and kindness (J. R. Harris 1998).
Finally,
in a situation where control is lost, or where evil people are in control,
everyone seems to regress not only into “following orders,” but into the
combination of cowardice and hostility that drives brutality in the first place. Post-traumatic stress disorder is very common
among former soldiers, and more so among victims of genocide, and probably
perpetrators also. Post-traumatic stress
is a risk factor for violence, but most PTSD sufferers do not become
violent.
Working back from a given
violent act, we see it is grounded in anger, hatred, or callous
doing-the-job. The wellsprings are, most
often, desires for material gain, or power and control, or social acceptance
and respect, or desire to protect these, or—perhaps above all-desire to protect
one’s group and self. Sheer desire to
kill can be a factor, in psychopaths and similar damaged persons. Social pressures are extremely important and
often determinant. Cultural biases and
cultural models of coping are also often determinant. Factors exacerbating the situation can
include anything from economic hard times to unsettled and chaotic social
periods to ordinary irritants like hot days, smog, and confinement; these are
outside our scope here. Lest this all
sound dauntingly complex, note that most evil can be explained by desire for
goods, control, and respect, combined with unnecessarily harmful and hateful
coping mechanisms taught by society or incorporated in cultural models. The ramifications and manifestations of these
are complex, but the basic framework is not inordinately so.
One
social and cultural force is pressure on young men to prove themselves by acts
of social daring or self-sacrifice. In
warlike or violent societies, and sometimes even in peaceful ones, young men
are under extreme pressure to be soldiers, fighters, or just “bad dudes.” Young men are high in aggression and
testosterone with or without cultural pressure, but they are peaceful enough in
peaceful societies; their activity is used in work, or sports, or community
service, or studying. But in warrior
societies it becomes “toxic masculinity.”
Status
emulation guarantees that the upper classes, elders, and superiors have more
effect on this than the rest of us do. “The
people strive to imitate all the actions and mannerisms of their prince. It is thus very true that no one harms the
state more than those who harm by example…. The bad habits of rulers are
harmful not only to themselves but to everyone.” Petrarch (as quoted by Sarah
Kyle, 2017:157.)
People
clearly have a strong innate tendency to become hateful, cruel, and violent. It is not a mere ability that society trains
into us. The generalized cognitive
abilities to make computers, drive cars, and trap fish in weirs are all innate,
in that any trained human of reasonable intelligence can do them; but humans do
not have any innate tendencies to carry those specific tasks. They do not make computers unless taught,
within a society with a long history of technological development. Evil is different. Every known cultural and social group in the
history of the world has had its cruel, brutal, murderous individuals, and the
horrible record of wars and genocides proves that almost every human will act
with unspeakable cruelty under social pressure.
As long as humans are social animals with strong fight-flight-freeze
responses, the chain from defense to hostility to evil is sure to be
reinvented, and to become popular wherever displaced aggression is socially tolerated. As long as human childrearing is imperfect,
leading to weak but resentful children and adults, evil leaders will take
advantage of that weakness and resentment. Evil
is not inevitable, and can be prevented, but it takes over when given even a
small chance, due to the human fight responses to threat and stress. Almost any person will become evil if
pressured enough, but almost any person can be kept from evil if pressured in
that direction. Culture usually provides
both good and bad models and teachings.
All societies have three
processes always operating: negative feedback loops maintaining the situation
without change; cycles; and positive feedback loops producing slow progress or
decline over long periods of time.
Progress has generally dominated throughout history, despite long
declines like that of the Roman Empire.
Human groups in ancient times were generally patriarchal lineages with
in-marrying women. These developed into
the vast fictive-ancestor lineages of nomad and mobile people from the Mongols
to the Scots. Much later, sedentary
agriculture led to more association based on place, eventually leading to the
nation-state. It also led to many
societies becoming matrilineal, with much more power to women, and often with
the men doing the marrying-in.
Over the last 50,000
years, there has been progress in science, arts, lifespan, food production, and
other areas. Complex large societies
arose; they needed markets and government as well as norms—markets and
political structures supplement norms in organizing at huge scales (here and
below, see e.g. Christian 2004; McNeill and McNeill 2003; Morris 2010; Turchin
2006, 2016).
Unfortunately, there has
also been advance in the technology and practice of war, cruelty, and
repression. War is somewhat less common
than it was in early civilizations (Pinker 2011), but bloodier and more
technologically sophisticated. Many technological
advances were developed for war, and only later applied to civilian use. More effort and money have gone into war than
into almost any other sector of social action.
Violent death rates were always high (Wrangham 2018:238), ranging from
less than 1 per thousand in peaceful modern societies to as many as 200 or more
in some highly stressed tribes. Wars and
murders seem to have become less frequent (Pinker 2011; Wrangham 2018), but
wars are far vaster in scope, and genocide has appeared as a major cause of
death. Evil leaders can appeal to group
hate in a way not easily managed (though not unknown) in ancient
societies.
Also increasing is the
extent and inequality of hierarchic social relations. For countless millennia, people lived in
small bands with little differentiation except by age and gender (Boehm 1999). With the rise of complex societies came the
rise of more and more unequal social relations, climaxing in the kings and
emperors of old and the heads of state and CEOs of today. This causes rapidly increasing competition
for scarce positions of power, and more and more defensiveness on the part of
those who gain such positions.
In agrarian societies,
resentment and antagonism is directed against bandits and barbarians, as well
as coups and religious deviants. Early
trade and commerce led to mercantilism and then freedom and democracy as the
alternative, so the hopeful revolutions.
Early but full industrialization produced socialism and communism. Later industrialization produced fascism,
because elites were entrenched and powerful and good at oppressing and at
divide-and-rule. Resource squeezes made
everyone worse off and less hopeful, thus easily turned to hate.
It thus becomes clear
that hatred is a natural human response, but is socially engaged, manipulated,
and deployed by the powerful to advance their own interests. The most obvious case is war for gain—predatory
invasion of the weak by the strong. From
the Assyrians to the European settlers of the Americas, and from the
“barbarians” sacking Rome to the wars over oil in Africa in the 1980s and
1990s, loot has been the driver of war.
However, it is not the only one.
Family politics, religious hatred, and even minor slights can push a
tense situation into outright war. In
the modern world, where genocide and civil war are commoner than international
war, it is most often the giant primary-production interests that mobilize hate
and decide who shall be the victims.
They usually go after local weaker minorities, but anyone can be fair
game. On the other hand, class hate,
dimly related to Marxism, may be the driver, as in Venezuela today. The
point is that hate does not exist in a vacuum.
It is deliberately manipulated and targeted by the powerful.
Warfare in premodern
times took place between rival claimants to the throne (often different
branches of the royal lineage), between rival states and empires, between rival
ethnic groups, and between religious factions.
In Europe, for instance, we see a progression from warring tribes to
city-states to the Roman Empire with its frontier generals and barbarians. After the fall of Rome, rival nobles
assembled loyal knights and dragooned peasants into being arrow fodder. Then the wars of religion dominated until the
Treaty of Westphalia substituted nation-states for religious factions, and war
became a battle of nations rather than of faiths. Meanwhile, racism and ethnic hatred became
dominant. The wars of empires and
nations at least call forth courage and self-sacrifice; ethnic, religious, and
class hatred seem largely mean spite.
Playing over this goes
the more general tendency of humans to be too tightly social, leading to group
hate, or too individual, leading to selfish greed and corruption—Kant’s
principles of aggregation and differentiation applying to public morality. We can see that the racism and religious
bigotry paralyzing America today are merely the latest in an endless sequence
of powerful, evil people taking or maintaining power, control, and wealth by
marshaling their troops through antagonism and hate.
Religious
hate grew out of identification of religion with rival powers, and then crushing
the conquered people, and thus hating and repressing their religion. Conquered Persian dualists, Jews, and then
Christians were harassed in Roman Empire times.
After Constantine, Christians crushed non-Christians and
“heretics.” Racism as a visible, significant
force (beyond simple ethnic prejudice) began by the late Roman Empire, but was
not serious until the 16th Century, with the conquest of the
Americas and much of Africa. The
expansion of the slave trade drove racism to a high point in and after the 18th
century.
Haves
vs have-nots is a permanent opposition in society, as Marx pointed out, but
real classes arose only with fully developed ancient civilizations, and did not
get serious till highly developed empires appeared. In China, hate was mobilized along kinship
(especially within imperial families), political sectors, and to a lesser
extent region and ethnicity. Improvement
in rationalizing bureaucracy, terror, and surveillance help explain the
increase in longevity of Chinese dynasties, notably the success of Ming and
Qing against all odds. It is
increasingly difficult to expect revolution to succeed. Eventually, the elites will turn on each
other. If they are evil leaders, since
they are amoral and only hate and greed hold them together; they betray each
other the minute they can. This happened
repeatedly in historic times (Ibn Khaldun 1958).
Traditional
societies rarely committed genocide in the modern sense. Tyrants killed political rivals and their
families. Wars were total, with
civilians not excepted. But wiping out
whole groups of non-offensive subjects of one’s own government was not common, except in cases of religious
crusades against “heretics.” Typically,
a dynastic cycle ended when the rulers had grown so weak and corrupt that no
one could put up with them any longer, at which point a general or invader or
popular leader would mobilize popular discontent and bring down the
regime. This happened over and over in
Europe, west Asia, China, and elsewhere, and is well understood (Anderson 2019;
Ibn Khaldun 1958).
Actual
genocides were rarer, and generally confined to religion. They tended to occur when forces of modernity
directly challenged the landlords and rentiers of the old order. Not only did a
new economy threaten them; new ideologies and sciences challenged their whole
self-justifying worldview. Genocide,
based on hate and fear, is thus quite different from (even though it may grade
into) normal warfare and dynastic cycling.
Those latter phenomena are based on rivalry, especially for power, also
for land and loot. They always include
hate of the enemy, but not usually hate of one’s own weaker groups. Indeed,
they may unite the whole polity against the common foe.
Large-scale
killers were often highly selective about their massacres. The Mongols and other Central Asian
conquerors were famously indifferent to religion, and even ethnicity (at least
outside their own); they were equal-opportunity massacrists. The Americans of the 19th century
committed genocide against Native Americans and repressed African-Americans,
but were fiercely independent otherwise; the Cossacks of old Russia were similar,
hating minorities while triumphing in indepencence. Today, independence is neither so desired nor
so possible. Voters motivated by hatred
vote for strongmen, and put themselves under a yoke of tyranny, from the
Philippines and India to the United States and Brazil. This deadly mix has appeared before in times
of rapid change.
The late Roman Empire saw
violent repression, first of and then by Christians. Later, Europe, challenged
by aggressive spread of trade, commerce, and new scientific knowledge from the
Islamic world, resorted to the Crusades and persecution of heretics in the 12th
and 13th centuries. Spain’s
Reconquista descended into genocide after the final conquest of the Muslims in
1492. Then Europe’s own progress and
religious ferment challenged old regimes in the 16th and 17th
centuries, leading to vast religious wars that involved genocidal murder of
opposing religious communities (including the Irish Catholics in Ireland). In the 19th century, following the
Industrial Revolution and its political revolutions, the forces of modernity
rolled into eastern Europe, where the result was anti-Jewish pogroms and Tsar
Nicholas II’s persecution of serfs and minorities, and into China, where
rebellions ensued and the Qing Dynasty met these with reactionary measures. In the early 20th century, new
ideas, arts, and sciences challenged primary production, leading—among other
things—to fascism.
These periods elevated
tyrants such as Philip the Fair, Ferdinand and Isabela,Oliver Cromwell, and
Empress Cixi. They represented landlords
and other rentier elites against the forces of change. As in later centuries, such negative leaders
were often marginal persons: individuals coming from remote regions, and often
subjected to poverty and hardship when young.
Genghis Khan, Zhu Yuanzhang (the leader who drove the Mongols from
China), and several Roman emperors fit this pattern.
Following Adam Smith
(1910/1776) and other political economists, and oversimplifying them somewhat
for convenience, we find that improvements on this warlike pattern developed in
expanding economies, especially those dominated by the trade, commerce, and
human resources sector of the economy.
That sector must invest in people to survive; it depends on skilled
workers and innovation. Economies
dominated by rentier primary production—plantation agriculture, mining, fossil
fuels, and the like—are regressive, and often repressive. Agrarian societies from the Inca to Sumer to
China wound up the same: city, king, court, bureaucracy, vast mass of farmers
from rich to landless.
Between enlightened
traders and reactionary plantation owners are the majority of people—the
ordinary workers and businesspersons who have to make a living today. They are thus more concerned with whether the
immediate economy is going up or down than with vast forces of Progress or
Return to the Old Days. Especially if
they are in business, they default conservative, but can shift rapidly and
easily rightward or leftward.
Class is also, famously,
a relevant factor; it has diminished from great importance in the mid-20th
century in American voting to near irrelevance now, with almost equal shares of
rich, middling, and poor voting Democrat or Republican. This has tracked the rise of social issues
such as racism and medical care at the expense of concern for immediate
economic returns.
In many traditional
societies, “honor” and distinction came from killing and looting, not from
honest work or trade. Not only warlike
but even quite peaceful agrarian societies shared this attitude. Fighting was honorable, compromising and
peacemaking dishonorable.
One can predict with
considerable accuracy the amount of evil in society by assessing the amount of
rentier or primary-production-firm dominance of the political economy and the
level of warlikeness of the culture. Within
equally agrarian societies, Afghanistan, rampant with landlordism and steeped
in a heritage of violence already noted by Alexander the Great, compares with
more peaceable Bhutan. The other
dimension—from agrarian to late-industrial—is seen in the conversion of
formerly warlike societies to currently peaceful ones. The Vikings, ruled by landholding and
slaveholding earls, contrast with their peaceable descendants in modern
Scandinavia’s world of trade, commerce, and education.
The ancient Greeks saw a
cycle: democracy gave way to autocracy (monarchy or oligarchy), which gave way
to tyranny, which collapsed and left the way open for democracy. This proved less than predictive, but cycles
from relatively open to relatively totalitarian societies and back do appear in
many historical records (Ibn Khaldun 1958).
Really new good ideas
spread from rich cores of trade and communication-based systems. Military technology seems to spread fastest
of all innovations. Next come
innovations in communication; people want to be in touch. Then comes ordinary production. Last comes the spread of morality. Then in the twentieth century, primary
production, especially fossil fuel production, took over, and now rules most of
the world.
Critical
to progress were several steps, mostly taken in Europe or China. One was rapid discovery science, foreseen by
the ancient Greeks, then developing between 1100 and 1600 in Europe. Rationalized property rights and freer
markets followed, for better or worse, in the 17th century. The Enlightenment then emphasized law and
recourse, with ideals of free speech, press, religion, assembly, and
conscience. (It is not mere coincidence
that this took place at the same time as the explosion of slavery.) Equality before the law for full citizens,
and expansion of the citizen concept, came a bit later in the 18th
century. The logic led to a rapidly
growing movement to end slavery, beginning in the mid-18th century
and continuing till slavery was legally ended, though not ended de facto, in
the late 19th.
The Enlightenment
succeeded not just because of the rise of trade, commerce, and science. Another key was the development of world
trade too fast for any nation-state to control it. Opportunity exploded, and traders managed it
themselves, through international networks.
They had to deal, without government supervision, with people of very
different cultures, faiths, and technologies.
This was one breeding ground of concepts of liberty, self-governance,
tolerance, freedom of conscience, and personal responsibility. One can compare the rapid rise of
enlightenment in multinational Europe with its relative failure in East Asia
during the centuries when the Qing Dynasty imposed its crushing weight on the
East Asian world-system.
The Enlightenment did not
invent the rule of law or welfare-oriented governments; Europe and China
already had those. What the
Enlightenment brought were science and participatory democracy coupled with the
ideal of freedom of conscience.
Another milestone was free public education,
an idea from the early 19th century.
Through all of this, popular demand by people rising in society but left
out by the elites was the usual cause.
It was always a fight: entrenched interests always opposed good changes,
and religious elites were often the worst.
When self-interest combined with needs for fairness and equality,
progress occurred. The more normal human
tendency to weather down and adapt to the system was always used by the elites
to repress the masses. So were hatreds
of all kinds, as we have seen.
2 American
Ideas
The Founding Fathers worked with a strong
sense that we are all in this together and
that my rights stop where yours start, sometimes
phrased as “your right to swing your arm ends at my nose.” Finally, they were aware that a society and
its laws and economy exist within a moral shell, and that shell must be
embodied in the laws and indeed in the whole system. (They got this thoughtful perception from
Adam Smith’s writings on morals.) These
basic principles lie behind the Constitution.
This led to emphasizing freedom of
conscience, thus of speech, religion, ideology, assembly, and voting. It meant free enterprise, within reason. It also meant freedom from torture,
warrantless search, and other abuses of government power. It meant equality in justice, opportunity,
and law, with protection in oppression.
It meant rule of law, not of men.
It meant presumption of innocence, protection of all, and mutual
defense.
These were seen as necessary because evil so
often wins unless actively stopped. A
polity must have balances of power, equality before the law, universal voting
rights, full recourse (rights to sue, etc.) in the event of direct harm, and
the other rights the Founding Fathers thought—wrongly—that they had guaranteed
in the Constitution. It is amazing how
easily Republicans now get around those rights.
The United States failed at the beginning,
in allowing slavery and in refusing citizenship to Native Americans while
taking their land. It failed again in
the Reconstruction by not enforcing full civil rights, and by letting the
carpet-baggers cream off wealth from the south.
These ills were eventually corrected, but not the lingering racism and
power abuses that resulted. These
failures have led cynics to dismiss the entire American program, equality,
freedom, and all. This is not a helpful approach.
The Depression was much better
managed. Fairness and, eventually, civil
rights followed from bringing some degree of justice to the economy.
While the world was wide-open, when
exploration and colonization were running wild, and then as long as technology
was increasing wealth faster than population, freedom and Enlightenment values
flourished. Today, with closing
frontiers, people are rushing to make all they can. Failing that, they support and follow the
powerful, in hopes of at least holding onto something. The poor have given up hope of getting rich;
they can only hope to cut other, weaker groups down and take what little those
groups have. This is a negative-sum
game. Some cultures are much more prone
to see the world as a zero-sum or negative-sum game than are others (Róźycka-Tran
et al. 2015; Stavrova and Ehlebracht 2016).
The United States was formerly rather moderate in this regard, but
negative-sum thinking has increased. Reform in US history has been strongly
cyclic.
The course is highly consistent. A few idealists will see a problem and a
solution. If they are right, and if the
problem gets worse, more and more people will be attracted to the cause, until
a majority is on board and can prevail.
This happened with the Enlightenment values that drove the Revolution
and the US Constitution. The next major
crisis was slavery: anti-slavery was early dismissed as crackpot, but with the
progressive damage to the whole US economy by plantation agriculture with
enslaved workers, anti-slavery prevailed (through war). Next came the mounting criticism of
deforestation and wildlife loss in the late 19th century, climaxing
in Theodore Roosevelt’s environmental reforms.
The next crisis was the Depression, which led to massive economic
reforms. Then came environmental and
food production crises in the 1960s, dealt with (inadequately) by laws in the
late 1960s and early 1970s. Visionaries
are always proposing new reforms, but these are picked up by the majority only
if they are immediately practical ways of addressing real and worsening
problems. On the other hand, the
opportunity allows the visionaries to pass many measures that the majority
would probably not support otherwise.
The Bill of Rights, for instance, was added to the Constitution by
Enlightenment visionaries; the Bill probably went beyond what the majority
wanted at the time.
All the crises after independence were
caused by the reactionary behavior of the plantation and big-resource-firm
sector. Slavery at its worst led to the
Civil War; suicidal levels of environmental destruction led to massive reform
campaigns in 1890-1910 and 1955-1975; cutthroat speculative and rentier
capitalism led to the Depression and resulting New Deal.
3
Progressive Erosion of Old Society
The
steady rise of giant firms has been noted, and protested, since the 1870s, but
it continues. It has had a steadily more
distorting effect on the economy and on politics (this and what follows is
largely common knowledge, but otherwise follows Anderson 2010; Anderson and
Anderson 2012, 2017; Putnam 2000; Turchin 2016; Snyder 2018).
As
folk society and traditional elite society collapsed with the decline of local
communities and the rise of mass society (Putnam 2000), people became more and
more dependent on giant corporations to integrate their worlds. Politics became less and less public and more
corporate. A worldwide shift from
lateral and community-wide association to top-down hierarchies, separate or competing,
appeared.
The
broad contours of politics in the early 20th century made sense: the
Republicans were the party of business, ranging from family farms to local
businesses and up to large firms; the Democrats were the party of labor. This led to reasonable dialogue (though also
plenty of bullying and cruelty by bosses).
The change beginning in the 1920s, but not serious till the 1970s, was
toward a Republican party uniting racism and giant reactionary firms, and
eventually a Democratic party also becoming absorbed with identity politics more
than with economic issues. This has led
to nothing but hatred, largely Republican racism and religious bigotry, but
also some real reverse racism on the left.
Serious discussion of economic issues is increasingly contaminated or
lost in a welter of mutual accusations.
One
of the first effects of the shift from a farm-and-small-business America to an
urban one dominated by giant firms was the disappearance of folk society. The old-time world of folk, elite, and town
forced people to work hard, cooperate, and toughen up. Now, life is easy but frustrating, especially
for those who aren’t succeeding. Bereft
of the support of old-time communities and the opportunity to work with
different types of people, humans become alienated, weak, and hence
cowardly. This leads to fascism.
In
traditional agrarian society, life was short and usually ended violently. People tended to escape into religion. They also had songs and folk literature to
teach them that individuals mattered—that life and death need not be in vain. Now, few are in that position, so political
action is commoner. In small-scale
societies, religion was about spirit power, since controlling the
uncontrollable was desirable and any control of anything helped. Now, fear and overoptimism are the
problems. So, pragmatic proactive help
become the main alternative to giving up.
The
decline of that world also led to the decline of folk and traditional culture
after 1950, and then to the dominance of popular culture and passive
consumption. Arts deteriorated. Great literature made people confront
tragedy, intense emotion, and social and personal complexity; it became less
and less appreciated. The burgeoning
interest in nonwestern cultures that taught people tolerance and mutual
appreciation in the 1960s and 1970s waned, leading to increasingly dispiriting
identity politics after 2000.
Perhaps
most interesting has been the disappearance of the self-improvement
agenda. The humanistic psychology and
personal development movements of the 1960s-1970s collapsed and left little
trace, outside of improvement in counseling practices. They succumbed to a backlash by people who
relied on thinking they were tough, and often on outright bullying, to maintain
their self-image. Weak and defensive
individuals were threatened by the whole notion of self-improvement. They attacked it with a vengeance.
The
arts succumbed to dominance by giant “entertainment” corporations. They became dominated by faddism, conformity
with the widest number, enjoyment as simply watching TV and playing video games. The Depression and WWII led to a lullaby
culture, the soothing and mindless pop culture of the early 1950s. That gave way to a range of developments,
from rich and complex to trivial, but ultimately mass culture settled on
“action” movies, video games, and other superficiality. Much of ordinary life settled on the least
emotionally and cognitively involving forms: mindless music, wallpaper art,
fast food.
Political
organization peaked in the 1930s and again in the 1960s with the civil rights
and antiwar movements; solidarity, voter drives, demonstrations, teach-ins, and
other forms of resistance thinned out.
Utopian experiments such as communes had a silly side, but they at least
expressed hope; they are few and far between now. Only the Great Depression and
WWII solidified people around progress toward the good. The 60s got most people motivated, but not
enough.
This
preceded political decline. Traditional
culture had kept Enlightenment values, including the Founding Fathers’ values,
alive. As traditional cultures and
educational forms disappeared, and Hollywood filled the gap, American politics
shifted rapidly from democratic to fascist.
What
happened in politics was similar to what happened to food. Decline of food traditions and rise of
agribusiness corporations led to the rise of sugar, salt, and soybeans, with
resulting heart trouble and diabetes. The
same rise of giant corporations led to the discovery, first in the plantation
sector and then in the fossil fuel world, that political power came from a mix
of lobbying and whipping up hatred to get right-wing votes. This led to a rise of racism, religious
bigotry, intolerance, and incivility—not just in the United States, but
worldwide. Face-to-face community has
been largely replaced by virtual communities.
Among the casualties are newspapers, local helpfulness, and Robert
Putnam’s bowling leagues—Putnam’s book Bowling Alone (2000) used their
decline as a marker of the widespread decline of civic and civil culture in
America. With folk and community
cultures dead and ideas of artistic quality gone, people collapse into a
mass—Tocquevillian “subjects” as opposed to “citizens,” as Putnam puts it.
The
result is a pattern in which environmentalism, concern for fine arts, liberal
politics, and community all decline.
Real wages and returns to labor decline.
Deaths of despair—suicide, drug overdoses, and the like—increase. Conversely, even in recent years, science
progresses; medical treatment improves, but not access to it; comforts of
ordinary life continue to increase.
Sexual
mores and other Old Testament values relaxed as old-time farming and rural folk
society disappeared. This has certainly
had its good sides, but also has led to a constant renegotiation of norms, not
an easy task.
In
short, the traditional world of rural and small-town America, of Christian
churches and local folksingers, of factories and workshops, is gone or
fading. Its economic underpinnings are
dissolving, as hi-tech and smart machines replace workers and farming becomes
concentrated in a few corporate hands.
It had its wonderful side, but also a very dark side. The worst features of it—racism, religious
bigotry, class oppression, and gender biases—are still very much with us. Increasingly, older and less educated whites
take refuge in those pathologies of the older world. So do ordinary suburban older whites, who see
their privileges challenged by upwardly mobile minorities.
All
this would be manageable if the hatred were not used by the giant but
downward-bound productive interests, especially the fossil fuel
corporations. They have funded much of
the hatred and anti-science activity of the last few decades.
The
Republican party has been captured completely by these corporations, and has
become a vehicle for subsidizing big oil, big coal, big agribusiness, the
military procurement and arms industry, and their allies. It has thus become a party of white supremacy
and military right-wing Christian religious agitation. The Democrats have moved from the party of
the working class into a position as the party of relatively upwardly-mobile
groups: minorities, women, urban young people, the education and health establishments,
and to some extent the hi-tech world.
This
new party alignment gives the Republicans a perfect platform to mobilize the
weak defensiveness considered above.
Everyone, progressive or regressive, has some weak defensiveness within,
if only because we all start as babies and never quite get over it. We never take full control of our lives and
eliminate all babyish crumbling in the face of out-of-control reality. The Republicans, however, are placed to take
advantage of it, via scapegoating and repression. The Democrats only lose by it. Weak defensiveness takes the form of lashing
out at “whites” and “males,” censoring right-wing speech, and otherwise playing
into Republican hands. Democrats will
have to be the party of self-control or they will lose all.
4 Decline
from 2000, collapse from 2016
The
real key to what happened next was the rise of corporations that live by
out-of-date production processes and by deliberately harming humans and the
environiment: big oil, big coal, toxic
chemicals, munitions and “defense,” and the shady sectors of finance and
gambling. These are the home industries
of the funders and leaders of the political right. The core has been the linkage of big oil and
the munitions-arms-military procurement industries. They support each other. They naturally attract those rich from
gambling, shady finance, private prisons, the mafia, and similar interests. They naturally defend themselves. They have defined themselves into a state of
war with the American people. They
flourish only by polluting, selling guns, resisting clean power, digging up
mountains, and generally damaging the public interest.
Leaders in the United
States include the great oil barons such as the Kochs, who funded global
warming denial as well as the Tea Party, ALEC, and other Republican agendas
(see e.g. Abrams 2015; Auzanneau 2018; Cahill 2017; Folley 2019; Hope 2019; Klein
2007, 2014; Mayer 2016; Nesbit 2016; many of these sources detail the enormous
sums paid to congresspersons for special favors). Even more extreme are the Mercers, who fund
the major white supremacist and far-right hatred organizations and media (Gertz
2017; Silverstein 2017; Timmons 2018), and the Princes, including Trump’s
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. These
and their allies are the people who have most to gain from a government that
lives by war and repression. They are
also the most heavily dependent industries on federal subsidies, contracts,
sweetheart deals, loopholes, giveaways, and failure to enforce laws. They are also the most in danger from a
government that cares about people.
Big oil, in particular, would
be uneconomic without government support, because the costs of cleaning up
pollution and dealing with damages would be insupportable (see Oil Change
International 2017). The CEOs would be
in danger of prison time for their shady lobbying and deliberate release of
pollution. These industries that invest
heavily in lobbying and campaigns. Their
fears and defensiveness are thoroughly understandable. Fossil fuels receive over $649 billion in
federal subsidies every year (Ellsmoor 2019; figures from International
Monetary Fund), and plow a good deal of that back into the system via political
donations, effectively bribing legislators to provide even more subsidies. A vicious spiral is created. They create another vicious spiral by
investing much of the money in anti-science propaganda, from racism to global
warming denial, and in whipping up hatreds.
They have been able to divide the voters and eliminate the chance of
unity against the common threat that fossil fuels present. Big Oil, and especially the Koch brothers,
have spread their tentacles throughout the world. Najib Ahmed, writing in Le Monde
diplomatique, shows how “US climate deniers are working with far-right racists
to hijack Brexit for Big Oil,” which “exemplifies how this European nexus of
climate science denialism and white supremacism is being weaponized by US
fossil fuel giants with leverage over Trump’s government” (Ahmed 2019).
With
this went an explosive increase in rent-seeking, quick money games, and
financial shenanigans, leading to monumental inefficiency in the economy
(Mazzucato 2018). Corruption in
government has greatly added to this.
The situation in which everyone is out for what they can get, at the
expense of the system, is characteristic of the end phases of political cycles.
Another
casualty has been traditional conservatism.
The old union of small-government advocates, hierarchic law-and-order
defenders, patriots, and security advocates has disappeared. Most of them at least had some sense of honor
and honesty. They were also
pro-environment, an attitude totally reversed now (as extensively documented by
Turner and Isenberg 2018). The current “conservatives” favor big government
interfering continually in people’s private lives (in sex, drugs, religion,
media, and more), are indifferent to hierarchies (though loving strong-men),
and make covert deals with Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and other countries
against America’s obvious interests.
Their main concerns are using racism and religious bigotry to whip up
support for the giant primary-production firms.
As to honor and honesty, one may allow the record to speak.
The
decline of cultures and their ideals came before the political decline, and
before any economic effects. Economic
growth continues. It seems that the last
thing to be affected by a change in economic organization is the economy
itself.
All
the worst things that progressives and liberals feared over the last 50 years came
together in a perfect storm in the Trump administration: attacks on democracy,
freedom, equality before the law, the environment, science, minorities, the
press, the poor, the workers. One main
driver has been the rise of inequality—especially the rise in power and wealth
of the rich. The rich are literally
above the law; it is almost impossible to convict them of anything, given their
ability to pay lawyers and bribe politicians.
Nazism and fascism have been revived, with even more focus on Big Lies
than in Hitler’s Germany, and with even more fawning surrender of America to
the most reactionary of the giant corporations. There is no question that Trump is directly
copying Hitler; Burt Neuborne has listed eleven pages of close, highly specific
similarities (Neuborne 2019:22-33).
Trump kept Hitler’s speeches by his bed for years (Neuborne 2019:20),
and sometimes uses Hitler’s literal words. The Big Lie and other fascist
methods of rule and control are manifestations of weak fear and take advantage
of it. Since 2016 they have become the
government. Nor is the United States unique; this is a worldwide movement (Luce
2017; Snyder 2018).
The
worst of that process is that it allows truly evil people, who are often
motivated by extreme greed and hate, to get ahead. Contrary to tropes of “the 1%,” most rich
people are reasonable enough. The
problem is that the few evil, sometimes downright psychopathic, rich—the Kochs,
Mercers, Princes, Trumps, and their ilk—are highly motivated to seek power. Since they are ruthless and not restrained by
morals, they outcompete others easily, and then become more and more lawless
and thus more competitively successful. When they get power, they use it
vindictively. They do not merely
increase their wealth; they attack the rest of us. True Trump supporters channel all their fear,
frustration, resentment, anger, and spite against the less fortunate. The segment of the left that is racist and
sexist (hating whites and males) differ only in that they are secure and
privileged enough to hate up, not down. Democrats should realize that the right
wing now represents only the reactionary fraction of the super-rich. They do not want economic growth; it would
lessen their control by making their industries more and more obsolete. They want a decline from which they can
benefit.
Evil
ideology in the United States perfectly tracks economic evils. The slave-based plantation world began
it. Continued decline of the rural south
has made it more toxic. It has spread
first into other declining rural areas, then into declining manufacturing ones. The “Southern Strategy” of Lee Atwater and
Karl Rove was perfectly timed to take advantage of this. The situation appears to be comparable in
other countries. The ties to
giant-corporate primary production are clear.
Extreme hierarchy of power and wealth, and economic and social
stagnation, are endemic to such systems.
Much of this is direct,
face-to-face politics. Investigative
journalism (e.g. Mayer 2016; Rich 2018) reveals that Trump was tied directly to
McCarthy’s right-hand man, Roy Cohn; that the Koch brothers started the Tea
Party and other right-wing organizations; that all these are directly connected
by personal ties, and are also tied to powerful Democrats. The extent of actual friendship and
mentorship on the far right is far too little studied and appreciated. This is not “conspiracy”; it’s long-standing
networks of friendship, political aid, mentorship, and power-sharing, going
directly back to the pro-Hitler activists of the 1930s via such ties as the
Koch and Coors family interests.
The political conversion
of the border south, Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas from “blue” to “red”
between 1970 and 2016 came with the decline of labor unions and small farms and
the rise of giant primary-production firms in those states. It was directly precipitated by a steady
stream of right-wing propaganda telling people that their problems were not due
to economic unfairness or mismanagement but to minorities. This led to a massive flip, especially in
2016, from voting self-interest to voting hate.
Many seem to have become convinced that the minorities rather than the
system (or the rich) were the source of their problems; others thought there
was no hope except to keep the minorities down; but surveys and comparisons
reveal and many or most simply voted because hysterical hatred had been whipped
up against particular groups and persons.
People who had been feeding the good wolf were feeding the bad one.
One must go back to
Hitler and Stalin to find anything comparable in terms of the sheer number of
groups attacked by the Republicans in the 2016 and 2018 campaigns. It results in cruelty—deliberately going
after not only the poor and weak, but everything that helps people: education,
medical care, sustainable resource use, etc.
These new leaders support and are supported by the war and gun industry
and the fossil fuels producers, the mega-polluters, and almost no one
else.
Trump voting has been
analyzed by Bob Azarian in Psychology
Today (2019). He sees, among other
things, immediate concerns over morality; sheer fear, conservatives being
relatively fearful; overestimating of expertise by voters; authoritarian
personality; Trump’s ability to engage people as celebrities do; and, of
course, racism and bigotry. One can add
a real fear of immigrants and Muslims, due to exaggeration and lies by
Republicans, and a real fear of change and process, especially among less
educated white males, who see themselves threatened by the rise of other
groups. Immigrants, who tend to be
highly motivated and enterprising, do present a threat to such persons. So do upwardly-mobile women and minorities
freed from open discrimination in hiring.
So does the steady decline in community and folk society in the rural
United States. The Trump voters have
their reasons to want to stop and reverse progress. Diana Mutz (2018) reports similar findings;
perceived threat to economic and social position dominated Trump voting.
Current
problems in the United States include a full-scale frontal attack on democracy:
on free press, voting rights, civil rights, civility, and equal protection
under the law. Brian Klaas, in his book The Despot’s Apprentice (2017), provides
a thorough account of these attacks, with many important and thought-provoking
comparisons to tyrannies and despotisms around the world. This attack is supported by the Big Lie
technique, by exploiting religious and racial bigotry, by attacks on the poor,
and by anti-scientific lies and misrepresentations. Huge subsidies and special favors for giant
corporations are now the rule, in a climate of corruption. Clearly, American democracy and freedom are
doomed unless Americans unite to save their best traditions (see Klaas 2017).
The
United States saw regime change in 2016-17, with the collapse of the
240-year-old Enlightenment traditions and the commencement of a regime
dedicated to eliminating those.
Corruption in the modern United States guarantees collapse. Most of it is legal. Firms donate as they wish to politicians who
vote on the issues that are critical to those firms. Legislators vote on subsidies for firms that
fund their campaigns. The interests that
depend heavily on subsidies and that also harm the general good through
pollution or dangerous speculation become the biggest donors.
In
general, the more socially tightly bound and the more hierarchic a society is,
the more people unite in hating and lowest-common-denominator social
presentation. Progress and individual
tastes divide. The far right has learned
to unite followers not only by arousing bigotry, but also by providing
lowest-common-denominator entertainment (video games, trash music, and the
like) that debase individuals and make them conform at a bottom level. George Orwell foresaw this in 1984 and commented extensively on it in
his essays.
The war on science and
public truth gets more serious as the Trump administration gains more and more
control of departments and agencies, and censors speech, cuts funding for
science, and denies scientific facts (Friedman 2017; Sun and Eilperin 2017; Tom
2018). Many Republicans have come to
hate and fear education, especially higher education; a poll show that most
oppose and distrust it (Savransky 2017).
The few giant firms that
support right-wing politics to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a
year now control the United States, through the Republican Party. The 2017 tax cuts, opposed by 75% of voters
and appealing only to the rich, show this dominance clearly.
Suicide,
opiate abuse, and Trump voting are all strongly correlated; they are at high
levels in the same places, including rural counties in Appalachia and the
northern Midwest (Snyder 2018). They
indicate a level of despair in these downwardly-mobile areas. Since these areas are overwhelmingly white,
much of the despair translates to anger against minorities who are supposedly
taking the livelihood or at least the social status of the white workers. Diana
Mutz (2018) found that voting for Trump tracked perceived threats to group
status, not economic woes. The
suicidal tip of the iceberg reveals the degree to which rational self-interest,
as normally understood, fails to explain right-wing attitudes, in
the United States and elsewhere. Mass
shootings, suicide bombings, genocides, and voting for amoral strongmen are
manifestations of a self-destructive level of hate and fear.
In
short, the United States faces a unique crisis, involving a shift far to the
right of anything seen before except in the Confederacy before 1861. Racist and religious prejudice financed by
giant firms are taking over politics (Beauchamp 2018; Lopez 2017; MacLean 2017;
Metzl 2019). From the farthest right,
there are calls for civil war and mass killings (Nova 2017). Justice is corrupted at the highest levels
(Eisinger 2017; Neuborne 2019).
Democracy is suffering from increasing distortion (Browning 2018). The human costs are far worse than most
people realize. For example, American
children are 76% more likely to die before reaching 21 than children in other
developed countries; high infant mortality and enormous levels of gunshot
deaths are the main causes (Kliff 2018).
Even Francis Fukuyama, famed for his overoptimistic views of the future,
has recognized the darkness (Fukuyama 2016).
Politics becomes more emotional, more
passionate, and less civil, as shown by Lilliana Mason in her book Uncivil Agreement (2018). An increasing number of young, uneducated
white men have flocked to Trump’s standard.
They are frightened by the rise of minorities and immigrants, and of
more educated workers, all of whom compete directly for economic position. In a world where memories of the 2008
recession are still fresh and where wages are stagnant, these fears are
expectable.
An
economic downturn or fear of losing the 2020 elections could precipitate
dictatorship and its inevitable result (Neuborne 2019:227-228). It is possible that the Republican
administration will crack down around 2020, declare a state of emergency,
suspend the Constitution, and begin full-scale genocide (on this possibility
see Goitein 2019). The Republicans, like
Hitler (and apparently copying him), have engaged in widespread hatred. Trump, in campaigning and in tweets, has
attacked Muslims, Mexicans, Jews, African-Americans, Native Americans,
liberals, poor people, feminists, and others beyond counting. Followers have added their voices, sometimes
advocating extermination of gays (as preacher Kevin Swanson and several other
right-wing “Christians” have done).
The centrists, liberals,
and moderate-conservatives of the United States have very little time to unite
and stop this. Without unity, it is
unstoppable. The stalwart unity of the reactionaries
and disunion and mutual criticism on the left are expectable and typical of
periods of declining empire. The people
who were dominant want it all back, and what should be the rising and
progressive fraction are despondent and easily set against each other.
The
center and left in the United States have recently fallen back on being “the
opposition”—opposing rather than proposing.
We need to borrow a leaf from parliamentary systems of government. These usually have a
government-in-opposition: a shadow cabinet made up of opposition figures who
discuss policy and plan what to do if they cycle back into power. The United States now needs a Democrat group
who can develop policy and unite the party around it, via opposition figures
serving as virtual cabinet ministers, heads of agencies, and the rest of the
government machinery. History teaches
that people must go against something to unite successfully. We can only do that in the name of a higher,
nobler, more inclusive goal. Even Hitler
knew enough to do it. We certainly
should.
We
have seen how certain “progressives” of the 2010s failed disastrously by
opposing their antagonism toward men and whites to right-wing antagonism toward
women and minorities. One does not fight
fire with fire in a gasoline storage depot.
5. A Dark
Future
We
have a new mode of production, that unites China, North Korea, and Venezuela
with the United States despite alleged differences between “communism” and
“capitalism.” The new mode is one in which giant
primary-production corporations, especially oil, coal, and agribusiness,
control the economy. They are tied
closely to government by subsidies and special favors and rules as well as by
bribery and corruption. In other countries,
they are actually a part of government.
Big oil and big coal—the reactionary energy-suppliers that should now be
displaced by solar and wind power—have an especially distorting effect, because
they are in such desperate need of maintaining political reaction and fighting
environmental protection. Their role is
like that of slavery and the slave trade in past times, not only the Atlantic
trade of the 18th and 19th centuries but also the
Byzantine and Genoese slave trade from the Black Sea region in the Middle
Ages. All these had enormous distorting
effects on politics and culture, driving reactionary and anti-Enlightenment
views and policies. The thousand-year
cultural stagnation of the Byzantine Empire seems due to this. Relying on reactionary and harmful methods of
getting basic energy is culturally fatal.
Capitalism
in the narrow sense—control of society by capitalists—is dead. If “neoliberalism” ever existed, it does so
no more. (The term has been used so
loosely that it has no established meaning; it once meant the extreme
free-market view.) Giant firms working
through tyrannical governments are the future, or at least the foreseeable
future. Since the rapid growth of these
extractive industries cannot go on much longer, a hard limit will be set within
100 years (and probably within 50), leading probably to mass starvation,
hopefully to some search for solutions.
Even
the dinosaur firms are somewhat horrified at what is happening in the US,
Turkey (Altınay 2019), Hungary, and elsewhere, but they cannot escape it now. They depend on racists, religious fanatics,
and other extremists. The right wing worldwide has abandoned
traditional conservatism in favor of an agenda that is anti-intellectual,
anti-education, anti-science, anti-environment, anti-health-care, anti-poor,
anti-young, anti-old, anti-minority, religiously bigoted in favor of extremist
right-wing beliefs, anti-women, militarist, gun crazy, violent, pro-corporation
and anti-taxpayer, corrupt, pro-unequal treatment and inequality, opposed to
all human and civil rights, pro-dictatorship, anti-freedom of conscience,
strongly hierarchic. In their world, the
powerful can do what they please and are above the law, the weak do what they are
told.
Primary
production by itself is not the predictor of evil. Evil does come from the primary-production end
of the economy, but only from the fraction of it that is controlled by powerful
landlord or corporate interests. The
evil done in the world for the last 200 years has been largely at the bidding
of plantations, fossil fuel companies, agribusiness, and related
interests. The driver is the
slave-worked plantation and its modern descendants: an economy based on a tiny, rich, powerful
elite ruling a vast servile labor force of which most are expendable and can
thus be killed in unlimited numbers to maintain discipline or simply for
convenience. Very different were the old
monarchies, even tyrannies, which could not kill at will—they usually could not
spare so much labor.
In
the future, worldwide, concentration of power and wealth will go on, while
resources diminish and global warming runs on apace—unless the human race sees
fit to stop fighting and hating and start working for the common good. The economy remains one of throughput, as
opposed to efficiency and recycling.
The
Republicans, and equivalent parties in other countries from Russia to Turkey to
Brazil, are now trapped. They depend
financially on a handful of giant corporations that are increasingly acting against
the interests of the majority, and are increasingly dependent on bribing
politicians for support—including exemption from laws, especially laws
protecting people against physical damage.
China’s tobacco industry operates with the full support of the government,
though tobacco kills 1.2 million Chinese a year, because the government depends
on tobacco taxes and many individual politicians depend on bribes (Kohrman et
al. 2018). The oil interests occupy a
similar position in the United States.
The
future after 2030-2050 is clear enough: the world will move toward emulation of
existing top-down primary-production systems.
These are recapitulating the society of the old agrarian empires. Some 20% of the population will be starving, 65%
barely surviving, 10% secure but not well off, 4% well off, 1% ruling and super
rich. There will be a steady downward
sift as population falls, first from starvation, then from disease as health
care gets cut back.
The
world has made a collective decision to have one final orgy of consumption,
rather than converting to sustainability and assuring a future for our children
and grandchildren. This appears in the
rise of fanatically anti-environmental regimes in the United States, Brazil
under Jair Bolsonaro, and elsewhere. The
rise of strongmen—individuals who specifically and explicitly violate laws and
morals to show they are above such things—has given us fascist leaders feeding
on hate not only in those cases but also (currently) in Hungary, India, Israel,
Kazakhstan, Philippines, Poland , Russia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and elsewhere. Such strongmen above the law are recorded in
the most ancient texts; Nebuchanezzar was an early one, followed by a whole
list of Roman emperors, then such conquerors as Tamerlane and Henry VIII. The Greek and Roman historians already had
the type thoroughly described. They
always have the support of publics who feel threatened by change and progress,
especially the poorer members of majorities, but also the primary-production
and rentier interests. Today, big oil
and urban mobs take the place of a team formerly made up of rentier landlords
and rural laborers.
Today’s
strongmen share a whole range of characteristics. First and foremost, they sanction their rule
by appeals to extremist religion or its ideological equivalent (especially
communism). This religion is virtually
identical whether called “Christian,” “Muslim,” “Jewish,” “Buddhist,” or
“socialist.” It sanctions total power in
the hands of the ruler; repression of women, often to the point of rendering
them passive vessels of men; violence in defense of the faith; denial of equal
rights to those not in the specific cult in question; and extreme opposition to
the messages of peace, love, harmony, forgiveness, and charity that are the
hallmarks of the actual faiths claimed.
Second, they lead attacks on weaker minorities, whether political,
ethnic, religious, or lifestyle.
Juntas with similar
amoral characteristics, but lacking the strongman image, control another few
dozen countries. Democracy is on the
wane worldwide. Strongmen sometimes
limit themselves to military dictatorship (as currently in Egypt) but more
often invoke full-scale fascist regimes, with ethnic hatred, fusion of
government and giant corporations, militarism, glorification of force, and
other fascist principles. They are
skilled at mobilizing otherwise peaceful, passive majorities against
minorities.
In
all cases, the fundamental ideology is one of rigid hierarchy, with respect or
adulation due to superiors and stronger individuals, contempt and oppression
due to those below. Callousness or
contempt of the poor and of less powerful miorities shades over into outright
sadistic treatment, of which the ultimate form is full genocide. This ideology follows from the “conservative”
reading of Nietzsche (which I accept as the correct one). Nietzsche did not
inspire it—he properly credited it to the more authoritarian side of ancient
Greek thought—but he expressed it, and his expression inspired the Nazis, the Randians,
and others who went well beyond his glorification of power into outright
glorification of mass deaths.
This form of thought
animates many a weak bully, who invariably calls out his opponents as “weak” or
“snowflakes.” It goes with dismissal of
all well-meaning public projects as “fantasy,” but glorification of the
military and of warlike adventuring. It
also, as pointed out repeatedly by George Orwell, goes with ferociously
anti-intellectual, anti-nature, and anti-art attitudes. Orwell’s portrayal of destruction of high
culture and promotion of pop trash in 1984 and Animal Farm is
expanded in most of his essays. It
turned out to be eerily predictive of the Republican preference for a
reality-TV star and public buffoon over a whole slate of veteran politicians.
The difference from the
old days is that with better means of surveillance and massacre, monitoring and
genocidal elimination of dissidents will replace the wars and campaigns of
old. North Korea, China, Iran, Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan, and several Middle Eastern countries already display this
regime. Turkey, Thailand, India, the
United States, Israel, Venezuela, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and several
other countries are moving rapidly toward it.
Many of these are oil countries; most have powerful primary-production
interests dominating their politics.
Interesting exceptions include Hungary and Israel, which have
diversified and progressive economies but have gone fascist. More interesting are the countries with powerful
primary-production interests that are not going fascist. Norway and Canada depend heavily on oil, but
are developed countries, so are more diversified. Bolivia, Zambia, and a few other countries
are anomalously liberal for countries dominated by extraction.
The
“base” for the leaders of these countries seems largely the same, especially in
the cases of the United States, Brazil, Turkey, Hungary, and Russia, and it is
similar to Hitler’s base in Germany.
Older people of the dominant ethnic and religious group, especially if
involved in traditional occupations like farming and small business, make up
most of it, so that rural areas are solidly right-wing even if cities are
solidly liberal. The big businessmen in
dinosaur firms and the rootless young men (and some women) of the dominant
groups are heavily involved. Puritanical
religion, as opposed to liberal or social-oriented religion, is heavily
involved. Less educated or more
traditionally trained individuals from the dominant ethnic and religious groups
are overrepresented. The young, the
minorities, and the occupants of socially oriented or new-type occupational
roles are less involved.
The
common thread seems to be that wealth is rapidly increasing but is being
captured by the top 1%, while the masses stagnate economically. The most frustrated and resentful are the
less progressive fractions of the majority ethnic groups, and they are the
drivers of the fascist trend, as they often were in the earlier fascist wave of
the 1930s (a point made by Edsall 2018).
Really rough times have sometimes led to fascistic or psychopathic
leaders taking over, but real hardship often tends to make people unite behind
a capable leader rather than a merely evil one.
The breakdown of the United States in 1860 gave us Lincoln; growth
appropriated by the rich while working-class whites lost out gave us Trump.
Democracy,
in the end, may prove unstable—a brief interlude between the monarchies of the
past and the fascist tyrannies rising in the present. Resource crunches may simply make it
impossible for the good to prevail.
However, this is not necessary at present. We can stop the downward slide.
There
is one striking conclusion that emerges from all: Evil is
almost always due to power challenged. Rulers
consolidating dictatorship, totalitarian rulers under threat, schoolyard
bullies dominating weak but smart kids, insecure and inadequate husbands
beating wives, politicians facing trial, oil company bosses facing better
energy generation and consequent loss of power and position, druglords facing
upstart thugs all have this in common, and above all majorities facing imagined
challenge by immigrants and minorities.
The only hope lies in eliminating total
power and restraining by law and superior force those who abuse power. This will not be adequate, but it is the
basic first step.
6. A Final
Note
Many
people of the younger generation now appear to be giving up, saying “The United
States has always been like this.” They
can point to a bloody history of slavery, genocide of Native Americans,
internment of Japanese and (some) Germans, Jim Crow laws, denial of the vote to
women, the Texas Rangers and their institutionalized harassment of Mexicans and
Mexican-Americans, anti-gay violence, and much more.
However,
those ills have always been challenged and all were eventually stopped, or at
least made illegal. Slavery and racism
go on, but underground. The campaigns to
stop them were widely supported, and involved much heroism and sacrifice. Slavery was stopped by a bloody war. The women’s suffrage movement, the labor
movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and other
movements involved a great deal of bloodletting. They prevailed in the end.
Most communities and states have
systems of checks and balances. It is
when these break down, or are deliberately dismantled, that the psychopaths and
hatemongers take over, and genocide can begin.
We have observed above that the two commonest reasons for murder,
whether genocide or individual, are desire for power and desire for acceptance
and approval. Frustration of these leads
to escalating conflict, especially when someone with an unusually high lack of
perceived control or of perceived approval feels frustrated in those needs. The more the perceived weakness and failure,
and the more the frustration, the more the overreaction to a slight, and the
more the resulting conflict spins out of control.
Throughout history, people have had
to cope with human evil. Religion has
been by far the main and most important way, over and above ordinary community
solidarity. Religion has produced
countless saints, sages, holy men, holy women, teachers, and meditators, many
of whom were genuinely virtuous people—though many were not, at least by most modern
standards. Religion has been the carrier
vehicle for most of the moral messages in human history.
However, religion has, notoriously,
been the excuse for many of the most horrific mass murders. No religion has a notably better track record
than any other. Christianity became the
excuse for the Crusades. Islam moved all
too quickly from a call for unity and peace to a call for jihad. Monotheistic religions appear to have a worse
record than others, but the others are far from perfect. Classical Greek stoicism and related
philosophies of ataraxia (suppressing desire) became excuses for expanding the
Greek and Roman empires. Even Buddhism,
which explicitly bans violence and teaches compassion to all beings, became the
religion of the samurai, and has been the excuse for countless killings over
time, including two of the worst genocides in modern history: the
long-continuing campaigns to exterminate the Tamils in Sri Lanka and the
Rohingya Muslims in Burma. There are
many other cases in history. The
Rohingya massacres should end the stereotypes about peaceable Buddhism and
violent Islam widely current in American society.
The basic problem with religion is
that it claims to have the one absolute truth.
This leads to intolerance for other claims, even obviously correct ones
(see the fate of evolution by natural selection, as a theory, in religious
societies). Moreover, organized
religions generally have organized hierarchies, often with a single apical
leader, and such hierarchies inevitably reprise Rummel’s principle: “Power kills, and absolute power kills
absolutely” (Rummel 1998). The same
dismal fate occurs with religion-like ideological systems, notoriously
including communism and fascism.
Since all cultures and traditions include alternative morals and
moral codes, religions that are founded on impeccable principles of love, care,
justice, and empathy always develop countertraditions that teach hate, cruelty,
and butchery, from human sacrifice to burning heretics at the stake. These are then often held-especially by
rulers consolidating power—to be the highest of moral goods, superior to the
everyday care and help. Ordinary selfish
greed can be handled; sadism considered as highest morality is harder to
control.
The alternative is not abandonment of religion or of truth, but
of expanding the basic principle of intelligent enquiry: we are searching for
truth but have not found it all, and the more people cooperate in searching for
truths, the better we all do.
There is a common theme of religion
turned evil: it is obsessed with control, especially control over the more
vulnerable and less dominant members of society. The clearest and most obvious common theme of
religions that harm is that they focus on harming and oppressing women. This is the distinguishing feature between
right-wing and liberal Christianity, extremist and ordinary Islam,
ultra-Orthodox and reform Judaism, extremist and ordinary Buddhism, and so on
throughout the world’s religions.
Repression of women usually carries over to repression and abuse of
children (“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” a folk version of Proverbs
23:13-14). Degree of intolerance for
heresies, including the most minor and trivial divergences from practice, also
tracks religion turned harmful; the opposite is ecumenism or tolerance.
Religions all seem to fall into the
trap of seeing ordinary innocent need-satisfaction and fun as “sin,” while
social jockeying for position and control is taken for granted, and even put to
evil use to promote the faith. No
religion seems to face the obvious fact that most evil in the world is done to
maintain social position or control. Religions
have hierarchic orders, organized monasteries and priesthoods, and so on, thus
leaving themselves open for the worst sins of all while fighting the trivial
ones.
Killing desire, the goal of some
religions and philosophies, frequently succeeds in killing desire for the
morally good, while leaving hatred intact.
At best, it allows people to avoid confronting the world, including its
evils.
Some argue that religion is “the
problem,” but the alternatives do not have a good track record. Nationalism, fascism, capitalism, and
communism are the leading ideologies developed as alternatives. Stalin and Mao repressed religion (all
religion) with even more sadistic enthusiasm than Christians in the 17th
century demonstrated in repressing heretics.
The problem is clear: all these are
social, all of them define groups, and it is social group hatred that is the
main and usual problem. Religions
usually blame greed and lust, but cannot get rid of them. The real problem is social hate, and the religions
do not even try to get rid of it. They
often cause it. Religion and its
imitators provides communitas, but also unreal abstractions and unprovable
visions. People then commit to those,
and carry out real murders in support of them. In short, grand ideological frameworks are not
going to save us.
2. First
Steps to Policy: Evaluating What Helps
From
what went before, it appears that the current problems facing the world are
best conceptualized under five heads, from more specific and immediate to
general and deep-rooted:
Saving
the environment, especially from dinosauric interests such as Big Oil and Big
Agribusiness. This means protecting
biodiversity, switching immediately and thoroughly to renewable energy, and
being as sustainable as possible—by whatever measure is useful.
Restoring
the rule of law, at the expense of the fascistic despots that now run all the
largest nations and many of the smaller ones.
Fighting
racist, religious and ideological bigotry and hatred, by teaching tolerance,
valuing diversity, and social solidarity.
Getting
people to stop, think, learn, and make reasonable decisions, instead of going
with exaggerated media-driven overreactions.
Above
all, the real back story: dealing with the chronic social fears and stresses
that create most of the problem. This
requires fair, responsive, responsible governments and leaders. Such are now exceedingly rare, and the worst
sort of strongman leaders control dozens of countries. Restoring fair, equitable governance is
clearly basic to security and thus to reassuring people, reducing threat,
making individuals feel capable of dealing with threat, and thus greatly
reducing the drive to hate and harm.
We
also desperately need an educational system that will create and foster self-confidence,
self-control, concern for quality of life, and dedication to
self-improvement. These are necessary to
blocking hatred and defensiveness.
People need to see themselves as independent agents improving the world,
or at least their own lives, rather than followers and mindless conformists.
Obviously, we also need
to increase such basic amenities as medical care, education, and justice.
To do all this, we will
have to work on technology, ideology, morality, and praxis. What follows, for most of the rest of this
book, is heavily moral. It will sound
sententious to many, but I believe there is a need to establish an agreed moral
ground as well as dealing with practical issues and stopping violence.
The
rest of this section will be largely devoted to my ideas on these topics. I claim no great originality, but will not be
citing literature except where I am directly using someone else’s ideas.
In
general, social change comes from individuals working within existing
structures, often modifying those structures in the process. There is a front story of individual
decisions, a mid story of human context, and a back story of demography,
climate, existing rules and laws, and historical contingencies that create a
“path dependent” situation. Charismatic
or brilliant leaders succeed, but only in hopeful times. They cannot do much in reactionary times and
regimes. Democracy helps, but
reactionary democracy does not.
Good
behavior does not come easily. One must
not only be moral, but—more importantly—able to deal rationally and as coolly
as possible with actual harms and stresses. The innate impulses toward
developing morality stem from human needs for warm sociability. As we have seen, developing these requires at
least some support, empathy, and empowerment of children growing up, and
self-efficacy among adults. Since people
being much worse than many of us once thought, we need stricter laws and sanctions. Recent events worldwide have proved that we
most especially need laws against malicious lying for political reasons. We also need much stricter sanctions against
betrayal, bullying, and hate crimes. We
need far better civil rights protection.
The Founding Fathers lived at a time when politically active people
could be assumed to be at least somewhat brave and responsible. Not now.
Violence normally
requires weakness and irrationality to drive it, so strength and reasonableness
help. However, there are
exceptions. Violence is the default
recourse and first recourse in warrior cultures, though mostly in intergroup
relations. Culture enters in to tell
individuals when to be violent. In any
society, violence can be dealt with only by strict, fair laws, with no
corruption. A wider moral shell is
necessary, but not sufficient. There
must be law and order with firm, impartial enforcement; norms of peace;
conflict resolution mechanisms, formal and informal, general and specific. Experience teaches that there must also be
something adventurous but nonviolent for young men to do. Ordinary sports appear to fail at this, but
exploring, seafaring, and the like are available. Peace is also helped by an expanding economy
that raises all boats, or at least prevents groups from sinking. This need not be ecologically ruinous; we can
expand into sustainable energy and services instead of mass-produced bulk
goods.
Recall that it is easier
to unite people against a common enemy, and to get them to follow orders if
those orders involve destroying a hated or despised group, than to unite people
in the cause of love and care. People
are sociable, and usually loving and caring to their close kin and friends, but
fear and hate dominate public interaction unless rigidly combatted.
The one thing that almost
everyone agrees on, in politics, is that the first requirement for a government
is that it protects its people. Until
now, that has been interpreted as military protection, with economic protection
added to the list in the 20th century. Today, the dangers to a given citizenry are,
first, environmental (especially climate change); second, genocide and related
corrupt and violent internal politics; third, preventable diseases and health
risks. The first and third were not
manageable by government when the Founding Fathers wrote. The second was, but was far less a problem
than external invasion; such is no longer the case.
The citizenry also has a
right and a need to be protected from hatred and hate crimes, and from major
loss in quality of life, as by loss in aesthetic opportunities, nature, historic
monuments, and the like. Protection of
economic benefits by managing the economy well is clearly necessary, but now
less important than preventing the catastrophic disasters that climate change
and pollution are bringing about.
3. A different
kind of civilization
An
ideal to strive toward is a civilization depending on growth in environmental
and cultural amenities rather than mass-production of manufactured goods. We currently measure economic growth and
development by the amount of value created by human activity, rather than by
the amount of value overall. Mining,
manufacturing, and any form of resource-transforming count—even if all they are
doing is producing pollution (Anderson 2010). Often, this means that pure
destruction is highly valued on paper, though it brings nothing but harm to
actual people. Preserving nature,
allowing environments to recover, and creating personal amenities not traded in
the market do not count. Art and craft
production does not count unless it is counted in the manufacturing and sales
statistics. Singing songs for one’s
children does not count, but polluting the air with hideous electronic music
does.
An
opposite model of how to run a civilization existed in old Southeast Asia. Nobody assessed economic growth, though the
governments did tax value created. What
mattered was saving forests and fruit trees, growing rich and complex crop
assemblages, creating beautiful arts, living happily, and letting others live
as they wished. Societies were ruled by
kings, but were astonishingly free and open.
The landscapes were beautiful, and got richer, lusher, and more diverse
over time, because agriculture was devoted to producing human food rather than
industrial goods. There was some war and
killing, but nothing remotely like what we have seen in the past 100 years in
the world. The one great problem was
disease, which was rampant, but with modern medicine this has been stopped, and
lifespans are comparable to the west.
The problems now are rapid population growth in a context of even more
rapid shift to western industrialization and destruction. Similar, if less materially successful,
cultures existed in other areas worldwide.
The Maya of Mexico and Central America have been notably good at maintaining
ecosystems, for instance.
We
are not going to return to Southeast Asia in 1900, but we can use their design
principles: a world where people are helped by moving toward the more natural,
more simple, more beautiful, and more sustainable. Our current industrial civilization sets all
its incentives, subsidies, and accounting in the opposite direction: valuing
destruction of nature to make vast and complex amounts of ugly stuff by
unsustainable practices.
We need to value trees, grasses,
gardens, birds, fish, landscapes, clean water, health, good food, beautiful art
and music, and other amenities, rather than sheer throughput of materials. Bhutan, basically a Southeast Asian state in
economy and ecology though culturally and linguistically Tibetan, has in fact
done this, measuring its “gross domestic happiness” via such indices. They show a genuine alternative, a way out of
our rush to collapse.
4.
Education
To recapitulate: the most direct and basic cause of evil is
anger turning to hate and hate turning to violence. This usually comes from strong reaction to
social slights, threats, and harms.
Escalating anger leads to fighting.
In such cases, the food
of the bad wolf is brooding on insults and personal offenses. Weak and defensive individuals, especially
those that have physical power (often in the form of guns) but lack of
perceived self-efficacy in social life, are the most avid consumers of that
food, and the most dangerous of people.
On the wider scale,
genocides and mass killings occur when ruthless leaders take power through
extremist ideologies, using those ideologies to whip up hatred that unites
masses against victims. In this case,
there is an initial coterie of zealots and then a vast mass of weak, conformist
followers who allow their everyday frustrations and resentments to be mobilized
in the cause of destruction. Once again:
the food of the bad wolf is ruminating on minor slights and harms, in this case
leading to weak and defensive persecution of scapegoats. The weak and defensive conformists are the
voters who vote for vicious dictators, the passive enablers of dictatorial
coups, and then the easily-swayed subjects of brutal regimes.
Part of this food for the
bad wolf is the insidious thought that some people don’t matter. Education must also teach people to control
hostility and aggression, the real problems in cases of hatred. Teaching students that hatred and unprovoked
aggression are unacceptable—morally wrong and socially destructive—is obviously
necessary. To feed the good wolf, we need to feed the irenic and full-person
sides of human nature. The best food for
good wolf is reflecting that every being is important, and every human deserves
consideration. Common decency and
honesty would be enough to keep the good wolf fed and the bad one at bay. Surely schools, media, and public life can
teach that much.
Education therefore needs
to talk at length about domestic violence, bullying, genocide, and war. All educators—including parents and, indeed,
everyone—must teach young people not to hate, not to brood about trivial
slights, and not to escalate conflict.
Anger and fighting have their place, but overreaction and hatred do not.
People need to be taught about bullies
and the strongmen who are bullies writ large.
They also need to grow up in a world of enforced laws against such
behaviors, to get a sense of the need for the rule of law.
Conflict resolution is
thus important. Children and adults need
to learn how to deal with conflicts other than by angering and fighting. This should be combined with teaching them
not to displace their fear, stress, and aggression. Specifics include better parenting and better
advice and counseling.
Education must return to teaching civics and basic civil morality—not
elaborate or puritanical rules, but simple common decency. American history must go back to teaching the
ideals that founded the nation and have continued to improve over time. American education has suffered terribly from
both jingoistic idolization of America, denying its past of racism, genocide,
and slavery, and hypercritical focus on such ills at the expense of recording
the ideals and the progress toward them.
One would hope for education in the great literature and arts of the
past—the whole world’s past—but teaching the “classics” did not save Europe
from fascism and communism, so perhaps something was missed in the old days of
liberal education.
More serious is the need to require and demand that public and private
education teach verified science and absolutely ban global warming denial,
anti-evolution, anti-vaccination propaganda, and other outright lies propagated
for the purpose of harm. We are not
policing education at all well. When it
teaches hateful lies, we are corrupting the nation. Freedom of speech absolutely must not extend
to freedom of schools to teach lies.
This is among the most immediate and critical of needs.
Schools need to change
profoundly, to teach civility and ordinary decency and to deal with
values. Today, schools have come
increasingly to drill students mindlessly in basic skills, to be assessed by
endless standardized tests that kill thought and destroy creativity. Some students report writing stories and
poems surreptitiously because the schools discourage such behavior. We need to go back to older ideals. The most important thing to teach is civil
behavior, not STEM skills. Teaching
students how to learn, how to do
research or at least find out accurate information, is vital also. Teaching truth is important, teaching how to
tell truth from lies is even more so, but teaching students how to find out for
themselves and improve their
knowledge and accuracy of knowledge is most important of all.
Traditional education,
worldwide, usually taught skills through doing, in an apprentice role. It taught values and abstract principles
through stories and songs (see Kopnina and Shoreman-Ouimet 2011, especially my
essay therein, Anderson 2011). It taught
ordinary declarative knowledge through taking young people out in the world and
letting them experience what they were learning. That last is no longer adequate—knowledge is
not just local any more—but should be pursued as much as possible. Certainly we need to return to these
principles. They worked; our modern
system does not teach well, except when it uses them. Nobody expects students to learn sports, or
musical instrument playing, or doctoring, through lectures. Nobody should expect morals to be learned
without songs and stories.
The other point, building
self-efficacy to prevent weak defensiveness and conformity to dictators,
involves teaching students to do their own thinking and acting—to be
independent and creative. This involves
making students (and everyone) do their own work, rather than rote memorizing
and taking tests. It also means moving
people away from radio, television, and other passive-listener media, toward
active interchange. Even video games at
least involve some effort. Messaging,
email, and the social media may yet save us.
People also need to know
that someone, somewhere, is backing them up.
Education needs to deal with issues of alienation, isolation, prejudice,
rejection, and marginalization. This is
a widely recognized point, but widely ignored in a world that will not spend
money on schools or psychological help.
Clearly, education,
therapeutic enough to cure people of weak defensiveness, hatred, and
scapegoating, is the most important need in combatting evil. Now that we know the basics of feeding good
and bad wolves, we need to reform educational systems accordingly.
5. Some
Moral Principles
The Seven Deadly Sins are all too
well known, as identified by the early Christian church from late Greek
thought, but no one seems to recall the matching set of Seven Virtues. They are: Faith, hope, charity, justice,
prudence, temperance, fortitude. This
seems as reasonable a place to start as any, but the following will highlight
justice-as-fairness, following John Rawls, and tolerance, following none of the
Seven. Intolerance was not a bad thing
in ancient times.
If people were really selfish, they would want
what we know people really enjoy: happy, cooperative, mutually beneficial, warm
societies and communities above all else—not self-aggrandizement at the expense
of their friends and families and communities.
If people were not mean, they would hate disease and misery and
unnecessary suffering—not each other or science or nature. If they were interested in actual control
rather than power to bully others, they would hate autocracy and unnecessary
hierarchy.
Caring is the nexus, the
alternative for which we strive. We seek
especially the broad sense: wanting good for others and wanting a good and
harmonious society (even infants want that).
The Bible calls this agapé
or caritas.
Buddhists call it compassion. Humans
being so prone to domination by the bad wolf, we must err on the side of
caution, caring, helping, reching out, and empowering.
Viktor Frankl noticed
that survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps were those that had something
deeply important to live for and be responsible for. Usually, this would be either families or
work that was a real Calling rather than a mere job. Sometimes it was religion. He spent his life extending this observation,
learning that almost all people need or want a deep meaning of this sort in
their lives (Frankl 1959, 1978). This is
one basic counter to living for hate.
Unfortunately, and perhaps ironically, group conflict is one of the most
powerful ways to give meaning to life (Rovenpor et al. 2019). Nothing is more meaningful to people than
fighting for a cause. One must use caution in deploying the classic
“work and love” in support of tolerance.
The
other counters are the opposites of excessive anger: reasonableness and
peacefulness. The opposites of hatred
are tolerance and valuing diversity. The
opposites of callousness are responsibility, but above all empathy and
compassion, which may in the end be the most important qualities for all
good-doing. The daily kibble of the good
wolf is support, empowerment, caring, compassion, mutual aid, mutual
responsibility, mutual respect, and mutual concern. The red meat that gives it strength to win is
conscious work to create and build social solidarity.
In
dealing with evil, we need to attack it directly: to oppose rational truth to
hatred, political lies, oppression, cruelty, abuse of power, and the summation
of all these in fascism and similar political ideologies. We need to call out such things directly,
constantly, and explicitly.
Above
all, we need to drive rational, reasonable thinking and behavior against the
irrationality (sometimes downright insanity) of murderous harm.
Nothing
helps except dealing directly with it.
When your baby throws up all over you, all you can do is clean it
up. Prayer doesn’t help, good thoughts
don’t help, meditation doesn’t help. You
keep loving the baby and do what is necessary.
The only direct way to stop murder
and mass violence is through appealing to reason and rational discourse while also
enforcing strict laws within a rule of law.
This,
by itself, is not enough. We need to oppose
evil with cultural and social teachings of help and unity, sustained by the
innate moral or premoral sense of mutual aid and generosity that seem to inhere
in humans. Directly relevant, also, are
natural interest—especially active warm interest—and curiosity, and the urge to learn more in order to
improve. Natural toughness and
innocent enjoyment are reasonable and useful.
The reason that advancing the good
so often fails is not mere selfishness.
It is antagonism to cooperating and to working with others as equals,
especially as seen in refusal to learn, change, and self-improve as part of the
process.
The cure is seeing all people as worthwhile
and that we are all in this together. The long first part of this book demonstrated
at length that the root problem is rejecting people for reasons of “essence”:
the false belief that “race,” ethnicity, religion, and the like are somehow
basic essences that condemn whole groups of people. The only cure is seeing all as not only
tolerable but worthy of help and of civil behavior. Ideally, they are all equal before the law,
and equal in opportunity—a hope not approximated in modern societies.
Seeing
all as worthy requires checking excessive anger. It also requires proactive compassion and
empathy, to avoid callous bureaupathy and similar evils. Studies on how to further such goals exist
(Batson 2011; McLaren 2013; Zaki 2019).
Our authors, notably Beck (1999) and Maslow (1970), provide ideas and
experiences.
The
task is to minimize both the level of anger and number of things that arouse
it. A fascist dictator will try to
find as many reasons for anger as he can, finding ways to include almost everyone
in the violent movement (see e.g. Traverso 2019 on recent successes and
failures at whipping up hatreds in Europe).
I recognize the drawbacks
of utilitarian calculation, but I cannot see any way to evaluate policies and
politics except by net help to people and the environment versus net harm to
same. Things like peace and freedom must be calculated within that shell. There are times when peace is wrong, such as
when one’s country is invaded. There are
necessary limits to freedom, such as denying people the right to bully others. Proactive effective help is good, by
definition, but can be worse than nothing when it is badly planned, or unneeded
and intrusive. The usual
social-conformity measures are usually helpful, keeping society together, but they
can be bad: being too conformist, going along to get along, and the like.
Helping
requires self-efficacy, reasonableness, self-control, self-confidence, and
courage (i.e. ability to go into unknown and risky, where self-confidence
fails). Obviously, parents and schools
need to do everything possible to develop these. Self-confidence, including confidence in
one’s moral principles and above all confidence in one’s control of one’s life,
is the key virtue for preventing collapse into blind conformity, including
conformity to genocidal leaders. It also
prevents collapse into domestic violence and other individual violent
acts.
The
countervailing forces are indifference (resulting in callousness) and actual
hate. Hatred in particular must be
fought wherever and whenever it arises.
If it becomes pervasive in society, violence becomes inevitable. Genocide is the ultimate case of hatred spun
out of control; it can only be stopped in advance by fighting hate and
displacing evil leaders.
The usual moral
touchstone, the Golden Rule, does not work perfectly. My neighbors do not take well to being
treated to Brussels sprouts, Scottish murder ballads, or displays of Chinese
art. Granted that such individual
preferences are probably not what was intended by the Golden Rule, where do we
draw the line? I do not inflict my
rather old-fashioned Christian morality on my kids, let alone the world at
large. Conversely, I would not accept
the hierarchic social morality that works in and is highly popular in Singapore
and China. We simply cannot use
ourselves as measures of all things and all people.
The
only reasonable touchstone is helping people.
But what helps? Is it help in
their terms, or in mine? One hopes for
easy cases—things that are recognized by almost everyone as helping, such as
feeding the hungry. Not all cases are
easy. If I were in Singapore (where I
lived and worked for a while many years ago), would I work to advance its quite
popular but rigid moral code, which—then at least—banned chewing gum, rock
music, and Playboy? Or would I work to advance
freedom and liberty of conscience, according to my own view of helping? Such cases can only be decided by detailed
consideration and consultation.
As David Hume said,
“Reason is, and must ever be, the slave of the passions” (Hume 1969
[1739-1740]:462). Reason is a good
slave. It is the only way to get things
right so that we can survive. It is the
only possible route to change and improvement.
But it matters more to get the passions right, such that reason is a
slave to the good ones. It is at least
as competent and hard-working a slave to evil as to good.
One opposite to evil is
the “universal positive regard” of the psychologists (Rogers 1961), but that is
a process goal, not achievable in the real world. Checking evil often involves direct fighting
against real enemies, so life cannot be free from harming others. This multiplies the need for rational
thought, since any irrationality can lead to harming the wrong people.
The cure for misdirected
aggression and rejection is action that is as helping as possible. Most religions have come up with this idea,
but only certain forms of the religion feature it. It has been termed the “Social Gospel” in
Christianity. It also characterizes
reform Judaism, Ahmadiyya, the Three Teachings tradition in China, various
forms of Buddhism, and other traditions.
There needs to be a Goddess of Common Sense.
The Southern Poverty Law
Center has listed ten ways to fight hatred: Act, join forces, support the
victims, speak up, educate yourself, create an alternative, pressure leaders,
stay engaged, teach acceptance, dig deeper.
Desire for wealth, power, status, standing, and sociability can lead to
positive-sum games and thus to goodness and progress, but all too often desire
leads to zero-sum or negative-sum playing.
Then, when others push back, conflict escalates, eventually spinning out
of control unless damped down. To be
evil, this must—by my definition, at least—reach irrational levels.
Damping must start with
desire (as religions have always taught).
It cannot end there. We must
teach and invoke policy to get people to play positive-sum games and to be
reasonable. We must put in place
conflict-resolution mechanisms (Beals and Siegal 1966). We must teach a morality of peaceful behavior
instead of vengeance and predation. Finally, we must outlaw actual harming,
including indirect harms that are currently accepted, such as pollution
damage. Damping down conflict is the
most immediate and direct need, however. The greatest problem in conflict, always, is
escalation. Really successful ways to
damp that down, all the way from playground fights and intimate partner
violence to international conflicts and genocides, are not always deployed, and
more research on them is seriously needed.
As we have noted above, the ordinary small-scale tensions, problems, and
slights of daily life keep people in a state that allows sudden
positive-feedback loops to emerge and lead to exploding conflict.
Since cowardice and
self-doubt lie behind so many of the problems, there is a serious need to
promote self-efficacy, self-reliance, and ability to act—notably including the
knowledge of how to de-escalate conflict.
People are often too busy
or defensive or simply lazy to work hard for the good; we cannot expect
everybody to do it. Dealing with
indirect problems like environmental woes is especially difficult. People discount the future, are too
optimistic, and hate the endless small adjustments that fixing the environment
entails. It is easier to go for one big
fix, such as a war.
Since overreaction and
misreaction are root problems, the start of the cure is facts. We have to get science back to a place where
people will accept scientific findings.
After that, the clearest intervention needed is demanding civil rights
and civil behavior.
This
provides a guide for a moral shell involving solidarity with others above all,
especially tolerance and valuing diversity, but also concern for
self-improvement and quality of life, including a return to the civility,
mutual respect, responsibility, and patience that we are losing.
Reasonableness
is inadequate. People cheat on their own
morals; they fall short and provide excuses.
They fail to reason correctly, and err in predictably self-serving
directions.
Even
without that, people must sacrifice to make community work. They need to make up for cheaters, and they
must be heroic in emergencies. We cannot
expect everyone to love and care much beyond the family and friendship circle.
(What follows draws heavily on John Rawls’ doctrine of fairness as justice
[Rawls 1971, 2001] but is informed by a range of ethical positions, from
Kantian [Kant 2002] and neo-Kantian [Korsgaard 1996] to neo-utilitarian [Brandt
1979, 1992, 1996] to Aristotelian virtue ethics [Aristotle 1953]; see also
Anderson 2010).
Thus,
every society on earth has had to develop a morality of self-sacrifice and
service to others, enforced it by public opinion. This was memorably argued by Adam Smith, who
correctly saw it as a necessary shell around his economic utopia of free
small-scale competition (Smith 1910, 2000).
They must conform up, to higher standards of behavior, rather than down
into toxic conformity to evil norms.
This requires personal strength.
From
what has gone before in this book, we conclude that evil is due to extreme
individuals—psychopaths, sociopaths, and the like—who often become leaders; to
cowardice and failure to cope with hurt, stress, and threat; and to conformity
with orders from people suffering from those two conditions. Ordinary selfish greed is also a huge
problem, but rarely gets out of control unless the other three conditions hold. People are notably good at stopping each other
from selfish greed. Studies show that
humans are good at “cheater” detection, and at stopping cheaters by shaming,
ostracism, and outright punishment (Tomasello 2016; Wrangham 2019). Ordinary people develop a conscience that
restrains them from cheating even when they can get away with it, and a concern
for people that makes them want to help others and do right by them. It is hard to separate these good mental
states from sheer fear of shame and punishment; all combine to keep most people
only somewhat selfish. We all cheat a
bit, but most of us limit it to fairly innocuous matters. The psychopaths are those who cheat in spite
of being attacked, writing off the attacks as unfair and hypocritical.
It is worth briefly
noting that some “sins” are not what they seem: gluttony is a matter of eating
disorders, themselves caused by problems usually apart from food; “sloth” is
usually hatred for dull work, or physical illness, or psychological inanition
due to fear and stress; and so forth.
Many early moralities foundered on the rock of condemning reasonable and
normal desires, rather than the irrational reactions to fear and stress that
made people seem sinful or immoderate in their desires. It seems likely that puritanical condemning
of normal desires did more damage by creating fear, stress, and guilt than it
brought benefit to anyone.
We
must maintain a consistent, oft-repeated ideology of unity, solidarity, mutual
aid, mutual care, and tolerance. From a
general sense of “we’re all in this together,” the first personal virtues are
openness, warmth, interest in the world, self-confidence, and ability to enjoy
life. These were highlighted by Aristotle
(1953), but they have been amazingly neglected since his 4th-century-BCE
days. These imply a set of learned
personal orientations: compassion, respect, responsibility. These in turn entail civility,
reasonableness, courage, patience, and hard work. Social attitudes include empathy and
egalitarianism—both equality before the law and the rough-and-ready sense that
we are all here and thus have to take care of each other and take people as they
are.
Empathy
and altruism are linked; psychological studies have unpacked both. Humans are wired for empathy in ways unknown
among other animals, and can build on that by learning to be much more
empathetic than is “natural” from the genetic base. We are experts at putting ourselves in
others’ places, feeling what they feel, and understanding how they could react
to situations. Daniel Batson (2011), a
leading expert on empathy, points out that these are different things. Understanding others’ feelings, matching
those feelings, and understanding how our own feelings can be different from
others’, are all different agendas. Lack
of empathy is, of course, far too typical of bureaucrats and governments, and
of many ordinary people who have either never learned real empathy or have
suppressed what they know (Baron-Cohen 2011).
Batson went on to show that altruism goes beyond this: we need to value
others. We have seen that understanding
the feelings of others can make cruelty worse; the sadist can use understanding
and sensitivity to devise the most fiendish tortures. This is well known from the annals of both
crime and Hitler’s death camps (Baumeister 1997).
Batson
further points out that empathy and altruism are not enough. They can make people unfair. One naturally has more empathy to one’s
family and friends than to strangers, and thus tends to skew altruism. The extreme is reached in those super-rich
families that take care of their own very well indeed while giving nothing to
charity. Batson, a Kantian who follows
Kant and Rawls into a realm of absolute ethics of fairness and principle,
opposes such narrow empathy to his general principles of fairness. However, in a particularly thoughtful passage
(Batson 2011:220-224), he traces the limits of extreme fairness: not only can
we not really do it—family ties are generally too strong—but we are also
masters at rationalizing, excusing, justifying, and otherwise weaseling out of
our principles, when emotions are strong.
Jamil
Zaki, in The War for Kindness (2019), takes up where Batson left
off. Summarizing Batson’s work, he goes
on to detail a number of programs for dealing with real-world problems
involving various kinds of empathy: reforming criminals, teaching police to be
community servants rather than “warriors,” teaching autistic children, and
simply helping ordinary people with problems.
We have the tools; we can go well beyond the remedies for hatred and
lack of empathy suggested by Beck (1999) and our other basic sources. The only problem is that all these remedies
involve intensive one-on-one work, “saving the world one person at a
time.” Meanwhile, strongman leaders whip
up millions with hateful rhetoric. It is
all too easy to turn nations of peaceable Germans or Cambodians into killers. Fortunately, peace did reverse that process in
those and other countries.
Recall
what was said earlier: the real food of the wolf is personal weakness or lack
of self-efficacy, leading to taking offense easily, brooding on it, and
escalating it in response. The cure is
to minimize offense-taking, but then to find morality, empathy, beauty, care,
compassion, and goodness in the wide world and in humanity. Both dealing with evil and separately
appreciating and respecting the good seem needed.
Religions
have tried for millennia to make people love all humans, or have compassion for
all living things. This is
difficult. People love or at least feel
solidary with their reference groups, which can be very large; many Chinese
feel deep solidarity and passionate loyalty to their billion and a quarter
compatriots. But genuine love for all
humans is rare indeed. Unfortunately, it
is demonstrably far easier to learn hate for targeted groups, even groups whose
members the haters have never met.
The
only philosophy that seems to have addressed this problem squarely is
Confucianism. Confucianism generally
holds that people are innately compassionate, helpful, and prosocial. However, first, they also have tendencies in
other directions, particularly in the direction of selfish greed. Second, they naturally and necessarily
privilege family over strangers (Confucians long anticipated Darwin here). Third, they do indeed rationalize away moral
conflicts. Thus, Confucianism sought to
define what each category of people owes others, with family, friends,
neighbors, the nation, and all humanity as the relevant categories. Debate still rages among Confucians about the
perfect balance, but the real message is that humans in the real world need to
accommodate different levels of empathy and be as fair as possible under such
circumstances. (See Mencius 1970; I have
benefited greatly from discussions with Neo-Confucian thinkers, especially Ben
Butina, Dean Chin, Bin Song, and Tu Weiming.)
All
these result in ability to be socially responsible, and to carry out mutual
aid, a highly desirable end-state (Smith 2000).
Basic to this are what I would consider the leading interpersonal moral
needs: caring, compassion,
considerateness and civility, reasonableness, respect, and responsibility (4
C’s and 3 R’s). It includes the values
that create peace and unity in society: solidarity, tolerance, valuing
diversity, mutual aid, and empowerment; thus, for society, peace, justice,
fairness, equality, truth, and inquiry (as argued by Rawls 1971). On these are built leadership, civic action,
mutual aid, and social responsibility in general. The short summary of all this is valuing
people (Batson 2011; Zaki 2019), or at least taking them seriously, as fellow
travelers on the planet.
The
main stem of this runs from caring to actual help. Ancillary to this stem are self-efficacy and
learning. Self-efficacy involves
self-control, not trying to control
others, courage, industry, and loyalty.
It includes self-improvement in appreciation, knowledge, and
psychological functioning (Bandura 1982, 1986).
Learning,
knowledge, and wisdom are obviously necessary, and critical, for this
enterprise. That involves keeping an
open mind about new findings, but no
open mind about hatred or cruelty. It
also requires self-control (including giving up the attempt to overcontrol
others), patience, and courage, but above all the ability to work hard, in
focused and thorough way, for the common good.
Hypocrisy and toxic conformity are banished. Education must follow accordingly.
It pays to look at this with a
medical gaze: see exactly what is wrong, why it is wrong, and what is the
cure. Moralizing in the abstract is of
less use, though also necessary.
“Process goals” are
goals that can never be fully reached, but that make the world better the
closer we approach to them. The classic
example is health. Perfect health is
impossible in this flawed world. We
could always be a little better off. But
striving for better and better health is obviously worth doing. Similarly, we will never be able to feed
everyone, but the FAO’s goal of secure, healthy, nourishing, accessible food
for everyone in the world is a goal worth striving for; the closer we get to
it, the better off we are. Other such
goals include learning, appreciation of diversity and beauty, and cooperation. We might even list cleaning, fixing, and
maintenance.
Freedom, tolerance, and
wealth all stop at moderation. Tolerance
must stop before it reaches tolerance for rape, murder, and theft. One should never be intolerant of persons as
such, but certainly we must be intolerant of evil acts. We must also frequently oppose actual
enemies, even though they are persons and deserve respect and fair treatment as
such. Inequality and excessive wealth are notorious
social evils.
There is a difference
between goals that must be intrinsically moderate, like drinking (assuming one
drinks at all) or exercising, and goals where the issue is targeting rather
than moderation per se. Tolerance is
such a targeting goal: being tolerant of ordinary differences is close to a
process goal (though it always requires some moderation), but being tolerant of
Nazism is intolerable—the classic “tolerance paradox.” Similarly, wrath is usually a bad thing, but
wrath against leaders of genocide is appropriate and commendable.
This gives us morals in pairs:
Caring vs indifference; courage vs. cowardice; peace vs. hate and
hostility; proactive help vs. laziness; responsibility vs. irresponsibility;
reason vs. irrationality; carefulness vs. carelessness; respect vs. scorn. Courage comes before hate, though hate is the
Problem, because hate comes from fear and thus courage is a prior and more
basic virtue.
Another need is for proactive positive action, and that requires
a vision of the Good and an ability to enjoy.
Cowardly defensiveness destroys enjoyment; it causes anhedonia. If one can openly enjoy something, one is
already moving toward the good. It is
natural for the social animals we are to want others to enjoy and to share in
our enjoyments. Puritans and constant
complainers are notoriously easy to delude into genocidal evil. Puritanism about anything—not just sex or
alcohol—feeds the bad wolf.
We
need a new moral order (Anderson 2010), based on keeping the good wolves fed
and the bad ones starved. Morality
exists because people are compulsively and necessarily social, and yet get
offended and angry and then hateful and aggressive. In this case, it should be the opposite of
hatred, callousness, and irrationally violent response to perceived threat.
Following
Kant, the first rule of morality is to take all people, and ultimately all
beings, as important, to value them (again following Batson), and to accept
them as valid beings—fellow travelers on this planet. As Kant said: they must be subjects of
concern, not objects to be used.
This
is one of the messages of epics like the Iliad, of the classic Scots ballads,
and of great literature the world over.
The extreme opposite of the typical Hollywood “action movie,” in which
cardboard characters are killed by dozens without anyone’s concern. The slide from traditional literature to
Hollywood thrillers is clearly related to the rise in genocide and violence;
the latter tracks the former and other pop cultural forms that teach
indifference to life. The rise of inequality,
especially the rise in power of giant multinational firms, is a much more
obvious driver of indifference to people and of taking them as Kantian objects
(Kant 2000).
Great
cultural productions can thus be used for self-improvement and for learning
about the humanity and sensitivies of others.
If they are simply read for schoolwork, however, they do very
little. The depressing lack of empathy
and humanity among well-educated leaders has often been noted. Particularly sad is learning of the number of
extremely intelligent, highly educated, creative people who sympathized with
the fascists in Europe in the 1930s. The
most famous cases were Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, and Leni Riefenstahl, but
there were countless more. Poets from T.
S. Eliot to e. e. cummings were sympathizers early on, and wrote viciously
anti-Semitic poetry, though they cooled when they saw what was happening. Fortunately, no significant thinkers or
writers have seen fit to approve of fascism in recent decades (see Travserso
2019 for the nearest-to-exceptions).
The
main pillars of that are caring, charity, and peace. These can take us on to active help: feeding
the hungry, healing the sick, and the other standard social goods. We are called to be nice to all, but for life
work do your best at what you do best to help.
St. Paul’s “gifts differing” (Romans 12:6) is a watchword: people have
different strengths, and this allows a complex society to exist and to be far
more productive and efficient than one in which everyone had the same
skills.
Long-term,
wide-flung interests should prevail above short-term, narrow ones. In the real world, the short term must be
considered, because failure to attend to immediate threats and concerns can
kill before the long term is reached.
However, the world is now sacrificing more and more long-term interest
to shorter and shorter benefits. A
classic case is overfishing. At current
rates of fishing, there will be no wild commercial fisheries by 2050 (Worm
2016; Worm et al. 2006). This occurs
largely because of overcompetition among fishers and subsidies by governments. Another problem is the opposite: overplanning
and top-down control.
A
final need is more integrity. Never
humanity’s strong point, it has declined for the usual reasons, especially the
loss of community to the rise of giant corporations and their
passivity-creating media. Ordinary lies
are common enough now. Even more common
is a broader failure to keep commitments, as modeled all too well by our
political leaders. The highest integrity
is working single-mindedly for more quality in life and thus real improvement
of the world. Quality ranges from better
music to better environment to better leadership; everyone has some particular
skill or calling, and can work for some cause, depending on innate and learned
abilities. The Japanese have a word, ikigai,
“life value,” for living one’s calling in a satisfying way.
Within
this moral shell, the most important thing to do is avoiding hatred and
rejection of people or any other beings on the basis of prejudice: imagined
“essence” that is somehow bad. Tolerance
and valuing diversity are essential. The
costs of prejudice are substantial.
Subtly foregrounding “maleness” made African-American boys do better on
tests, while foregrounding “blackness” made them do worse, because of
internalized stereotypes (Cohen et al. 2006).
Similar results have turned up over a wide range of stereotypes, e.g.
foregrounding “Asian” vs. “women” makes Asian-American women do better or do
worse, respectively, on math tests (Clark et al. 2015). A part of this is realizing that there are no
pure races and no pure cultures, and there never have been. The racist and culturist appeals to purity
are major sources of evil. Recently,
even “progressives” have been seduced by pure-culture theories, as in the more
naïve theorizing about decolonialization and cultural appropriation. Decolonialization means fixing social
inequalities, not rejecting all cultural change. Cultural appropriation is bad when it
involves insulting stereotypes of others, or stealing their livelihood—not when
it is simply normal borrowing. Some
progressives are being lured into genuine right-wing thinking—the old fascist
lies about pure cultures and their need to remain pure. In fact, a social morality for the future
would involve, critically, learning the best from all the world’s traditions
about how to manage the environment, reduce conflict, and keep societies moral. Every culture and society on earth has
experiences with these problems and has something to teach us.
Direct
action should be to help, not harm unnecessarily; work for a living and some
material comforts, but, beyond minimal personal comforts, only to share with
others and help others in the world; constantly work to learn more, find more
truths, and abandon more wrong views; defend, but only against real direct
threats, not imagined or trivial social slights or indirect or potential
enemies. Morals thus cover social
interaction, self-efficacy and self-control, learning, and public values.
Religion
teaches us to be as good as possible to sinners and lure them into a warm,
supportive community. Religions all
idealize helping, concern, and peace, but often fail to encourage the interest,
engagement, and love of beauty that are also necessary for the common
good. Puritanical religions in fact fear
these, since they tend to make people think independently and want to change.
Practical
concerns and economic adjustments are not going to do all the lifting. Economics has followed culture and ideology
in the past, and will no doubt continue to follow. Obviously, in the future, we will have to set
up a society based on sustainable use of the earth, equality of opportunity,
substantial public sector, and controls on inequality, but the immediate need
is to unify behind a set of principles that will stop fascism and restart
progress in those directions.
The
first step, since the root problem is hatred (in the broad sense—including
deliberate dismissal), is to shore up civil and personal rights to provide
maximal protection from abuse of minorities, women, children, and other
vulnerable groups, and maximal recourse for those groups in case of
injury. Hate crimes (to say nothing of
genocide) must be condignly suppressed.
That includes deliberate incitement to hate crime.
Ideally,
we will have physical neighborhoods held together by strands of mutual aid, co-work
on projects, mutual responsibility, and general neighborliness. Virtual and dispersed communities are also
valuable and need all the encouragement they can get, but there is no
substitute for face-to-face contact and mutual aid. This requires promoting
tolerance; all traditional small communities had their experiences of
intolerance and violence.
We
need to make our current values far clearer, but we also need to combine them
with emotional and personal appeals, as religions do. This takes us back to education and the
media. It also requires some
resolutions, at the political level, about what kind of society we want. The rapid descent of the Republicans from a
party of business to a party of hate has been terrifying to watch. It is similar to the evolution of fascism in
Europe, and communism in the USSR and China.
The
old ideas of “economic determinism” do not work. We have now seen genocide and other evils
arising in every type of economic situation and every type of economic
regime. The classic modes of production
are not helpful. “Socialism” covers
everything from Denmark and Norway to North Korea to Venezuela. “Capitalism” covers everything from Germany
to Equatorial Guinea. This does not get
us far.
We
have, in fact, seen genocide arise in every type of system except true
democracy with equality before the law and full equal rights for everyone. And even true democracy has proved unable to
get rid of war, violence, gangsterism, and everyday crime. Obviously, we need all the laws we can have,
to outlaw harming others gratuitously, but laws exist in a moral shell, and we need
to work on that as well as on making the laws apply to all equally.
The nexus, always, is caring for and about others. Only powerful self-interest combined with
social pressure can lead to doing good.
Morals exist to drive people to do good even when scared.
The
morality enshrined in the Constitution is based on the theory of equal rights.If
people recognize the need for equality before the law and equal opportunity
under law, they must work from this principle above all. Then, the clear moral order for the world is
saving nature, promoting responsibility and mutual aid (with the more fortunate
or strong helping those less so), promoting learning and truth, and
nonviolence.
It is important to understand that both this
and other moral views can go with economic growth, wealth accumulation, and the
other things that developers currently consider “good.” There is no reason to pick one over the other
except for common human decency. In
the long run, the Trumpian view is unsustainable, because it leads to
dinosauric interests pushing the system into collapse, but in the short run, we
have seen the lack of any real break from Obama’s growth economy to
Trump’s. “Capitalism,” whatever it is,
can be range from rather benign to utterly malignant. The socialist alternative is equally
ambiguous; Norway and Venezuela are both “socialist” in some ways, but Norway
has a morality based on social decency, Venezuela has a moral order based on
Trump-style dictatorial violence and bullying.
It
is depressing to read how the British and Americans, good Christians and lovers
of Shakespeare and Milton, ran most of the world slave trade that killed
perhaps 100,000,000 people in the 18th and early 19th
centuries. It is similarly depressing (though
less bloody) to read the sorry history of religious movements, communes,
idealistic communities, grassroots utopias, and the hippie movement. Good intentions not backed up by firm social
rules led only to collapse.
People
being imperfect, progress comes from outlawing the bad and forcing minimal
civil decency. Appeals to inner virtue
are not enough. Historically, help has
come from science and education, relative economic freedom within moral limits
(as Adam Smith argued), and the Enlightenment program. That program of democracy, equality, rule of
law, separation of church and state, and civil rights has done wonders. So has the idea of promoting people according
to their knowledge and ability rather than according to their birth. Meritocracy has a bad name recently, but any
acquaintance with history shows that the alternatives were worse.
Comparing
societies and communities that minimize violence and cruelty with those torn by
it shows that only strict and specific
rules help. Rights are general; if
they are not backed up by specific laws and court judgments, they are empty. All societies outlaw murder, and that ban has
real effect, depending on how many ancillary rules are passed. Above all, it depends on how much the
societies in question frown on violence as a way of solving problems. Some societies regard violence as the only
“manly” or “honorable” way to deal with problems, and they have murder and
warfare rates that are many times—sometimes orders of magnitude—greater than
the rates in societies that privilege peaceful methods of coping (Baumeister
1997; Pinker 2011; Robarchek and Robarchek 1998).
The
Founding Fathers of the United States were aware of the problems of hatred,
autocracy, lack of checks and balances, and lack of recourse. They instituted participatory democracy in
hopes that people would pick the best, or at least the less awful. They created a mesh of checks and balances
that distributed power fairly well. They
separated church and state, to prevent the awful conflicts that had driven many
of their ancestors from Europe. Most
important, they established a rule of law rather than a rule of men. This worked well for a long time, but then
the genocidal demagogue Andrew Jackson took over and began a long, bloody
process of consolidating power in the hands of the president and then using
that power to bad ends. This process has
now reached the very edge of fascist dictatorship, and American democracy may
not long survive.
Absolutely necessary is the right to
recourse. People who are injured
must be able to sue, to protest, to speak out, to vote evil leaders out, and to
defend themselves in any reasonable way.
The success of democracies at preventing genocide and famine is notable,
but even more important is the realization that in such democracies, only
actual citizens avoid being killed or starved (Anderson and Anderson 2017;
Howard-Hassmann 2016). Noncitizens, such
as Irish in the British Isles in the 1840s and Native Americans in the United
States before 1924, are starved and killed without compunction.
Communities
must have written and unwritten (customary) laws that strictly and thoroughly
regulate violence and callousness. These
laws must be based on a principle of equality before the law, which requires at
least some degree of economic equality, because otherwise the rich will simply
buy their way out of enforcement. Laws
must be based on the principle that violence is the last resort in dealing with
any problem other than direct personal attack.
They must also strictly forbid activity that destroys many solely to
benefit a few, such as big dams, engineered famines, and exposure of
impoverished workers or families to pollution.
There must be legal requirements to rehabilitate both victims and
lawbreakers.
Communities
must extinguish specific bad behaviors by specific rules, but they go on to
encourage general good behaviors and ideals by more broad appeals to morality.
Above
all, concentration of power in the hands of one person is always
dangerous. Even a long run of good
administrators or autocrats comes to an end.
Sooner or later a bully or psychopath takes over. I have seen this process on small scales in
academia, where chairs and deans usually have enough power to devastate their
units, ruin careers, destroy students, and corrupt or block research. Academia usually picks better leaders, but
one bad one does incalculable harm.
There are benevolent despotisms in the world—Singapore and Oman occur to
mind—but they rarely last.
On
national scales, the takeover of democracies by tyrants has been noted ever
since ancient Greece, and the results were known to be awful even then, as
Aristotle’s Politics tells us. Democracy works only so far as a way of picking
good leaders; again, the ancient Greeks already knew of charismatic demagogues—in
fact, they coined the words. Participatory democracy seems still the best way
of picking leaders, but then they must be restrained by a mesh of laws that
create checks and balances and prevent corruption. The United States is hopelessly behind in
these regards. The extreme corruption
and tyranny of the Trump presidency came after a long downward slide, visible
since the Nixon presidency. Similar
devolution from Hungary and Brazil to Turkey and the Philippines characterizes
politics in the 21st-century world.
Today, to the classic
rights, we need to add the right to a livable environment; a right to good
education, at least to the point of literacy, basic science, basic math, and
competence with technology; a right to free enquiry; a right to government
honesty, with full recourse if the government knowingly circulates lies; and a
right to decent medical care at little or no cost. These all follow as entailed corrolaries of our
natural rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
From what has gone before, the needs center on three areas: damping
down conflicts caused by desire for wealth, power, and approval; balancing
power so that it is distributed as widely and evenly as possible, with checks
and balances at the top and equality before the law for all; and a widely
distributed search for truth—science in a broad sense—instead of religious or
ideological claims for absolute truth or nihilistic denial of truth’s
existence.
In the United States, and increasingly in other countries, the rule of
law has collapsed, and the first need if we can take the country back would be
to restore that rule. Second would be
some sort of truth and reconciliation agenda for dealing with the hatred that
has spun out of control in recent years, and not only on the right. Rational and civil discourse must replace
increasingly unhelpful confrontation and in-your-face insult. Hate speech up to a point is protected as
free speech, for the very good reason that “sunlight is the best disinfectant”
(see below). What needs to be stopped is
actual incitement to violence. Also,
hateful lies should be checked by false-advertising laws. I thouroughly agree with the proposal to make
campaign statements and public speeches by leading politicians sworn testimony,
with mandatory jail sentences for deliberate lies.
The simplest, cleanest model of mass violence is that a strongman
backed and funded by sunsetting industries whips up hatred of minorities that
have long been salient as weaker rivals or enemies. Obviously, action must start by preventing
evil leaders from rising, and preventing them from leading a charge by
deploying ever more vicious rhetoric.
Individual violence is more complex, but turns on issues of greed, power,
and social acceptance and respect.
Individuals are not, however, violent because of those motives; they are
violent because they have learned that violence is the best way to get those
goals under existing circumstances.
Alternatives to violence thus become needed. Peterson and Denaley’s findings (see above,
p. 33) show that mass shooters have a characteristic background, involving
abuse, and usually announce their plans in some way before they act. Proactive prevention of abuse and proactive
listening, reaching out, and treating young people with violent and suicidal or
murderous ideology is obviously needed.
From a wider social context, several obvious things need doing in the
United States to accomplish any of these goals.
Among these are: making campaign statements sworn testimony to prevent
outright lying, ensuring voting rights, ending gerrymandering and voter
suppression, getting big money out of politics and making all political money
fully transparent, fighting corruption, saving the environment, and cracking
down on hate crimes and incitement of them.
We need an entire new civil rights movement, focused immediately on
putting a total end to gerrymandering, voter suppression, partisan purging of
voter rolls, new Jim Crow laws, and similar games. We need to limit money in politics, starting
with a Constitutional amendment to end dark money, demand full disclosure, and
force politicians to recuse themselves from voting to help, subsidize, or act
in support of any direct economic interest (as opposed to public-interest and
worker groups, and even trade organizations) that funded their campaigns.
Freedom of speech must be defended, but does not include direct
incitement to violence, or libel, or false advertising. These provide enough of a platform to allow
us to ban campaign lies, Fox News-style public lying for evil ends, and direct
rabid hatred that cannot help but lead to violence. A great deal of “hate speech”—ordinary racist
rhetoric, for instance—must be protected, because if it is banned then those in
power will ban anything that annoys them.
This is a “slippery slope” argument that is quite true. We have hundreds of years of experience, in
every realm from religion to education to politics to community “civility” and
“political correctness,” to prove it. The
principle is, once again, my rights stop where yours start.
A major part of this must be vastly increasing research on social
problems, especially evil as herein defined.
Both scientific research and investigative reporting are required. The great newspapers are a shadow of their
former selves. We desperately need much
more exposure of dark places.
We must ban subsidies as much as possible, and certainly ban subsidies
to maintain dinosaur industries that cost more than they produce. We must block
the chain from lobbyist to “regulator”; those who lobby for a polluting
industry can never be allowed to regulate it.
Above all, we must take actual social and environmental costs—the hard
cash people lose—into account in all social and political accounting. Oil is profitable only because its real costs
are passed on as externalities. Many
calculations have shown that gasoline would cost hundreds of dollars per gallon
if those costs were internalized. (For
more, see Anderson 2010.)
The only way to get these goals accomplished is the tried and true
combination of mass peaceful demonstrations, teach-ins, media campaigns with
new media dedicated to the task, proposals for comprehensive legislation, and
above all getting people voted into office at all levels of government from
waterworks boards on up (see Chenowith and Stephan 2012 on what succeeds in
people’s campaigns). These are the
measures that worked for the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the
antiwar movements, the environmental movement, and every other popular cause
that got beyond shouting. Voting and
media attention without demonstrations and other active measures are not
enough.
Social pressures,
leadership, and social behavior are critical, motivating most of the good and
evil behavior; cultural models are critical in providing plans for how to act;
and individual personality and environment factors finally determine what a
given person will do. The social,
political, and economic environment provides a back story, but the direct
motivation is typically social pressure by leaders and peers. Improving bad situations requires full social
change. Revolutions rarely work; they
simply bring other violent leaders to the fore to replace earlier ones. Social and cultural change requires deeper
and more systematic, and therefore more gradual, evolution. This requires personal commitment. The oft-heard argument that changing oneself
is a waste of time because only vast social changes matter is
self-defeating. Without changing
ourselves, unless we are already committed actors, we will never have the
courage or drive to change anything.
Bringing
about all those changes will depend on teaching and otherwise carrying the
word, on contributing to organizations that fight for justice and truth, and on
modeling civil behavior. People need to
choose reasonably what groups to join and what groups to prioritize. Joining extremist political groups is the
order of the day. We need centrist
groups, community organizations, aid associations, and other groups that will
bring people together to help and to meet each other—groups that will be
unifying rather than divisive.
One cannot keep a totally
open and tolerant mind. As in eating and
drinking, moderation is advised. The
ills I am addressing in this essay—genocide and its small-scale correlates such
as bullying, callousness, and domestic violence—do not deserve “open minded”
assessment. They must be stopped.
Very few ways of feeding
the good wolf have worked in the past, but those few have worked very
well. Unsurprisingly (given the human
condition), they largely add up to empowerment of individuals through provision
of human rights. We also need to go back
to civility in society, as long argued by Jurgen Habermas (1987), and stop
fighting each other over every change.
By
far the best way has been guaranteeing civil and human rights, equal for all,
before the law, and enforced strictly by executive and court action. This has eroded disastrously in the United
States, but grown steadily in much of western Europe.
Gandhi,
Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela exemplify the most important:
appealing to solidarity and natural human social goodness in the face of
oppression. Next most important and
effective has been empowerment. Doing
scientific research to find out what improves the human condition is a strong
third. Forthrightly opposing evil is a
long fourth, but still needs to be done.
Group
hatred has traditionally been addressed by getting the groups together in
positive situations, giving them common goals or working with the common goals
they already have, affirming irenic and tolerant values, stressing the
advantages of diversity, looking for common ground, striving to make groups as
equal as possible (at least in opportunity and before the law), stoutly
defending civil rights and explaining why those are beneficial to all, and other
well-known methods.
All
this does work, but not perfectly. The
most notorious case of failure was the heroic attempt made in Yugoslavia to get
the various nationalities in that “united Slav” (“Yugo-“Slavia”) country to get
along. Unfortunately, it was
counterproductive; the well-meaning majority tried too hard, alienated a
vicious and noisy minority, and faced breakup, war, and genocide when
Yugoslavia threw over communism (these insights come from my own questioning
and observation in Croatia in 1988).
“Multiculturalism” in the United States has had some similar problems;
when it emphases the classic American e
pluribus unum, it works, but too often it emphasizes differences and even
antagonisms without emphasizing the common ground and common goals. It often
fostered the deadly mistake of seeing subcultures and ethnic communities as
closed, steel-walled spheres, completely cut off from each other. That view directly causes and fosters ethnic
hatred.
Some
traditional societies have dealt with potential religious conflicts for
centuries, and managed them by a number of social rules and strategies. The people of Gondar, an Ethiopian city that
is a traditional stronghold of Christianity but has a large Muslim population,
have learned to get along, and have taken ISIS in stride, partly by casting it
as non-Muslim or otherwise aberrant (Dulin 2017). Similar accommodations have worked until
recently in many countries, but the breakdown of very old and long-established
ones in Iraq, Syria, and China bodes ill for the future.
The
standard methods of increasing happiness—gratitude, good thoughts, reaffirming
values, and other mindfulnesses (Lyubomirsky 2007)—are also of some use, but
never transformed a society. Only
uniting economic incentives, charismatic leaders, and common morality ever
works to improve conditions. We need
positive and inclusive dialogue that is factual yet hopeful. We need healing and rejuvenation. Recall, also, that mindful meditation reduces
existential fear and thus defensiveness and intolerance (Park and Pyszczynski
2019).
Wayne Te Brake (2017), studying
the decline of religious war in Europe, found that nation-states had to
facilitate the process of getting people to live in harmony. The bottom line was that people who were
neighbors had to get along. Where the cuius regio, eius religio rule held, the
country had only one religion, and intolerance kept right on, but in areas
where pluralism was established, governments finally realized they had to
guarantee rights to religious minorities—ushering in the Enlightenment, by slow
degrees. It appears that government
peacemaking led to philosophers and politicians coming up with ideas of
religious freedom, which eventually led to ideas of liberty of conscience. Something similar happened with civil rights
in the modern United States in the 1950s and 1960s, but the results have been
less satisfactory so far. State and
local governments have dragged their feet.
Still, the model is there.
The
good wolf is fed by empowerment, which brings confidence and hope, and allows
rational assessment and coping. Weakness
and fear feed the bad wolf. They lead to
scared and defensive reactions, including sudden breakdowns into terror, rage,
and violence, and allowing strongmen above the law to rule the polity. Society,
especially social leaders protecting their stakes, almost always do the actual
feeding.
For having a decent world, and for having a
future for the world, we must make moral choices, not simply economic
ones. We must make a moral choice to
help people rather than hurt them. That
involves honesty with ourselves about the ways that weakness, resentment,
overreaction to trivial or imagined slights, and overreaction to trivial harms
combine to feed the bad wolf and thus feed displacing resentment onto weaker
people and onto the natural world.
Then we must work to feed the good
wolves, all of them, everywhere, out in the world. The food of good wolves is caring and
consideration for all, especially as shown through empowerment by decent,
supportive, respectful behavior.
Freedom
of speech is most at risk. The Trump
administration is attacking the media in exactly the way Hitler did in the
1930s. Unfortunately, some of the
misguided “progressive” camp is going after the media too, in the name of
suppressing “hate speech.” There are
classic problems with this, all identified by the Founding Fathers, and by Tom
Paine and John Stuart Mill.
Since
the people in power will naturally be the ones doing the censoring, all
opposition to those in power will soon be censored, and everything that
supports them will be permitted, no matter how vile it is. This is, in practice, the greatest reason why
censorship is generally bad.
Hate speech is in the eye of the beholder. No definition can be tight enough to stop
people from insisting that what they say is not hate speech, and what their
opponents say is always hate speech no matter how nicely phrased. (Politeness can be a way of subtly
maintaining white privilege, for instance.)
Hate speech can be educative–if not the speech itself, then from the
fact that people say it, believe it, and act on it.
Suppressing
speech drives it underground, where it spreads like wildfire—as censored things
always do—and is attractive simply because it was suppressed. There is an Arab saying that “if you forbid
people from rolling camel dung into little balls with their fingers, they would
do it, because they would think that if it is forbidden there must be something
good about it.” Moreover, suppressing
speech makes the suppressed people into instant martyrs, no matter how unsavory
they seemed before.
Last,
it is immoral to shut other people up because you happen to dislike what they
say. They have a right to their opinions
and their mouths.
If
what they say is downright libel, or a direct call to violence, or a lie that
directly leads to physical harm to people (like a con game, or incitement to
murder), that is something else. Lying
under oath is properly forbidden. It has
been suggested that campaign speech should be sworn testimony, at least when
facts are stated, and thus lies like Trump’s would be illegal. We also have no freedom to disclose
proprietary secrets, or to plagiarize.
Freedom is not a matter of absolute freedom; it is a matter of
considering others’ rights. However, the
wise activist errs on the side of liberty.
All
this we learned in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the 1960s, but it
has all been said before, ever since Voltaire and Jefferson.
Similar
conclusions apply to freedom of press, assembly, and religion. However, religion has now been so thoroughly
abused as a cover for political campaigning and even for money-laundering and
profiteering that it must be restricted.
Taxing the churches seems an inescapable necessity if the US is to
flourish. Politics is probably protected
speech, up to a point, but outright campaigning by churches—with donations of
laundered or illegally-gained money—is banned in the US by the Johnson
Rule. It is inappropriate for churches
and temples.
Preachers
who are clearly in it for the money rather than the souls are all too common,
and tax laws must recognize this. The
problem is not just one of politics; the rapidly escalating religious hate that
has swept the world, and notably the United States, in the last generation is
to a very large degree a product of preaching for money. Corrupt and evil men posing as preachers find
that the easiest way to make it pay is to preach hate and right-wing
politics. This is the story of ISIS and
the Taliban as well as of Trump’s preacher claque.
Thus,
cleaning up the institution of
religion would seem to be a part of assuring liberty of conscience. Above all, though, liberty of conscience must
be preserved.
Tolerance,
the most desperately needed and vitally important civic virtue, is also under
an astonishing amount of attack from the left as well as the right.
It
really should need no defense. Many of
the same considerations as those above will apply.
If
you do not tolerate others, they will not tolerate you. They may not even if you do tolerate them,
but, in general, hate breeds hate, acceptance breeds acceptance.
We are all in this together. A functioning society must grow, change, and
build, and can do that only by unified effort, mutual aid, and solidarity. The alternative is mutual destruction. The dominant group may win for a while by doing
others down, but it merely hurts itself—first by losing those other groups and
whatever they can offer, but second by starting a spirit of hate and rivalry
that inevitably tears up the dominant group itself, in due course of time.
As
usual, there are limits. Obviously, we
do not want to tolerate rape, murder, or robbery. The argument is for tolerating people as
individuals—the essential personhood behind whatever unacceptable behavior they
may sometimes present. They deserve
fairness and consideration, but if they are acting to harm others, they must be
stopped. Toleration of ideas is a good;
we need to argue and negotiate and work them out. Toleration of specific behaviors is allowable
only in so far as those behaviors do not actively and unnecessarily harm
people. Not all harm to people is
bad. Plato and Aristotle were already
pointing out 2400 years ago that surgeons “harm” people for their own
good. One wants to minimize hurt, but
some pain is necessary.
In
short, tolerance is a major goal, but must be qualified by common sense. None of
this affects tolerating people as human beings, or, for that matter,
tolerating other life forms. Essential
acceptance of living beings, simply because they are fellow travelers on the
planet, is the basic and essential need
of a functioning society.
It
is therefore unacceptable to hate or reject anyone because of skin color,
ethnicity, language, history, or the like.
No morality can justify that.
Total personal rejection of anyone for any reason is unacceptable. We may have to kill a person in self-defense,
but we are not given license to hate that individual simply for being. We are also not given license to kill off his
entire ethnic group just because he attacked us. We know that “races” are not biological
entities, and that all human groups are pretty much identical in potential, but
even if we did find a group that was—say—less intelligent by some measure than
the average, we would morally have to pay them the same respect and treatment
as everyone else.
This
is the real underpinning of the classic Enlightenment virtues: liberty,
equality, fairness, justice as fairness, and civil behavior in civil
society. Never mind that the
Enlightenment was financed by slavery and colonialism. The point is that much of its content was
explicitly directed against slavery
and class discrimination. No one in the
history of the world had opposed slavery in general until 18th-century
religious thinkers, largely Quakers, did so.
Fairness means serious attention to disadvantaged groups, not just
even-handed treatment of all. Equality
before the law has been in sorry shape under Trump, with flagrant favoring of
whites and rich people over the rest.
Racism
and religious bigotry are more open now than they have been since the 1960s or
perhaps even the 1920s. However, the
real underlying problem seems to be a more general increase in hostility and
antisocial aggression. We have mass
shootings in which the victims are country music fans (Las Vegas), Baptist
churchgoers (Texas), Walmart customers, and other ordinary Americans. By far the greatest number of mass-murder and
terrorist killings in recent years have been of this sort; very few are either
Islamic-extremist or otherwise religiously or racially motivated. Ordinary murders are also increasing again
after years of decline.
It
thus seems that there is a major need for calming speeches and for ideas on how
to reduce violence and antagonism in general.
Certainly, we still need to combat racism, and to defend freedom of
religion, especially freedom from bullying in the name of religion. We need even more to combat overall
hostility.
This
brings us to solidarity: Mutual aid,
mutual support, mutual empowerment and strengthening. It worked for the labor movement and for the old-time
Democrats; disunion, carefully nurtured by the right wing and now by the far
left, has led to the decline of both those institutions. The war between Clinton and Sanders
supporters took down Clinton in 2016, and will guarantee a Republican win in
2020 if it is not resolved.
A
major part of this is civility. We are
getting farther and farther from civil discourse. The right wing is usually the leader and
always the most successful in extreme, exaggerated, intemperate, and insulting
remarks, and we should leave that to them.
We always lose if we try that tactic.
This
brings up science and environment. The
Trump administration, including the Republicans in Congress, have launched a
full-scale war against both. They do not
stop with dismissing science that is embarrassing to their corporate donors,
such as research on climate change and pollution. They have attacked everything from
conservation science to Darwinian evolution.
This is perhaps the area where the Republican base—giant primary-production
firms, racists, and right-wing religious extremists—shows itself most
clearly. “Scientific” racism and
creationism are now supported; the genuine science that disproves these is
attacked. Budget cuts to basic science
and to science education are planned; they are serious enough to virtually
destroy both. Republicans realize that
promoting such a wide anti-scientific agenda—climate change denial, claims that
pesticides are harmless to humans, anti-vaccination propaganda,
anti-evolutionism, racism, and so on—can only succeed if the entire enterprise
of science is attacked. The whole
concept of truth is a casualty, with the calls for “alternative facts.” Ideas of proof, evidence, data, and expertise
are regarded as basically hostile to Republicanism.
Clearly,
it will be national suicide ot allow this to go on. Not only is further scientific research
necessary to progress; a government that makes policy in defiance of the facts
of the case will not survive. We have
already been afflicted with Zika, MRSA, and a host of other germs because of
indifferent attention to public health.
Rising sea levels are eating away at coastlines. Bees and other critically important insects
are disappearing. Foreign policy made in
a fact-free environment has devastated the Middle East. The future will be incalculably worse. Attention to science education, moral
education, and humanistic education remains small.
Part
of this is environmental concern, and there we need to draw on traditional
moralities. Most cultures, worldwide,
have solved the problems of sustainability—usually by teaching respect for all
beings. Children absorb this at a very
young age. They go on to remember that
trees, fish, grass, and future humans all need to be regarded as worthy of
consideration—to be used only as necessary and to be protected for future uses
or simply to keep them alive. The
western world has long been an outlier, worldwide, by treating resources as
things to destroy without a second thought.
With
a proper spirit of respect, we will be able to preserve species and
environments and to avoid destroying the environment with pollutants and
excessive construction. In the short
run, we will have to fall back on laws.
The framework existing as of 2016 was inadequate but was a good start;
it is now lost, and we will have to start from scratch, hopefully with better
laws to be designed in future. There are
countless books on solving the environmental crisis, and to go further into it
here would be tedious. What matters is
recognizing that we must think of sustainability and respect.
The
Endangered Species Act has been under permanent attack by Republicans since it
was proposed. The ostensible reason is
that the act saves worthless weeds and bugs at the expense of human interests. The real reason is that it protects habitat
that corporate interests want to use.
Balancing
environmental protection against immediate use is always difficult, and
requires much more attention than it usually receives, but in this case there
should be no question. “Extinction is
forever.” Once a species is extinct, it
can never be brought back (despite recent claims for reconstruction through
DNA—still merely a vision). Most of the
species proposed for protection are economically and ecologically valuable. A few “weeds and bugs” do get protection, but
they are probably more important than they look. We still have no idea what is important in
nature. Sometimes, loss of an apparently
minor species has caused meltdown of a whole ecological system. Beyond mere utility, there is an issue of
respect for life and living things.
Individuals can be replaced; species cannot.
We
also need a mechanism for moving quickly to protect species that collapse
suddenly. A new pesticide, an epidemic,
a rampantly multiplying introduced pest, or an ill-considered human action can
rapidly change a species from common to endangered.
The
need for environmental protection and conservation is now obvious to everyone
except certain giant corporate interests, who persist in seeing everything
natural as a problem to be eliminated.
Even far-right activists admit a need for some action. Sustainability of resource use is obviously
necessary when at all possible, given the rapid expansion of US population and
economic activity. Some things will
inevitably be lost; we need to restore a great deal to make up for that.
Anti-pollution
rules, wise use rules, and conservation in general are under full and total
attack by the few corporate interests, however.
This has led to some extreme rhetoric on all sides. Always, the worst problem is the fossil fuel
industry, which not only causes most of the pollution and global warming, but
is fighting for its life against cheaper, more efficient, ecologically
preferable energy sources. It now
survives thanks to enormous taxpayer subsidies, so it plows vast sums into
lobbying and into spreading disinformation.
The amount this industry spends on those activities could very possibly
finance a full-scale conversion to clean energy.
One
huge problem that is widely ignored is loss of farmland. Soil conservation has been quite effective in
the US in recent years, leading to complacency.
The real problems now are urbanization and pollution. Vast areas of productive soil and waters are
lost to these. California has urbanized
almost a third of its farmland, including almost all the very best land, in the
last two centuries. Within my memory,
“Silicon Valley” (the San Jose Valley) was probably the most productive orchard
land in the world. It now has no
orchards at all. Nothing is being done
to halt the steady conversion of the best land to suburbs and parking
lots. Other states suffer less, but the
problem is nationwide (and worldwide).
Conversely,
there are some reasons to pull back on Obama’s new national monuments, and
rather more reasons to look for more due process in future. Obama declared vast areas of mixed-use land
as national monument, without local consultation or input, and with some
disregard for established interests. In
general, one can only sympathize with land protection, but more local input is
highly desirable for both pragmatic and democratic reasons.
Forestry
has also suffered from a see-saw battle between lock-down preservation and
totally destructive and wasteful clearcutting.
Wiser solutions (reforestation, controlled burning, thinning, etc.) have
been well known for over 100 years. They
are too rarely invoked today. A scan of
satellite photographs of Oregon is instructive:
tiny pockets of overcrowded locked-down preserves, surrounded by vast
moonscapes of badly recovering clearcuts.
Oregon has lost most of its songbirds, as well as its forestry
futures. There is a desperate need to
maintain more wilderness, for reasons that have filled many whole books, but
that would need to include some burning to preserve actual wild conditions.
Specific
conservation areas of major concern:
Biodiversity and endangered species preservation
Forest management: sustainable logging, controlled
burning, disease control, etc.
Grasslands, wetlands and streams, brushlands,
deserts: sustainable management
Agriculture: getting away from deadly chemicals,
continuing to fight soil erosion, saving farmland from urbanization, reducing
meat and increasing vegetables, etc.
Pollution
Urban sprawl and urban crowding; urban blight;
lack of parks, markets, etc.
Aesthetics
Park and recreation areas that are actually
accessible to everyone
Environmental education
Regulating imports: banning endangered species and
hunting trophies, controlling dangerous pest importation, banning palm oil,
banning or discouraging other ecocidal crops, etc.
There
is now no question that the world is
warming rapidly, and that human-released greenhouse gases are the main
reason. The outright denialist positions
are now apparently monopolized by public-relations people working for fossil
fuel corporations. (There is a long list
of books and articles documenting this.)
Since not only all scientists, but all persons who have spent much time
outdoors over more than a couple of decades, must admit that global warming is
occurring, the denialists have fallen back on saying that it’s happened
before. Indeed it has; we know the
causes, which were either the earth changing its tilt in regard to the sun (so
the sun more effectively warmed the earth) or natural releases of greenhouse
gases, especially carbon dioxide and methane.
The most dramatic well-known episode of that was a massive outpouring of
CO2 from volcanoes, about 50 million years ago.
The Eocene world warmed rapidly and dramatically, and stayed warm for
about 200,000 years. Then it cooled so
fast that trees growing in the high Arctic froze in place. Explorers unthinkingly used some of them for
firewood, only later discovering that their firewood was 50 million years
old. We are now releasing quantities of
greenhouse gases comparable to those released by the volcanoes.
The
immediate consequences include slow but sure sea level rise, and increase in
global temperatures to the point where major changes in biota and in human
lives will occur. In a bit of karma, the
world’s main oil producing region, the lowland Middle East, will become
uninhabitable in a few decades, as air temperatures soar into the 180s. No one knows where this will end. There is no reason to expect that the earth
will not suffer the fate of Venus, with surface temperatures in the hundreds of
degrees.
The
fastest and most effective way to deal with this is by leaving or restoring
natural vegetation, especially forests.
That alone could blot up 20% of atmospheric carbon, given quite possible
scenarios. Other agricultural changes in
the direction of less fuel-intensive, more biointensive farming would greatly
help also. There is a long literature on
this, some reviewed in:
Griscom, Bronson; Justin Adams; Peter Ellis; Richard Houghton; Guy Lomax; et
al. 2017. “Natural Climate Solutions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 114:11645-11650.
Ultimately, the solution
must extend to clean power; power generation for electric grids,
transportation, and industry accounts for the other 80% of greenhouse gas
release.
The denial industry has
been financed by the large fossil-fuel corporations, who have hired
public-relations firms and in-house scientists.
The Koch brothers are the most conspicuous organizers and funders of the
effort, but ExxonMobil, Shell, and other firms have been involved.
Health
All
other developed countries, and many less developed ones, now have government
health care systems: socialist, single-payer, or government-insured. All these systems work better than the US
system, but every normal measure: life expectancy, days lost to work, maternal
mortality, infant mortality, and coping with illnesses in general. The US mix of government, private insurance,
and private or religious health care is a disaster. American pay twice as much as Europeans for
vastly inferior care. The only
reasonable solution is to expand Medicare and Medicaid to cover everyone, while
also expanding the CDC and other government agencies that deal with
health.
Health
education is another problem, as is the level of nutrition in virtually all environments
in the US (and, in this case, most of the rest of the world also).
Research
should add more work on prevention and education to the ongoing research on
actual pathology and treatment. We are
not doing enough to prevent conditions like substance abuse. We are not doing enough to stop pollution
and clean up polluted environments.
Education
Another
value in extreme danger under the Trump administration is education. His Secretary of Education opposes the whole
idea of education, in the usual sense, and totally opposes public
education. She is systematically
planning to minimize schooling and turn it into indoctrination in right-wing
views. We need the exact opposite:
education to produce genuinely better people—people who are not hateful bullies,
but who want to help others.
Americans
are not getting the type of education they need. This would be one that 1) teaches civics,
including the Constitution and a non-whitewashed US history; 2) teaches actual
science and how one can tell falsehoods and investigate truth; 3) teach the
young about the depth and complexity of human emotions.
Humanistic
education these days runs too heavily to comic books and other media that may
be well enough in themselves, but do not have the sustained engagement with
human feelings and thoughts that one gets from Shakespeare, Cao Xueqin,
Dostoievsky, Thomas Mann, or Toni Morrison.
Serious music seems to have disappeared from most people’s lives; again,
whatever is true or not about “quality,” music of Victoria or Beethoven engages
much more deep and complex emotions than the popular stuff. Whatever one likes or feels is appropriate,
people need more insights into humanity than they get from American popular
culture. A reasonable order of teaching
children would be starting them with civil behavior (considerate, respectful,
sharing; responsible reasonable), then going on to teach compassion and
helpfulness because we are all in this together and must follow something like
the Golden Rule. This should be done along
with reading, writing, history, and math, if we are to survive.
The
Republican tax cuts have caused a massive and steadily increasing flow of
wealth from the poor and middle class to the super-rich. Cutting tax deductions that the middle class
uses, while maintaining those for the rich, accompanies huge cuts to the
highest brackets of taxing and trivial and temporary cuts to the rest of
us. The resulting rise in national debt
will be managed by cutting Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other
programs that transfer wealth to the less fortunate. The worst problem with that, from an economic
point of view, is that money in those programs is immediately spent—it goes
directly into circulation, to buy goods and services. The rich, in contrast, hoard their money,
waiting for ideal investment possibilities.
This
is bad enough in the current good times, but Republican policies will certainly
cause a depression in the near future.
At that point the less affluent will lose their jobs and savings, and
the rich will have every incentive to move their wealth offshore—investing in
other countries or stashing their money in tax shelters like Bermuda and the
Cayman Islands. Other countries will be
developing while the US is depressed; hence the rich will invest in the other
countries.
By
that time, also, education will have been devastated by Republican policies and
funding cuts (see Kansas, currently leading in that area). There will be no pool of young, educated
people to re-grow the economy. The
depression will feed on itself, bringing the United States down, and letting
other nations pick up the lead.
The
Democrats must unite, first of all, before doing anything else. The current disunion (routinely described in
the media as a “circular firing squad”) is suicidal. Democrats will never win any close elections
until they at least vote for each other.
Then,
obviously, appealing to the former base—the great working class—is the next
most important thing to do. Democrats
are perceived, with much reason, as having forsaken the workers to pursue other
issues, many of which are of interest mainly to well-to-do, educated
urbanites. Populist issues like health
care and tax fairness should be foregrounded.
Third
is getting out the vote. This should be
obvious, but Democrats have failed to do it for the last several
elections. Money is spent on lavish
media campaigns—not terribly effective—instead of the proven doorbell-ringing
and precinct phoning and activism.
Fourth
is a concentrated fight against voter suppression and gerrymandering. Again, this should be obvious, but Democratic
officials have been surprisingly quiet about it.
Fifth
is more aggressive calling out the Trump administration on their constant lies
and misrepresentations, and above all naming names of their funders and backers
who are really calling the dishonest shots—the Koch brothers on global warming,
for instance.
There
are many other issues I could name, but those five, in order, seem to me the
key ones. Without attention to these
five, the Democratic party is finished, and the US will be a one-party nation.
First,
the standard freedoms, including all human and civil rights, guarantee of
impartial justice (especially impartial to dollars) and rights to
organize. Explicitly, money is not
speech.
Next,
full rights to a decent environment—minimal pollution and waste, no subsidies
for primary production, preservation of as much of nature as possible given the
need to maintain a decent standard of living.
Next,
no offensive war; war only to defend the country from direct attack, but that
can cover going after terrorists abroad.
Then,
firm graduated tax rate, written into the constitution. No tax exemptions except for legitimate
business and work expenses, and actual, effective charities. No exceptions for
churches, for “charities” that do not spend over 80% of their incomes on actual
charity work (as opposed to “overhead” and administration), or political
outfits masquerading as “non-profits.”
Offshore tax havens and the like would be absolutely illegal, with
extreme penalties.
No subsidies, no favoring specific businesses,
minimal restriction of business and trade, but firm regulations such that harm
and cheating do not happen.
Free
universal health care (free up to a point—small deductibles possible, and no
free discretionary treatment such as plastic surgery for looks).
Free
universal education with arts as well as sciences in the schools.
Savage
penalties for corruption, which would be defined to include donating campaign
funds beyond a set low limit.
Universal
national service: a year in the military, a year doing environmental work, then
a year of social work. Lifetime
emergency call-up, as in Switzerland.
Discouragement
of hate and hate speech. Citizens see
their duty as opposing it and damping it down.
No penalties, but extreme, savage penalties for violating civil rights
and for hate crimes.
Campaign
fund regulations, especially in sensitive things like judicial elections.
Aesthetics
encouraged; national conservation in museums, sites, etc.
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