Back during my first year in grad school, I wrote a lit review on colonist-indigenous violence in British colonial North America that relied somewhat on psychological theories of violence. These theories posit that the vast majority of people have an aversion to practicing violence (there are always a few innate sadists), but that this aversion can be overcome through certain mental stimuli, including social pressure, grievance, and frustration. Most powerful are when those stimuli work in tandem. It's often not just one thing that drives a person to violence but multiple things stacked together: social conformity on top of a sense of victimhood on top of ethnic hatred.
Terrific comment. I always point out to my students that it is true, the Pilgrims has a very good relationship with the Wamponoag for about forty years. They had horrific relations with the neighboring tribes and had no issues with the wholesale slaughter of them when the Puritans arrived. Most students are then shocked that the largest Indian slaughter in any time period was Pequot Massacre in 1637. Carried out mostly by Native America's but abetted by their English, for the time, allies.
Patrick, have you read "The Empathic Civilization" by Jeremy Rifkin?
The author argues (going largely from memory here, and I didn't quite finish the book) that, essentially, energy (harnessing industrial sources of power) and communication (mass literacy, printing, and now electronic communications) have enabled humanity as a whole to "expand its circle of empathy", as it were, seeing more of the world as part of "the in-group" and thus worthy of empathy and protection -- but at the cost of environmental degradation and disruption of traditional family structures. (And had the book been written in the Social Media age, the author might have listed other "costs".)
Important piece. I often find myself frustrated with continued assertions that the Holocaust is somehow uniquely evil in human history, set apart from all else, and then we focus on it as the big evil thing which we learn about. But the danger in this isn’t that we teach about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, as you say, each of these atrocities is unusual in its own way, it’s that if we raise this thing up upon a pedestal and say “this is what evil looks like, and there have been no other instances like it,” we not only let everyone else off the hook, we teach our kids that this sort of evil is unlikely to happen here, or even that it’s impossible.
Presenting these kind of things as mundane, normal, COMMON is essential if we’re going to have a society resistant to producing other horrors in the future.
"Ordinary" white men destroyed the well-to-do black community in Tulsa, setting a fire that burnt down around 1200 homes and killed 300, circa early 20th century. In Milton Meyer's "They Thought They Were Free", more ordinary men burnt down a "Jew church" in Kronenberg Germany 1938. These ordinary German men then went back to their ordinary lives as if nothing happened. The same with Republican insurrectionists, at least the ones not in jail. They are not ordinary people. I've known them as managers, co-workers, and neighbors, and just beneath the surface there's a mean spiritedness along with implied violence that occasionally shows up and shocks me. The German expression is "wildgewordene Spiessbürger" which means according to Meyer, "little men gone wild." It's another way of saying there are a lot of border-line sociopaths out there who will throw punches, drive cars into crowds, and probably more if given the approval. Nothing ordinary or civilized about them in spite of the fact they have families, go on vacations, and root for their favorite ball teams.
I've studied history for the better part of my life (history undergrad, human rights master's, and applying to doctoral programs in poli-sci/peace studies), and still I occasionally find myself sitting in a café, reading something like this, and trying not to sob in public.
The surprise of this truth about human nature is understandable. We have been fed a regular diet of sweetness and light conjured by the Enlightenment for 250 years. The Secular Humanism of that philosophical tsunami demands that we believe our nature is basically good, regardless of the obvious evidence that it is not. Bear in mind that the expansion of the State over the last couple of centuries is to provide the State with the power to create the needed just-right circumstances where that goodness can be realized. Their search continues.
And, frankly, my life experience to date (70 years) clearly shows that if I were provided with the same life circumstances, I would do no better. Thinking differently is self-delusion. Whether one believes they are good people who do bad things or bad people who do good things, the outcome is the same.
There are few worldviews providing an escape from that overbearing human nature. The only one I have found that works is Christianity (properly pursued). The indwelling Holy Spirit is the mechanism through which the trade between our old nature and the new one is conducted. I have found no other, though I searched for it for some time.
Humans are pro-social animals. Most go along to get along. Coupled with fear and deprivation, this characteristic has sustained humanity and also made us extremely dangerous.
But the wall I always hit my head against is that these acts are contra-survival, both short-term and long-term. They don't work for long if they work at all and even when they are seen to be "working", they are working very poorly and inconsistently. Hardly a year of the Roman Empire (or Egyptian or Babylonian or Persian or British or...or...or...) went by when the armies weren't putting down an uprising somewhere.
Really good read, and I enjoyed and appreciated the podcast interview with Daniele Bolelli.
However, I think there is a really glaring omission made in both this and the podcast episode. And that is: it is, overwhelmingly, not ordinary people as a whole that do this. It's ordinary MEN. I really think a conversation about heinous acts committed in the context of warfare and conquest needs to engage with the reality that these are all endeavors that are primarily engaged in by men in very patriarchal societies.
Something about the way men are raised under a patriarchal system leads them to have a sense of entitlement to commit violence against those within their power, those weaker than them. For a man who feels he has the right to control his wife and children through threats of violence (and from what I recall, archaeological remains and historic records indicate that domestic violence was completely normalized in many, many patriarchal societies throughout history) it isn't that big of a stretch to consider it his right to take out whatever feelings of fear and aggression warfare sparked in him on women and children from a different group.
I am only conjecturing, really, but I think it would be very worthwhile to specify and acknowledge that the sorts of behaviours you cover in this article and in the podcast interview are committed primarily by men, not people as a whole.
Having read the essay and listened to the very interesting interview with Daniele Bolelli, I find one issue. Your usage of „people” in particular referring to proportions as in the percentage of perpetrators to those who oppose violence. The statistics you quote speak solely of males. Entirely leaving out the perspective of women - are they co-perpetrators? Accomplices? Victims? Quiet witnesses? How can one talk of truths related to „people” when the only mention of actual women making up 50%+ of humankind refers to an enslaved woman and her daughter neither with any freedom of choice or self-determination?
Great piece Patrick. Its causing me to revisit imperial wars always come home and think about how these two ideas fit together in a way that is both simple and disconcerting.
It also reminded me of the new Jonathan Glazer movie Zone of Interest, where the barrier between the horrifically violent acts of genocide and ordinary home life is a literal wall, which drives home the point really well. Worth seeing!
Really interestin essay and commentary. As someone who has worked with the survivors of trauma for decades, I absolutely agree that ordinary people do terrible things. And the more ordinary the perpetrators are, the more traumatised the survivors are. Where I depart from your hypotheses is when you talk about those men (not people - historically women generally have not participated in campaigns and where they have been caught doing so, have suffered consequences) returned to ordinary life as if those lives were violence free. We are pretty clear that domestic violence of all types, sexual violence against women and children (and often men) have been normalised for thousands of years. Most societies were hierarchical and about structures of power, where having power is consequent on denying it to others. The everyday life absolutely supported harming and even destroying others. Those in power had the ability to make life and death decisions about the bodies and lives of others - public punishments like stocks, branding, amputation, and so on all the way to execution and the most painful way to accomplish that, were normal and so a desenstising level of trauma for all was also normal. The trauma of warfare had it's part, I believe, in reinforcing those everyday behaviours. Trauma is about feeling/being powerless and threatened. Only those with existing personality disorders do not feel fear and threat in war, expecially in hand to hand combat of the past. The numbing and avoidance that is so often a part fo the trauma response, sends them home, not to talk about the horrors, but to victimise others instead. The stats of veterans show very high rates of DV, substance/alcohol abuse, divorce and other miseries including suicide. The blame however was (and is) always placed on the 'other', wicked wives, disobedient children, lazy or malcontent underlings, all who should really have been grateful. The men are also victims of ideas about masculinity and feel ashamed of what they see as aberrant behaviour (fear and lack of control) and work hard to control everything in their orbit to manage their anxiety. There are definitely generational effects of trauma that make one more susceptible to negative responses than, for instance, those who did not grow up with violence. In the 20th C with the arrival of psychology, there was a gradual realisation of the harm warfare did to men who were soldiers. It wasn't until the 70s that Judith Hermann wrote the seminal 'Trauma and Recovery' that outlined how that trauma was entirely the same for women surviving family based trauma. Any explanation of why 'ordinary' people might do terrible things is lacking without a discussion of trauma and its effects and how those effects generate and condone more trauma. You're right there is absolutely no reason to believe that people of the past are particularly different to the present - certainly not in their responses to physical fear. So unless we can reduce the amount of trauma in the general community (and it's astonishing how much there is), we will all continue to be affected by the tragedy of war and the trauma it engenders.
Great piece. As a historian I think historical context matters. We like to assume morality is an absolute in space and time, but it isn’t. And while there is an argument for a certain level of violence being seen as absolute in that no matter when/where basically all humans would recognize it as such, it too is something that is culturally defined as are levels of toleration of it. By this I mean that many past civilizations inhabited worlds that were much more drenched in daily violence than we experience in the modern era, at least for most areas of the world, particularly the western world. Some acts that are abhorrent to us would simply be “Thursday” in other times. This is not to excuse anything, as I agree with your basic premise here about what lurks inside all of us just under the surface, but merely to point out the relative nature of historical context. As I always point out to my students, even though we may see some similarities between us and peoples of the past, we are not them and they were not us. We each inhabit our own time and circumstance.
Strong essay.
Back during my first year in grad school, I wrote a lit review on colonist-indigenous violence in British colonial North America that relied somewhat on psychological theories of violence. These theories posit that the vast majority of people have an aversion to practicing violence (there are always a few innate sadists), but that this aversion can be overcome through certain mental stimuli, including social pressure, grievance, and frustration. Most powerful are when those stimuli work in tandem. It's often not just one thing that drives a person to violence but multiple things stacked together: social conformity on top of a sense of victimhood on top of ethnic hatred.
Terrific comment. I always point out to my students that it is true, the Pilgrims has a very good relationship with the Wamponoag for about forty years. They had horrific relations with the neighboring tribes and had no issues with the wholesale slaughter of them when the Puritans arrived. Most students are then shocked that the largest Indian slaughter in any time period was Pequot Massacre in 1637. Carried out mostly by Native America's but abetted by their English, for the time, allies.
This is a topic I cover at every chance because it's so important. Here's one of those discussions: http://historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/2018/3/31/episode-33-on-good-and-evil-from-my-lai-to-sand-creek If you feel like it, let's do a podcast together on this
I would love to do that.
Wonderful!
Messaged you on Instagram
Patrick, have you read "The Empathic Civilization" by Jeremy Rifkin?
The author argues (going largely from memory here, and I didn't quite finish the book) that, essentially, energy (harnessing industrial sources of power) and communication (mass literacy, printing, and now electronic communications) have enabled humanity as a whole to "expand its circle of empathy", as it were, seeing more of the world as part of "the in-group" and thus worthy of empathy and protection -- but at the cost of environmental degradation and disruption of traditional family structures. (And had the book been written in the Social Media age, the author might have listed other "costs".)
Empathy doesn't scale.
This is chilling.
Important piece. I often find myself frustrated with continued assertions that the Holocaust is somehow uniquely evil in human history, set apart from all else, and then we focus on it as the big evil thing which we learn about. But the danger in this isn’t that we teach about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, as you say, each of these atrocities is unusual in its own way, it’s that if we raise this thing up upon a pedestal and say “this is what evil looks like, and there have been no other instances like it,” we not only let everyone else off the hook, we teach our kids that this sort of evil is unlikely to happen here, or even that it’s impossible.
Presenting these kind of things as mundane, normal, COMMON is essential if we’re going to have a society resistant to producing other horrors in the future.
That, and preventing us from overreacting when violence does intrude on our peaceful (first) world.
"Ordinary" white men destroyed the well-to-do black community in Tulsa, setting a fire that burnt down around 1200 homes and killed 300, circa early 20th century. In Milton Meyer's "They Thought They Were Free", more ordinary men burnt down a "Jew church" in Kronenberg Germany 1938. These ordinary German men then went back to their ordinary lives as if nothing happened. The same with Republican insurrectionists, at least the ones not in jail. They are not ordinary people. I've known them as managers, co-workers, and neighbors, and just beneath the surface there's a mean spiritedness along with implied violence that occasionally shows up and shocks me. The German expression is "wildgewordene Spiessbürger" which means according to Meyer, "little men gone wild." It's another way of saying there are a lot of border-line sociopaths out there who will throw punches, drive cars into crowds, and probably more if given the approval. Nothing ordinary or civilized about them in spite of the fact they have families, go on vacations, and root for their favorite ball teams.
I've studied history for the better part of my life (history undergrad, human rights master's, and applying to doctoral programs in poli-sci/peace studies), and still I occasionally find myself sitting in a café, reading something like this, and trying not to sob in public.
The surprise of this truth about human nature is understandable. We have been fed a regular diet of sweetness and light conjured by the Enlightenment for 250 years. The Secular Humanism of that philosophical tsunami demands that we believe our nature is basically good, regardless of the obvious evidence that it is not. Bear in mind that the expansion of the State over the last couple of centuries is to provide the State with the power to create the needed just-right circumstances where that goodness can be realized. Their search continues.
And, frankly, my life experience to date (70 years) clearly shows that if I were provided with the same life circumstances, I would do no better. Thinking differently is self-delusion. Whether one believes they are good people who do bad things or bad people who do good things, the outcome is the same.
There are few worldviews providing an escape from that overbearing human nature. The only one I have found that works is Christianity (properly pursued). The indwelling Holy Spirit is the mechanism through which the trade between our old nature and the new one is conducted. I have found no other, though I searched for it for some time.
Amen.
Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil.
Perhaps this is the real Original Sin?
Very perceptive.
Humans are pro-social animals. Most go along to get along. Coupled with fear and deprivation, this characteristic has sustained humanity and also made us extremely dangerous.
But the wall I always hit my head against is that these acts are contra-survival, both short-term and long-term. They don't work for long if they work at all and even when they are seen to be "working", they are working very poorly and inconsistently. Hardly a year of the Roman Empire (or Egyptian or Babylonian or Persian or British or...or...or...) went by when the armies weren't putting down an uprising somewhere.
Really good read, and I enjoyed and appreciated the podcast interview with Daniele Bolelli.
However, I think there is a really glaring omission made in both this and the podcast episode. And that is: it is, overwhelmingly, not ordinary people as a whole that do this. It's ordinary MEN. I really think a conversation about heinous acts committed in the context of warfare and conquest needs to engage with the reality that these are all endeavors that are primarily engaged in by men in very patriarchal societies.
Something about the way men are raised under a patriarchal system leads them to have a sense of entitlement to commit violence against those within their power, those weaker than them. For a man who feels he has the right to control his wife and children through threats of violence (and from what I recall, archaeological remains and historic records indicate that domestic violence was completely normalized in many, many patriarchal societies throughout history) it isn't that big of a stretch to consider it his right to take out whatever feelings of fear and aggression warfare sparked in him on women and children from a different group.
I am only conjecturing, really, but I think it would be very worthwhile to specify and acknowledge that the sorts of behaviours you cover in this article and in the podcast interview are committed primarily by men, not people as a whole.
Having read the essay and listened to the very interesting interview with Daniele Bolelli, I find one issue. Your usage of „people” in particular referring to proportions as in the percentage of perpetrators to those who oppose violence. The statistics you quote speak solely of males. Entirely leaving out the perspective of women - are they co-perpetrators? Accomplices? Victims? Quiet witnesses? How can one talk of truths related to „people” when the only mention of actual women making up 50%+ of humankind refers to an enslaved woman and her daughter neither with any freedom of choice or self-determination?
great essay
Great piece Patrick. Its causing me to revisit imperial wars always come home and think about how these two ideas fit together in a way that is both simple and disconcerting.
It also reminded me of the new Jonathan Glazer movie Zone of Interest, where the barrier between the horrifically violent acts of genocide and ordinary home life is a literal wall, which drives home the point really well. Worth seeing!
Really interestin essay and commentary. As someone who has worked with the survivors of trauma for decades, I absolutely agree that ordinary people do terrible things. And the more ordinary the perpetrators are, the more traumatised the survivors are. Where I depart from your hypotheses is when you talk about those men (not people - historically women generally have not participated in campaigns and where they have been caught doing so, have suffered consequences) returned to ordinary life as if those lives were violence free. We are pretty clear that domestic violence of all types, sexual violence against women and children (and often men) have been normalised for thousands of years. Most societies were hierarchical and about structures of power, where having power is consequent on denying it to others. The everyday life absolutely supported harming and even destroying others. Those in power had the ability to make life and death decisions about the bodies and lives of others - public punishments like stocks, branding, amputation, and so on all the way to execution and the most painful way to accomplish that, were normal and so a desenstising level of trauma for all was also normal. The trauma of warfare had it's part, I believe, in reinforcing those everyday behaviours. Trauma is about feeling/being powerless and threatened. Only those with existing personality disorders do not feel fear and threat in war, expecially in hand to hand combat of the past. The numbing and avoidance that is so often a part fo the trauma response, sends them home, not to talk about the horrors, but to victimise others instead. The stats of veterans show very high rates of DV, substance/alcohol abuse, divorce and other miseries including suicide. The blame however was (and is) always placed on the 'other', wicked wives, disobedient children, lazy or malcontent underlings, all who should really have been grateful. The men are also victims of ideas about masculinity and feel ashamed of what they see as aberrant behaviour (fear and lack of control) and work hard to control everything in their orbit to manage their anxiety. There are definitely generational effects of trauma that make one more susceptible to negative responses than, for instance, those who did not grow up with violence. In the 20th C with the arrival of psychology, there was a gradual realisation of the harm warfare did to men who were soldiers. It wasn't until the 70s that Judith Hermann wrote the seminal 'Trauma and Recovery' that outlined how that trauma was entirely the same for women surviving family based trauma. Any explanation of why 'ordinary' people might do terrible things is lacking without a discussion of trauma and its effects and how those effects generate and condone more trauma. You're right there is absolutely no reason to believe that people of the past are particularly different to the present - certainly not in their responses to physical fear. So unless we can reduce the amount of trauma in the general community (and it's astonishing how much there is), we will all continue to be affected by the tragedy of war and the trauma it engenders.
Great piece. As a historian I think historical context matters. We like to assume morality is an absolute in space and time, but it isn’t. And while there is an argument for a certain level of violence being seen as absolute in that no matter when/where basically all humans would recognize it as such, it too is something that is culturally defined as are levels of toleration of it. By this I mean that many past civilizations inhabited worlds that were much more drenched in daily violence than we experience in the modern era, at least for most areas of the world, particularly the western world. Some acts that are abhorrent to us would simply be “Thursday” in other times. This is not to excuse anything, as I agree with your basic premise here about what lurks inside all of us just under the surface, but merely to point out the relative nature of historical context. As I always point out to my students, even though we may see some similarities between us and peoples of the past, we are not them and they were not us. We each inhabit our own time and circumstance.