THE RESURGENCE OF CRUELTY

The January 6th assault on the Capitol marked the emergent underside of dark impulses.

January 6th marks the anniversary of the insurrectionist assault on the Capitol. It took place in a changed environment, an environment made toxic with the foul air of hatred and violence. We live in times in which cruelty has surfaced and been given legitimacy. The human capacity for cruelty is most often submerged under a veneer of civilization. When conditions are properly aligned, that veneer is breached and our species' ugly capacity for violence and cruelty comes to the surface. We live in a time when that capacity is tragically emergent.

I have taught human rights in the academy for over twenty years. Human rights centers on victims, women and men who very often are the victims of horrendous cruelty. Prior to teaching I was a human rights activist. As with many in the field I did my initial work with Amnesty International. I was inspired by the moral dimension of working on behalf of those imprisoned for their ideas or their identities. Too often, these prisoners were tortured. When our group worked for the freedom of prisoners of conscience, we often had their lives in our hands.

I tell my students that human rights is an inherently depressing field. If you take it seriously you are forced to encounter the dark underside of human behavior. Doing the work, and now teaching the subject, had me reading innumerable reports of human rights violations and degradation – torture scenarios, mutilations of human bodies, mass slaughter, rapes, executions, forced humiliation, among other unspeakable crimes. I am a humanist, but I must confess that investing myself in human rights drained me of a sunny view of human nature. Any reckoning of our species needs to countenance the human capacity for hatred and the wanton abuse of our fellow human beings.

This has presented me with a personal enigma. I construe myself a peaceful, non-violent person. I like to believe that I am a person of good will. Despite that, my moral imagination does enable me to envision how a single person could be sufficiently enraged to commit a single act of murder.

Then there is genocide and other mass atrocity crimes, which I cannot understand. Despite all my reading in the field – and there is a large and expanding corpus on genocide studies – I cannot countenance how people can rise up and murder thousands, tens of thousands and even millions of their fellow citizens. In many cases these were people who lived side by side, who shared the same communities, who knew each other as neighbors. It is a phenomenon I cannot wrap my mind or emotions around. It eludes my understanding.

To make my point, here is a description of an event emerging from the Bosnian genocide of the early 1990s. Warning: this is hard reading.

“Non-Serbs were subjected to almost every conceivable form of torture, humiliation and killing...including the deliberate disfigurement and excision of body parts of prisoners in Serb- run camps.

“Once a young woman with a baby was taken in the middle of a hall...They ordered her to take off her clothes. She put the baby on the floor next to her. Four Chetniks raped her; she was silent looking at her crying child.

“When she was left alone she asked if she could breast feed her baby. Then a Chetnik cut the child's head off with a knife. He gave the bloody head to the mother. The poor woman screamed. They took her outside and she never came back.”

One is well served to ask, how can a person do this to another human being?

Without claiming virtue, perhaps I am limited by my own sense of empathy. My mother saw me as an especially sensitive child. I think that was correct. For example, when I would watch westerns on TV and witnessed the villain shot and killed, the presumption was that the viewer, whether young or old, was to celebrate the death of the bad guy, or, at least, construe it as a matter of indifference. My reaction was one of distress. I could not help but conclude that to be shot dead by a bullet must be horribly painful, and death was something none of us would want for ourselves nor wish upon others, no matter how morally reprobate.

Yet, I cannot fool myself. Those who have taken part in committing mass atrocities most likely see themselves in their own eyes as essentially good and decent people, as I would like to believe that I am. Many probably see themselves as doing nothing morally wrong or even morally required. It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among others, who observed that we are faced not with separating those who are evil from those who are good, for the line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

What enables the perpetration of cruelty? What enables ordinary people to commit egregiously evil acts is a product of context and socialization? It also asks, what type of creature are we? What is our fundamental nature?

There is a long tradition in the religions, philosophy and psychology, that takes a stark view of human nature. While Judaism holds a neutral view of human nature, the Christian perspective, influentially propounded by St. Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries, is that man is a fallen creature besotted by original sin. Man is born with evil proclivities that need to be held in check.

The Renaissance thinker, Michel de Montaigne, had once written, “Nature herself, I fear, attaches to man some instinct for inhumanity.” Thomas Hobbes, an early expositor of the modern state, was a philosophical materialistic who rooted human dispositions in our biology. Hobbes's view of the human being was not complimentary. Man is starkly individualistic and not by nature social. We are self-centered, driven by our impulses and seek aggrandizement and maximization of our power and glory. To construct his state, Hobbes imagines a state of nature, a fictitious time before there was government. Rather than being an era in which our ancestors could luxuriate in their freedom, Hobbes tells us that the state of nature is the worst of all possible conditions. Given the aggressive impulses of our neighbors, the natural state is one of high anxiety and fear. Hobbes famously describes this primary human condition as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The state he constructs is an authoritarian one in which the innate power and freedom of the people is given over to an all-powerful sovereign to hold in check man's destructive impulses.

A negative view of our species has a long pedigree. We can find it in Kant, Nietzsche and implicitly in Darwinism. Nature is amoral, but from the standpoint of our ethics the process of natural selection is extraordinarily cruel and indifferent to the death and suffering of innumerable sentient creatures.

Sigmund Freud famously held to a negative view of humanity. I interpret Freud as a latter day Hobbesian, who roots human psychology in our biological drives, sex and aggression the most prominent. It is civilization, and our superego as the repository of guilt, that holds our natural instincts in check. The unprecedented slaughter of World War I caused Freud to further darken his view of human nature. Arguably with good reason.

If such is the raw material of which we are made, then to give it free rein in paroxysms of mass cruelty requires specific structural conditions to enable it to happen.

Contemporary times have seen the emergence of Holocaust and genocide studies. Research has accelerated since the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides of the early 1990s. There are world-wide genocide watch groups that analyze tension spots around the globe to predict which ones will break out into widespread atrocities and genocide. The presumption is that if such markers can be identified, the international community will mobilize the political will to intercede to stanch the killing before it begins or surges out of control.

Among the conditions that underlie genocide are cultural, historical, ideological, psychological, and political, and the power and authority of demagogic leadership.

My thesis is that in these times in which violence and hatred of the other is leeching into our culture, we should become educated and attuned to the signs that allow these propensities to metastasize. As Holocaust scholar Timothy Snyder warns, the similarities between our time and the emergence of fascism in the 1930s are too stark for us to ignore. Nothing is inevitable, but the current atmosphere requires that we remain continually vigilant.

This issue is very complex and I can here only provide the most basic sketch.

The Stanley Milgram experiments of the 1960s dramatically demonstrated the extent people will go to extend obedience to authority by inflicting escalating degrees of pain on people unknown to them on the say-so of authority and in conformity with the proffered requirements of “science.”

Another critical factor enabling mass cruelty is that people behave differently in groups than they do alone. Group psychology reinforces conformity. When everyone else goes along, individual dissent is dissuaded and becomes much more difficult to assert. Group conformity represses conscience and diffuses individual responsibility. Fascism, and German Fascism is the prime example, submerged individual identity within the concept of Aryan society which was construed as an organic whole. The people en masse, and not the individual, was the primary unit. Identity was reinforced by being absorbed into the whole, which was ordered hierarchically.

Essential to the prevalence of cruelty which targets “the other” is the division of society into “us and them.” In our domestic environment, Sarah Palin referred to “real Americans,” a moniker brought to fruition by Donald Trump. Genocide starts with such divisions. “Us” and “them;” “the insider” and “outsider;” “the blessed” and “the damned;” “the producers” and “the takers.”

All societies have their internal divisions, but when these divisions become charged with xenophobia and then intensified by scapegoating, we are on the road to unleashing the cruel underside that in normal times is kept under control. When circumstances, -economic, social and political- become tense and frustration abounds, blaming “the other,” whether immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, women, or the poor, is a response too readily invoked. Scapegoating and blaming others for deeply felt social problems, however false, diminishes the responsibility of those displacing the blame. It becomes psychologically useful by identifying the “cause” of the problem and providing “solutions.”

Perhaps most pernicious in explaining cruelty is the process of dehumanization. It is emotionally difficult to kill another human being. The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers. It started in Eastern Europe with marching Jews out of their villages, forcing them to dig mass graves and shooting them in large numbers. The Nazis, as masters of efficiency, discovered that not only were bullets expensive, but some Nazi soldiers found it difficult to murder children at point blank range. Gas chambers were far more economical and industrialized mass murder more impersonal.

In order to kill or otherwise impose ghastly acts of cruelty on another person you first have to convince those carrying out the killing that the object of those acts are not truly human. The Nazis favored hygienic metaphors. So Jews were not fellow human beings but “vermin,” “parasites,” “tuberculosis,” “plague”; a disease on the Aryan body. And what does one do with a disease? One either cuts it out or otherwise destroys it. In the concentration camps Jews couldn't bathe and were forced to live with their own excrement, further reinforcing their dehumanization. In the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu genocidaires referred to their Tutsi victims as inyenzi meaning “cockroaches” or “insects.”

Knowing this, I must admit I shuttered when I heard Donald Trump refer to immigrants and those seeking asylum at our southern border not only as “criminals” and “murderers” but some also as “animals.” Separating children from their parents was a scathing act of government cruelty that conveys very heavy historical resonance. In the concentration camps separation was a prelude to annihilation.

Though much more needs to be said, an essential component that unleashes the forces of cruelty is the role played by demagogic leadership. Think Hitler, Mussolini, Idi Amin, Slobodan Milosevic and numerous others. Leaders are standard-bearers who represent and articulate the frustrations and values of those whose who endow them with authority to direct their actions. Trump has become a cult figure for millions. Through his unparalleled authority as president he has given permission to his followers to express their hatred and he has clearly incited violence, most dramatically the January 6th attack on the Capitol, in an effort to overturn the will of the electorate.

Trump by no means is solely responsible. Citing an article by Harvard history professor, Peter Gordon, “Four years of Trump’s presidency helped to expose the hatred and intolerance and violence that has coursed through our society since its founding. In 2018 the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that the number of hate groups operating in the US rose to a record high—more than a thousand—with a corresponding increase in hate crimes as documented by the FBI.” According to Gordon the potential for hatred and cruelty to emerge has always been present in American society. He further notes,

“(Trump) was only the latest expression of the patterns that have coursed through American history since the beginning: The racism, the tribalism, the gun-loving swagger, the testosterone-pumped misogyny, the snake-oil fraudulence and the anti-intellectualism fobbed off as pious belief, the worship of money and the hatred of the weak, the fetish of a so-called “liberty” that actually means little more than placing one’s one narrow interests above the common good—none of this is really new. All of America contributed to the making of Trump.”

In other words, violence and cruelty have always been latent in society. But it took Trump as demagogic leader to light the spark, and history tells us that the power of leadership cannot be understated.

To be clear, I am not concluding that America will go the way of Germany in the 1930s. I think Trump does not possess the necessary ideological commitments nor zeal. But he has helped unleash very dark forces, which, as noted, have poisoned the political environment by making hatred, violence and cruelty permissible. On the anniversary of the assault on the Capitol a newly released poll finds that one third of Americans believe that violence against the government is justified. January 6th marked the culminating event in which the capacity for hatred and cruelty has escalated and widened its reach. It was a unique event, but it was on a spectrum.

We should not be surprised. We are entering a new year and I predict that 2022 will be a fateful one. When it comes to the future of democracy, we will encounter forks in the road. We need to pledge that in our personal lives and in our commitment to our wider society we will work hard to restore faith in democracy. We should not allow a demanding political climate to corrupt us and enable cynicism to take over our lives. We need to act with decency and kindness and work, however we can, to extend those values into the wider world. We need to ensure the triumph of civility .