Book reviews → Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing (Arne Johan Vetlesen)

I’m reading Arne Johan Vetlesen’s Evil and Human Agency.

If I wait to finish it before writing a review, I’ll pen one of those unreadable monster blockquote-dumps that goes on forever. So I’ll try something different: I’ll break up my reading and write up my thoughts along the way.

Vetlesen is trying to reconcile sociological, psychological, and philosophical accounts of human evildoing, particularly those prompted by attempts to wrestle with the Holocaust and other examples of large-scale massacre: things like Hannah Arendt’s examinations of totalitarianism and “the banality of evil,” and the Milgram experiment.

He compares the conclusions of various thinkers in these disciplines, and examines their predictions in light of subsequent examples of collective evil, for instance the massacres in the former Yugoslavia.

He starts by offering a “commonsensical and minimalist” definition of evil: to “intentionally inflict pain and suffering on another human being, against her will, and causing serious and foreseeable harm to her.” This makes me defensive, partially because it seems too simple, and partially, I think, because it reminds me of the definitions of torture that the fine legal minds in the White House had so much fun drilling loopholes through. But at least so far, Vetlesen’s definition plays very little role in his book, so I’ll leave it at that.

There is a school of thought in reaction to the Holocaust that sees its perpetrators — the people who actually did the day-to-day mechanics of murdering millions of people, not the ideologues in the newsreels — as having been swept along against their own inclinations by an overwhelming force that only extraordinary personalities were able to resist. Arendt showed Eichmann to be not a conventionally wicked sadist delighting in evil, but a thoughtless careerist oblivious to the results of his actions. Milgram showed that ordinary people would do awful things to innocent strangers if someone in a position of authority gave the word.

While reading Evil and Human Agency on public transit I have — twice now! — been interrupted by the person in the seat next to me who, reading over my shoulder, could not help but discuss it with me. This is pretty remarkable, since for one thing it violates social taboos about talking to strangers on public transit and about interrupting people who are reading, and for another, I didn’t have any idea this was a topic that many people care about.

Anyway, one of these people had absorbed the school of thought I described above, and repeated it back to me in a way that really demonstrated how defeatist and excusing it can be if it is absorbed uncritically and superficially: looking at the perpetrators of the Holocaust and shrugging, saying “it could happen to anyone, human nature being what it is; they didn’t know any better, with the morality of their society gone all topsy-turvy like that.”

Arendt tried to head off this sort of sloppy thinking, insisting (and showing) that those who participated in administrative massacre had real choices, made them, and bear real guilt for the choices they made. She also insists (and shows) that other choices were possible, and that other people could have (and did) evaluate their situations and make conscientious choices, even in the topsy-turvy morality of Nazi Germany.

But Vetlesen, though respectful of Arendt’s contributions to the study of collective and individual evil, thinks that her portrait of Eichmann is partially “naïve: in suggesting that he was ‘merely thoughtless’, she in fact adopts the very self-presentation he cultivated.… [T]his is a blindness in Arendt caused by her privileging the role of intellectual capacities over — morally crucial — emotional ones.”

Vetlesen is referring not only to Eichmann in Jerusalem but also to other writings of Arendt in which she puts thinking at the center of morality (see The Picket Line, 26 September 2006). Indeed, in her view, conscience is a by-product of thinking, where “thinking” is an honest and curious inner dialog of the sort that would make Socrates proud.

Vetlesen doesn’t buy it. Conscience and moral perception, he believes, has much more to do with empathy, and Eichmann’s problem was not that he was “thoughtless” but that he “was insensitive.”

Vetlesen also critically examines Milgram’s interpretation of his famous experiment. Milgram believed that his subjects, in the presence of an authority figure, stepped into a corresponding role and something called the “agentic state, the state in which the agent finds himself once responsibility has been shifted away by his consent to the superior’s right to command” which leads one “to restrict one’s sense of responsibility to the purely technical aspects of one’s action” as opposed to their effects or ends.

The first objection to this “agentic state” is that it is illusory, and the way it is described often seems to grant it an undeserved reality. When you enter the agentic state, you don’t really shift away your responsibility, you only agree to conspire with the authority figure to act as if you have done so. This doesn’t excuse anything, and Vetlesen suggests that this conspiracy of dishonesty not only helps people to commit evil but is itself a sort of evil:

Morally speaking, permitting oneself to be dehumanized, to be robbed of one’s autonomy (Kant), is in itself no lesser sin than participating in the dehumanization of others; it entails permitting oneself to become an instrument in the realization of ends posited by others.

He summarizes Arendt’s own view: “superfluousness represents a temptation: it holds the promise of an existence devoid of (enacted) human agency, hence free of the burdens of responsibility and guilt, as well as hurt and loss.”

If people are selfishly tempted to enter the “agentic state”, then their evil actions when in such a state are the sort of garden variety “sins” that come from being willing to harm other people in pursuit of selfish aims. This in contrast to the usual interpretation of Milgram’s experiment: that people are willing to act against their own inclinations and interests to do things they would ordinarily not want to do, in certain contexts of authoritarian role-play.

Vetlesen extends this objection by considering what Milgram never allows himself to consider: that his subjects may have had genuine sadistic impulses — that in subjecting their victims to pain, they were not being somehow coerced by their situation to do things they would ordinarily not want to do, but that they were being allowed by their situation to do things they were ordinarily inhibited from doing.

He quotes Ernest Becker, who took a second look at Freud’s take on mob violence:

…[M]an brings his motives in with him when he identifies with power figures. He is suggestible and submissive because he is waiting for the magical helper. He gives in to the magic transformation of the group because he wants relief of conflict and guilt. He follows the leader’s initiatory act because he needs priority magic so that he can delight in holy aggression. He moves in to kill the sacrificial scapegoat with the wave of the crowd, not because he is carried along by the wave, but because he likes the psychological barter of another life for his own: “You die, not me.” The motives and the needs are in men and not in situations or surroundings.

And this is where I’ve stopped for the day, not quite at the half-way mark.

Last Friday I started sharing my thoughts on Arne Johan Vetlesen’s Evil and Human Agency and I promised to continue as I worked my way through the book.

Since then I’ve finished only one more chapter. When Vetlesen reviewed Hannah Arendt’s philosophical wrestling with evil, and Stanley Milgram’s sociological experiments, I was on at least somewhat familiar territory, as I’ve read some of this directly and have also read other authors who have wrestled with the ideas these two raised.

But in this latest chapter, Vetlesen describes some of the approaches to evil in psychology — is evil a part of human nature, or do people become evil (and if so, how)? Do people have a drive to do evil, or are their evil deeds secondary to some other motive? What about people who do not do evil: how did they develop that way, or how did they come to channel their drives differently?

And here, I’m out of my depth. I’m completely unfamiliar with most of the thinkers Vetlesen cites, and his summaries are too dense and require too much familiarity with the discipline for me to make much sense out of.

To me, many of the psychological theories he discusses strike me as just-so stories that either seem intuitive to you or don’t, but that don’t seem to have much else to go on. There’s lots of talk of existential despair, self and other, inner and outer, object and symbol, and things like “the autistic-contiguous position” and “projective identification.”

I can’t tell for sure whether I’m just being baffled by the jargon of a technical discipline that’s not my own, or whether I’m being snowed by the hair-splitting dogma of a pseudoscience. My rational mind rebels at reading about theories of developmental psychology that are long on new terminology and short on experimental data; or at discussions of motivations for evil that don’t acknowledge that the evolutionary psychology outlook even exists (or has produced a great deal of insight into this area: see Homicide for instance).

Vetlesen entertains several ideas about the psychology of evil, and also the idea that culture is (when it is working properly) a way to take the individual drives that lead to evil deeds and channel them instead into a symbolic realm where they don’t do any real damage. “Avoiding evil [says C. Fred Alford] ‘depends on the ability to symbolize dread’ ” — and this ability in turn relies on the cultural inventory of symbols and stories and such.

He also explores the idea that evil is rooted in envy, particularly envy of what is good in other people, and the resulting desire to destroy or defile that which is good. This makes evil more destructive than it would be if it were simply motivated by greed, for a greedy person would want to preserve the good thing (but keep it for himself), whereas an envious person is destructive of goodness itself.

Later, he returns to the case of Eichmann:

One of the questions Alford put to those he interviewed was: Was Eichmann evil? Much to Alford’s surprise, …nearly everybody asked to reflect on the question identified with Eichmann. … Likewise, there was a deep reluctance to make — or accept — any attempt to judge Eichmann’s actions from a moral point of view. In both groups [prisoners convicted of violent crimes and normals], the replies would take the following form: “Before we eventually judge Eichmann, we must bear in mind that he was acting within a hierarchical organization, receiving orders from his superiors; and surely he would have been killed if he had refused to do these things that others now call bad” (let me add: in fact, he would not). And then, to offer a final thought — actually, an angry counter-question — “Who among us can really be sure what we would have done in his place?”

Vetlesen wonders how people would look at the story of Eichmann and the millions of innocent people he helped to exterminate and identify with Eichmann. First, he asks if maybe it is “a kind of moral modesty” — hard to judge another unless you’ve walked in his shoes, that sort of thing. Then he gets what I think is probably the right answer, which is that the question itself invites you to examine Eichmann and sympathize with him (if only hypothetically) while leaving his victims unimagined.

But Vetlesen reads more into this, and thinks that perhaps people have a motive to identify with the perpetrators and not the victims because they in a larger sense prefer to identify with perpetrators rather than victims. In other words, it’s all well and good to say that you prefer to be neither victim nor executioner, but if you come to a fork in the road and only have the two choices, if you’re like most folks, you’ll take the executioner turnoff.

I wonder if maybe something else is at work. I recently read a paper by Paul Slovic — “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide — in which he shows (using scientific studies, numbers, evidence, the sort of psychological studies I feel I can bite into) that people seem to have a decreasing sympathy for victims the more of them there are.

As Stalin’s apocryphal quote goes: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

For example:

Fetherstonhaugh, Slovic, Johnson, and Friedrich (1997) documented this potential for diminished sensitivity to the value of life — i.e., “psychophysical numbing” — by evaluating people’s willingness to fund various lifesaving medical treatments. In a study involving a hypothetical grant funding agency, respondents were asked to indicate the number of lives a medical research institute would have to save to merit receipt of a $10 million grant. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents raised their minimum benefit requirements to warrant funding when there was a larger at-risk population, with a median value of 9,000 lives needing to be saved when 15,000 were at risk, compared to a median of 100,000 lives needing to be saved out of 290,000 at risk. By implication, respondents saw saving 9,000 lives in the “smaller” population as more valuable than saving ten times as many lives in the largest.

Here’s another:

Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic (2006) gave people leaving a psychological experiment the opportunity to contribute up to $5 of their earnings to Save the Children. The study consisted of three separate conditions: (1) identifiable victim, (2) statistical victims, and (3) identifiable victim with statistical information.… Participants in each condition were told that “any money donated will go toward relieving the severe food crisis in Southern Africa and Ethiopia.” The donations in fact went to Save the Children, but they were earmarked specifically for Rokia [the identifiable victim] in Conditions 1 and 3 and not specifically earmarked in Condition 2. The average donations are presented in Figure 8. Donations in response to the identified individual, Rokia, were far greater than donations in response to the statistical portrayal of the food crisis. Most important, however, and most discouraging, was the fact that coupling the statistical realities with Rokia’s story significantly reduced the contributions to Rokia. Alternatively, one could say that using Rokia’s story to “put a face behind the statistical problem” did not do much to increase donations (the difference between the mean donations of $1.43 and $1.14 was not statistically reliable).

Another study found that people were more likely to contribute toward a set amount of money that would be used for costly, life-saving medical treatment needed by a single child than they were to contribute toward the same amount of money needed for the same treatment of eight children.

Slovik’s conclusion: “[W]e cannot depend only upon our moral feelings to motivate us to take proper actions against genocide. That places the burden of response squarely upon the shoulders of moral argument and international law.” I don’t have much faith in international law, but I’m convinced by his arguments that empathy and moral feelings are inadequate guides to use when trying to decide on an appropriate attitude toward large-scale massacre or tragedy.

Chapter four of Arne Johan Vetlesen’s Evil and Human Agency looks at the “ethnic cleansing” during the Yugoslav Wars in the light of the previous chapters’ examination of post-Holocaust philosophical, sociological, and psychological approaches to the problem of evildoing.

Vetlesen says that many of the characteristics of the Holocaust that had been identified as essential ingredients of genocide were absent in the Yugoslav genocide. In the Holocaust, there was a regimented, bureaucratized, technological manner of killing, a separation between those who ordered and organized the murders and those who carried them out, and a dehumanization and anonymization of the victims.

People who tried to draw lessons from the Holocaust in the hopes of preventing future genocide have erred by overgeneralizing from this case and claiming that these characteristics are themselves the warning signs for genocide. The Yugoslav genocide, however, did not have these characteristics: the killings and tortures were face-to-face and technologically unsophisticated and directed on a grass-roots level.

So Vetlesen tries to describe a more accurate set of conditions that lead to collective evildoing. Such things, he says, “must be regarded as the conjunction of human maliciousness with the failure of cultural containment… or, more to the point, with the deliberate and systematic production of conditions which undermine whatever positive cultural containment is in place.”

Propaganda is crucial to this deliberate and systematic production of the conditions for collective evildoing. “In all cases of genocide in the twentieth century, the action… typically assumes the character of self-defense.… If there is a mentality characteristic of genocidal perpetrators, it is that of self-righteousness.” In what Vetlesen calls genocidal logic, “the perpetrator group does exactly what it castigates the target for having done [or] being now about to do against one’s own group.” The collective evil “assumes the form of retaliation” or “pre-emption” and action “takes the character of self-defense.”

These excuses for collective evildoing do not have to be sturdy. They do not even have to be falsifiable, but even if they are conclusively disproved, they are easily replaced — they are not really reasons that the perpetrators rely on to excuse (or compel) their actions, but only justifications that they use when telling a story about what they do.

Vetlesen quotes Michael Sells:

In justifying the atrocities in Bosnia, Serb nationalists would point to atrocities by Croats. When it was pointed out that the Muslim population had nothing to do with the Croat army and, indeed, had been attacked by the Croat army in 1993, the Serb nationalists shifted to generic blame of all Muslims for the acts of those who fought with the Ustashe. When it was pointed out that many of the families who suffered had fought against the Ustashe, the Serb nationalists would shift to claims of Ottoman depravity and treat the Muslims as Turks. When it was pointed out that the Slavic Muslims are just as indigenous to the region as Orthodox Christians or Catholics, the discussion would then shift to allegations that the Bosnian Muslims were fundamentalists and that Serbia was defending the West against the fundamentalist threat of radical Islam. When it was pointed out that, in fact, most Bosnian Muslims were antifundamentalist by tradition and character, the Serb nationalists would insist that this was a civil war, in which all sides were guilty, there were no angels, and the world should allow the people involved to solve their own problems.

In the Yugoslav Wars, outside observers tended to overly concentrate on this mix of stories instead of on the reality of what was going on — so that commentators would talk about “ancient hatreds” and take at face value that the ongoing genocide was just the latest back-and-forth in a feud stretching back to the 14^th Century or earlier. This reinforced international passivity (“it’s all very complicated”) and reinforced also the idea that what was going on concerned not individual victims of an “ethnic cleansing” policy but irreconcilable groups or a sort of roiling, mutual violence.

“Until these folks get tired of killing each other, bad things will continue to happen,” said President Clinton at the time. (Ten years later, Donald Rumsfeld would use a similar, passive, victim-free description to describe Iraq: “Iraqis are being killed, as they were yesterday and the day before. At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed…”)

This perspective is, crucially, the perspective of the perpetrators. Adopting it leads outside observers to sympathize with the perpetrators, and furthermore the legitimacy of this perspective is itself both an important goal and a necessary tool of those perpetrators.

A crucial preliminary to collective evil of this sort, says Vetlesen, is that group identity takes primary importance for the perpetrators. In other words, you no longer just happen to be a member of Group X, but your Group Xness becomes the essential, defining feature about you. Because of this, the most important things you have to worry about are threats to whatever is vital about Group X — which can be anything from its existence as a group to something symbolic that is thought to belong to or embody the group (perhaps a relic, a holy city, or a virtue like “freedom”).

The victims-to-be are also cast in this group-essential way, and are said to be such a threat. All the sins, real or imagined, of the enemy group or of any particular member of that group, are carried equally by every member of that group and so there is no sense of talking of the guilty or innocent — their groupness is their guilt.

This can quickly become all-or-nothing. Merely happening-to-be a Serb is not enough to make you a Serb. You have to be a Serb, which increasingly becomes defined as someone eager to defend against the threats to Serbness by killing and raping them en masse. Vetlesen recounts examples of people who happened-to-be Serbs being killed by genocidal Serbs for being unwilling to kill their non-Serbian neighbors when ordered to do so.

I found my mind was often wandering while I read this chapter, and I tended to entertain some very speculative thoughts.

I was struck by the parallels between the methods used to establish an overriding group identity in the Serbs and those used to instill the ordinary military mentality. When people join the military they relinquish responsibility to authority, they define themselves by their group (“once a Marine, always a Marine”) and deemphasize individual personality, they kill strangers based on their group identity, they elevate intra-group bonds and denigrate out-of-group bonds, they justify their actions as defense whatever their real nature, they are ideologically prepared to justify mass murder, and so forth.

And I kept seeing parallels between the propaganda that led to the Yugoslav genocide and that which led to the Iraq war — the way the guilt of 9/11 got transferred as if by magic to Iraq, the way the war was billed as an act of preemptive self-defense, the way the justifications for the war kept falling apart only to be replaced by new ones, the way “our” enemies are said to be eagerly plotting their assaults on Freedom itself, the way dishonest intellectual arguments and media propaganda were used to incite the faithful and paralyze bystanders, and so forth.

The collective evil that the United States is engaged in in Iraq is not in the same register as that of the Yugoslav genocide. The United States military is up to no good, certainly, but they aren’t rounding up Iraqi women in camps and gang raping them until dead or pregnant, and they’re leaving the ethnic cleansing to the locals.

But although the nature of the collective evil is different, the similarities in the cultural gestalt that led to the Iraq War and that maintain it today are worth pondering over.

Vetlesen discusses the theories of René Girard concerning the purpose of collective violence. In Girard’s view, communities maintain unity and stability by periodically channeling internal violent impulses toward a surrogate victim in a ritual sacrifice. Vetlesen thinks that the examples of collective evil he is interested in may be varieties of this ritual sacrifice.

Girard says that not just any surrogate victim will do, but that a victim has to be selected who is “marginal” — near the boundary between being inside and outside the group — so that the sacrifice has the function of highlighting and strengthening the group’s boundary:

The victim must be neither too familiar to the community nor too foreign to it. This ambiguity is essential to the cathartic functioning of the sacrifice… The marginal categories from which these victims are generally drawn… provide the least unsatisfactory compromise. Situated as they are between the inside and the outside, they can perhaps be said to belong to both the interior and the exterior of the community.

Most recent cases of genocidal collective violence that come to mind have been of this sort: the victims have been a group that occupy roughly the same territory as the perpetrators, who may have been co-citizens (or -subjects) of the same political entity in the recent past, who may have commonly intermarried, and so forth.

By sacrificing the surrogate victim, the community is purified: that pollutant which was ambiguously part of the community is cast out of it, those inside the community reaffirm their belonging by participating in or cheering on the ritual sacrifice, and the community’s border is firmly established in such a way as to keep other pollutants at bay.

If the United States is using the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as varieties of ritual sacrifice, then in order for these surrogate victims to have been appropriately selected, the United States must have been identifying itself and its borders with the world as a whole (so that the people in Iraq and Afghanistan could be considered pollutants within it).

This is not too far-fetched given the rhetoric that accompanied the war, but it is far too ambitious. The United States can never cast all of the enemies it has identified out of the enormous borders it claims, so as to reestablish those borders with the pollutants outside of them.

The next step, then, I fear, will be either to expand the war in the hopes of accomplishing this impossible dream, or, more realistically, to repeat the ritual sacrifice on a less ambitious scale by finding some marginal group that is within the actual borders of the United States — illegal immigrants, drug users, perverts, dissidents, Muslims — and engage in a ritual sacrifice that has some hope of culminating satisfactorily.

I can’t help but wonder also, after Vetlesen’s suggestion that envy — the desire to destroy or defile what is good or admired — is at the root of evildoing, to what extent Americans are striking out against its enemies out of envy. Does America envy the Jihadists for their fundamentalist devotion, as a more forthright and consistent version of the half-hearted religion that so many of them practice? Does America envy the fearless fanaticism of the suicide bombers in comparison to our heavily-armored and green-zoned troops, or the cocky moxie of Saddam on the gallows compared to Dubya’s frightened 9/11 flight? Are we trying to kill them because we can’t stand that they’re even more stupidly devoted to blowing things up for their ideals than we are?

I repeat that these are just examples of the sort of speculation that ran through my mind as it wandered away while I was trying to keep track of the (often almost as speculative) theoretical framework I was reading about.

In Chapter 5, which I’ll review next, Vetlesen will explore the bystanders — neither victims nor executioners, occasionally collaborators or even rescuers.