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.
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.
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!
This is a great piece, thank you. I think two things can both be true - ordinary people can be monsters, and most people try to form a happy society and community. Have you read "Humankind: A Hopeful History?" I think it skews a bit too unbelievable in its chapters on war, but I do believe in general that there are two sides to the coin of human nature, and we should acknowledge both the war like and the peace like (kinda how Ice Cube did in his double album once upon a time)
Hi, this is off topic, but you say write if you want to reach out.
My comment is about your conversations with other historians or archeologists, etc. They are valuable but could be made a little more engaging with more ground level information and less methodology, historiography. For example, I would have liked to hear more about how pigs fitted into the two rains cultivation system of the Indus valley. You and the guest kept referring to a paper but the listeners have not seen it. To reiterate, this is a matter of emphasis, not a complaint about the conversation format per se.
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.
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
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".)
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.
"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.
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!
I’m sure you’ve saw Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing”. There is no good and evil, only human beings and human beings (as he said).
This is a great piece, thank you. I think two things can both be true - ordinary people can be monsters, and most people try to form a happy society and community. Have you read "Humankind: A Hopeful History?" I think it skews a bit too unbelievable in its chapters on war, but I do believe in general that there are two sides to the coin of human nature, and we should acknowledge both the war like and the peace like (kinda how Ice Cube did in his double album once upon a time)
Hi, this is off topic, but you say write if you want to reach out.
My comment is about your conversations with other historians or archeologists, etc. They are valuable but could be made a little more engaging with more ground level information and less methodology, historiography. For example, I would have liked to hear more about how pigs fitted into the two rains cultivation system of the Indus valley. You and the guest kept referring to a paper but the listeners have not seen it. To reiterate, this is a matter of emphasis, not a complaint about the conversation format per se.
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.