THE DARK SIDE, ANCIENT AND MODERN.

In his book, Peacemaking Among Primates, Frans de Waal passes on a striking story told to him by a German ethologist who worked among very primitive tribes in the inaccessible highlands of New Guinea. Two village heads were given a flight in an aeroplane. They asked for a side door to be kept open, despite being told this would make them very cold, as they were wearing nothing but their penis sheaths. Then they said they wanted to bring two heavy stones on the flight. They explained that they wanted to drop the stones on an enemy village. The ethologist realised that he had been present at the invention of bombing by Neolithic man.

The subject matter of the Iliad is a grim and protracted war with deaths and horrors often described in detail. Simone Weil was right to call it a "poem of force". The continuities with events in out own time are depressing for those of us who wonder if war and cruelty are too deeply rooted in our nature to be eliminated. But the poem -especially in the description of the shield his mother has ordered to be made for Achilles- amid the dark of war also celebrates the light. It gives a sense of the beauty and richness of life: of laden vineyards, of wedding dances, music, ploughing and harvesting.

In deliberate contrast, W.H. Auden's great poem on the atrocities of our modern world has a shield that portrays "quite another scene".

THE LUBIANKA PRISON WAS A PLACE OF TORTURE AND DEATH IN STALIN'S MOSCOW.

TODAY THE VICTIMS' STORY IS TOLD IN THE MEMORIALS OPPOSITE THE LUBIANKA.

OTHER MOSCOW MEMORIALS ARE IN THE GARDEN OF FALLEN HEROES.

The Manicheans, and Freud's Fateful Question.

It is obvious that humans have the potential to do terrible things to each other. But we have another side too. The early Christian "Manichean heresy" saw the world as a continuing struggle between the light and the dark. When interpreted, not as a metaphysical struggle between the forces of God and the Devil, but as a psychological conflict inside us, the view is very plausible. Will the dark side prevail, perhaps destroying us all? Or can we leave war and atrocity behind us? Or will the struggle between the two never end?

Some reflections on the psychological lessons that can be derived from the darker side of twentieth century history: They are linked to the project undertaken in Humanity, a Moral History of the Twentieth Century.

One was an interview on a Boston radio station, in a programme called "The Connection", notable for the wide-ranging and thoughtful questions of the interviewer Christopher Lydon:

Dr. Gwen Adshead, a psychiatrist working in Broadmoor Hospital, and I were interviewed together by Melvyn Bragg in his BBC radio programme In Our Time. One theme of Melvyn Bragg's questions was the relationship between the possible historical, social and psychological explanations I had suggested for the great collective atrocities such as genocide and what a psychiatrist such as Gwen Adshead could learn from studying her patients about the causes of murder and other violent crimes carried out by individuals.

Explanations of the great atrocities were also discussed in this unedited material for a filmed interview with David Hulme of the magazine Vision. His questions came partly from his own religious perspective. I was stimulated by the challenge of articulating what we disagree about and at the same time exploring how much common ground we have.

Ingredients for an Interview.

Terror, the "War on Terror", Atrocities and Torture.

Here are a few attempts to respond to some recent atrocities. The first is a comment on how atrocites carried out indiscriminately against groups, whether terrorist bombing or indiscriminate shelling or bombing by military forces, are justified by those who order them or those who carry them out. Often the justifications rest on an illusion of collective responsibility. I wrote about this in a Festschrift for Amartya Sen:

The Illusion of Collective Responsibility.

Especially when we are remembering some harm or humiliation inflicted on "us", we are prey to the illusion of collective responsibility. "They" (all of them!) have these bad characteristics, which were expressed in what they did to us, and so they are all responsible. They all deserve what they get as a result.

The illusion is found in the leaders. When Osama bin Laden celebrates 9/11, it is "America" whose nose is rubbed in the dirt. But is it likely that, of the some 3,000 people he killed, all were supporters of American government interventions in the Islamic world? Did the Islamic Americans he killed deserve to have their noses "rubbed in the dirt"? What about the 86 people he killed who came from Japan, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico and the Philippines? The celebration depends on belief in collective responsibility, which in turn depends on not asking these questions about the actual people who get killed.

And when President Bush targeted Afghanistan and Iraq as part of his "war on terror", he was delivering on his promise that the people who knocked these buildings down "will hear us all soon". But how many of the more than 3,000 Afghan civilians killed does this fit? Were there really more people in the 9/11 conspiracy than were killed by it? And the more than 600,000 people, according to some estimates, killed as a result of the Iraq war obviously were not all involved, and perhaps none of them were. Of course other motives were in play... But one reason for early American support of the war was that it was hitting back at Iraq's supposed implication in al-Qaeda terrorism. Among the false beliefs behind this thinking was the illusion of collective responsibility.

This illusion is found not only in the leaders, but also in those who carry out the supposed acts of retribution. It is found in the videotape made by Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the terrorist bombers who struck London on 7 July 2005. He was both British and Islamic, but his words made it clear that his chosen identity was Islamic rather than British. "You" are the people of Britain and other Western countries involved in the Iraq war. "We" are Islamic people.

He said,

our words have no impact upon you, therefore I'm going to talk to you in a language that you understand. Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood... Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetrate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security, you will be our targets. And until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.

The illusion of collective responsibility is linked to the idea that all members of the other group have shared (usually negative) characteristics. Here "you" (British people) are all impervious to the words of Islamic people and so "blood" is chosen as "a language you understand". "Your" support of governments perpetrating atrocities against Islamic people "makes you directly responsible".

With his bomb at Edgware Road Station, Mohammad Sidique Khan killed (apart from himself) six people. One question he might have asked about his potential victims is whether some of them might have been British and Islamic. Another is whether it was likely that all those he killed would be among the minority in Britain who supported the Iraq war. Another is whether the "you" he holds "directly responsible" would include those who took part in London's (largest ever) political demonstration: the one against that war just before it started. The illusion of collective responsibility does not easily survive such questions.

The same illusion helps bring about the kinds of action that fed Mohammad Sidique Khan's resentment. American troops back from Iraq have started to describe atrocities in which some of them participated. According to one report,

The mounting frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the devastating effect of roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many troops to declare open war on all Iraqis. Veterans described reckless firing once they left their compounds. Some shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold along the roadside and then tossed grenades into the pools of gas to set them ablaze. Others opened fire on children.

Some of the soldiers were troubled when, back in America, they thought about how they had felt and acted. One said that the general attitude was "A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi" and explained this: "The soldiers honestly thought we were trying to help the people and they were mad because it was almost like a betrayal. Like here we are trying to help you, here I am, you know, thousands of miles away from home and my family, and I have to be here for a year and work every day on these missions. Well, we're trying to help you and you just turn around and try to kill us."...

The illusion of collective responsibility behind waging open war on all Iraqis... again relies on the collective "you". Again the illusion would not survive such questions as whether the children fired on are really part of the "you" who "just turn round and try to kill us".

The cycle of humiliation and retaliation, together with the linked illusion of collective responsibility, has marked the current conflict. Prisoners of one side may be beheaded, with the atrocity broadcast to the world. Prisoners of the other side may have their religion insulted and may themselves be tortured and sexually humiliated. It is easy to understand the feelings on each side of rage and vengeance. It is less easy to see how to break out of this cycle, created by those on both sides who do not understand how it works.

From Identity, Violence and the Power of Illusion, in Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur (eds.): Arguments for a Better World, Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen, Volume 2: Society, Institutions and Development, Oxford University Press, 2009.

Another response to atrocity was an article requested by the New York Times at the time of Abu Ghraib. Despite having given the impression that it would definitely be published, they decided not to publish it, preferring a (quite good) "human interest" article on Abu Ghraib as an example of how pocket-size cameras have increased the role of photography in recording atrocities.

Article on Abu Ghraib invited and then rejected by the New York Times

Another of the great moral issues of recent times has been the revival of the view that the use of torture may sometimes be acceptable. I had a chance to reflect on this when invited jointly by the Philosophy Department of University College London and by the British Humanist Association to give their annual Bentham Lecture.

Making Genocide Easier: Propaganda that Cuts Off Human Responses.

Most of us are familiar with the role of hate propaganda in helping make atrocities possible. But the general familiarity does not always deaden the shock on coming across a particular item of it. In Nuremberg, the Parteitag Building has been turned into a Museum dedicated to keeping alive the memory of how Nazi atrocities were facilitated by propaganda such as the huge rallies for which the building was created. Despite the familiarity of the rallies, the exhibition is still powerful. Some items surprise as well as shock. One item is a series of quite young schoolchildren's essays and drawings on such themes as "The Jews are our Misfortune". The contents are horrifying. The teachers have corrected such things as spelling mistakes. But they have either agreed with or acquiesced in the sentiments, which are not criticized.

The Fragmentation of Responsibility: The Nazi Genocide, Hiroshima and Global Warming.

Modern collective atrocities are greatly facilitated by the way the social and technological complexity of modern society hooks on to an aspect of our psychology.

One of the barriers to killing or torturing people is the sense people have of their own moral identity: "I do not want to be the kind of person who murders or tortures people". But because modern industrial atrocities involve large numbers of people, who each play only a small role, no-one need feel that they are responsible for what is done. "I am not a murderer. I only drove a train."

The fragmentation of responsibility creates in participants illusions that each of them is doing no harm to anyone. This is clear in the case of such atrocities as the Nazi genocide or Hiroshima. But it applies equally to issues like global warming. Most of us know that, because much electricity comes from sources that add to CO2 emissions, it is important to cut down on our power consumption. But, when it comes to switching off a light or a television on standby, nearly all of us are enormously seduced by the thought that such a small gesture will not make any difference at all, so why bother? A long time before hearing about global warming, I tried to refute the general assumption underlying this kind of thought. My switching off the light is below a discrimination threshold: it will not make a difference anyone will detect. But does this really mean that leaving the light on does no harm at all? I used a thought experiment to argue for an alternative view I called "The principle of divisibility", which says, in terms that may seem fiddly and abstract, that:

In cases where harm is a matter of degree, sub-threshold actions are wrong to the extent that they cause harm, and where a hundred acts like mine are necessary to cause a detectable difference I have caused one hundredth of that detectable harm.

Anyone who doubts this principle should consider the consequences of assigning zero harm to sub-threshold acts.

Suppose a village contains 100 unarmed tribesmen. As they eat their lunch 100 hungry armed bandits descend on the village and each bandit at gunpoint takes one tribesman's lunch and eats it. The bandits then go off, each one having done a discriminable amount of harm to a single tribesman. Next week, the bandits are tempted to do the same thing again, but are troubled by new-found doubts about the morality of such a raid. Their doubts are put to rest by one of their number who does not believe in the principle of divisibility. They then raid the village, tie up the tribesmen, and look at their lunch. As expected, each bowl of food contains 100 baked beans. The pleasure derived from one baked bean is below the discrimination threshold. Instead of each bandit eating a single plateful as last week, each takes one bean from each plate. They leave after eating all the beans, pleased to have done no harm, as each has done no more than sub-threshold harm to each person. Those who reject the principle of divisibility have to agree.

From It Makes no Difference Whether or Not I Do It, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 1975, reprinted in Peter Singer (ed.): Applied Ethics, Oxford Readings in Philosophy, 1986. This line of thought has been developed further in Derek Parfit's "harmless torturers" thought experiment. See his appendix on mistakes in moral mathematics, in his Reasons and Persons, 1984.

The Shape of the Twentieth Century, a symposium at a conference in Potsdam.

I was a speaker, together with Eric Hobsbawm and Robert Paxton, in a symposium on "The Shape of the Twentieth Century", which was part of a conference in Potsdam. The conference, hosted by the Einstein Forum, and by New York's Remarque Institute, looked at the similarities and dissimilarities between Nazism and Communism. Many participants were historians, but a number of people were there because, being Berliners or East Germans, they had experience of both to draw on.

Hobsbawm

Paxton

Glover

The Stasi, Ethical Values and Markus Wolf.

One of the speakers at the Potsdam conference was Markus Wolf, former head of the external side of the Stasi. Earlier in the conference, he and I had chatted in English over coffee and biscuits. He was a nice looking elderly man, smiling and with twinkling eyes. He looked like everyone’s ideal great-uncle. I would never have guessed he was a spymaster, but no doubt that is how a spymaster should be.

His talk (given in German but which we English speakers heard in simultaneous translation) was an account and defence of his professional life. He started in a very sympathetic way, talking about his horror at Nazism as a young man, his ethical commitments to peace and to socialism, and how he became a communist because he saw the KPD as the only people really strongly standing up to Nazism. When the war came he went to Moscow to be trained to work against the Nazis. The bit about Moscow was a bit worrying. He said he saw nothing about the bad side of Stalin. And he made no mention of any reaction he might have had to the Hitler-Stalin pact. He went on to say that he was happy to come back after the war to work for the DDR, the first socialist state in Germany.

After the talk, the questions (given and answered in English) seemed not very probing. Perhaps people felt he had been punished by his prison sentence and that his presence at conferences should be welcomed. I felt a bit more probing was needed. Partly the problem was that the questions (not themselves filmed) were allowed to be bundled together and answered in groups, so that any particular question could if desired be answered very briefly.

In the answer given here he refers to my question, which had been roughly this: "In the early part of your talk, you spoke powerfully about your youthful ethical ideals. I want to ask about your ethical views later in your career. You say you came back to the first socialist state in Germany. But the DDR was not just a socialist state, but also a state claiming to be founded on Karl Marx's teaching. Sometimes Marx was scathing about ethical ideas (such as human rights). Could you say a bit about your ethics while you were leading the Stasi, and in particular whether there were any ethical restraints that set limits to what you were prepared to do?" The response (starting where he says "About Marx and Marxism to discuss today I think will be dificult") does not answer this. In the background you hear me calling out for a fuller response ("His views on morality?. On ethics? Ethical constraints?"). But I got nowhere.

Trapped in the Cycle of War and Violence: Humiliation and the Resulting Backlash.

Nations and other groups often respond to humiliation, especially to humiliating defeat, with a backlash that may bring about the next war. This is a striking feature of the history of the states that once made up Yugoslavia. It can also be seen in the history of German nationalism. The great philosopher of German nationalism, Gottlob Fichte, gave his Addresses to the German People as lectures, after the German defeat by Napoleon in 1807, in French-occupied Berlin.

In 1871, after the Franco-Prussian war, Bismarck insisted on humiliating France in turn by a Prussian victory march down the Champs Elysees.  

The cycle continued. After the First World War, it was the turn of Germany to be humiliated. In addition to the defeat, their leaders were forced to sign on their behalf the “war guilt clauses” that placed the whole blame for the war on Germany. One who felt the humilation acutely was Adolf Hitler. It is impossible to read Mein Kampf without noticing how the boiling rage -its dominant emotion- is linked with the sense of national humiliation. The allies were not subtle about this humiliation, as the photograph of the war memorial statue at Compiegne shows.

It is the German eagle that is hanging upside down and dead on the war memorial. Compiegne was where the railway carriage was used for the signing of the 1918 German surrender, the allies under Marshal Foch on one side of the table and the German military leaders on the other side.

The strength of Hitler’s response to this symbol of humiliation comes out in his arranging for the French surrender in 1940 to be in the same railway carriage, with the German delegation sitting where the Allies had, and Hitler sitting in the seat of Foch. For this second surrender, the memorial with the dead eagle was covered up, as shown at the start of this video clip:

As reported by the CBS correspondent William Shirer, Hitler did stand on the memorial slab on the ground:

I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life. But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph. He steps off the monument and contrives to make even this gesture a masterpiece of contempt. He glances back at it, contemptuous, angry –angry, you almost feel, because he cannot wipe out the awful, provoking lettering with one sweep of his high Prussian boot. He glances slowly round the clearing, and now, as his eyes meet ours, you grasp the depth of his hatred. But there is triumph there too –revengeful, triumphant hate… He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide apart. It is a magnificent gesture of defiance, or burning contempt for this place now and all that it has stood for in the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the German Empire.

 

After all this dark, some hints of light.

Freud again, this time with some cautious optimism:

Freud's thought is echoed by Freeman Dyson's account of the campaign against biological weapons by the molecular biologist Matthew Meselson. (I once had a conversation over dinner with Matthew Meselson when he visited Oxford to give a lecture. Having recently been reading Watson's Molecular Biology of the Gene, I asked him about the beautiful Meselson-Stahl experiment. He was extremely interesting, but I wish I had known about his work against biological warfare, as I would love to have heard about that too.) Here are extracts from Dyson's account of the soft voice of the intellect not resting until it has gained a hearing.

MATTHEW MESELSON.