Humanity, A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
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Glover is a moral philosopher, whose stock in trade is the
hypothetical moral dilemma. (A trolley is hurtling out of control.
Five workers down the track don't see it and will be killed if it continues.
You can throw the switch and save them, but it will cause the death of one
person standing on a spur. What should you do?) In this ''moral
history of the 20th century,'' Glover deftly analyzes some of
its real and terrible moral dilemmas. Is the bombing of civilians
ever justified if it would shorten a dreadful war? Should the Allies have
accepted Adolf Eichmann's offer to trade a million Jews for 10,000 trucks?
What kind of risk to self and family should a moral person be
expected to take in opposing a terrifying regime?
But when it comes to the choices made by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot,
Milosevic and their henchmen, moral dilemmas are beside the point.
Glover wants his profession to help us understand how great evils can happen
and how they might be prevented. That requires not just philosophy but
history and psychology.
Most of ''Humanity'' is history: an account of the major
atrocities of the century. In novelistic detail, Glover describes the
wrenching realities behind the just wars and the utopian social projects.
The descriptions are heartbreaking, enraging, at times unbearable. No matter
how bad you thought the century was for human rights, Glover will
convince you that it was even worse. The following vignette, though lacking
the death and gore of the others, encapsulates for me how the
century's political movements could obliterate all that we value in
life:
''A French ethnologist captured by the Khmer Rouge . . . befriended a
girl of about 3 whose father was marched away to probable death. He played
with her and grew fond of her, but she was forced to attend indoctrination
classes. Her smiling response to him was replaced by sullenness. One
evening, looking him in the face, she tried to insert her finger between his
ankle and the rope that bound him. Finding that she could, she called the
guard to tighten the ropes.''
Glover's history is not original, of course, but his psychology
is, dramatically so. The prevailing wisdom among many intellectuals has been
that evil has nothing to do with human nature and must be attributed to
political institutions. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu, at a time when
the ashes of 35 million victims of World War II were still warm (or
radioactive), urged Unesco to declare that ''biological studies lend support
to the ethic of universal brotherhood.'' In 1986, Unesco and several
scholarly societies resolved that ''it is scientifically incorrect to say
that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our
human nature.'' Scientists who have dissented from this saccharine view have
been picketed, smeared and likened to Nazis.
Glover does not let our species off so lightly. He shows that distinctive
patterns of cruelty and callousness pop up repeatedly in history,
cutting across times, places and political systems. He insists that ''we
need to look hard and clearly at some monsters inside us,'' not to make us
pessimists but as ''part of the project of caging and taming them.'' For
Glover argues that human nature encompasses not just destructive impulses
but ''moral resources'': humane impulses that sometimes recoil from
the intentions of the monsters. The course of history, and our hopes
for the future, are shaped by struggles among these impulses inside
countless minds.
The great contribution of ''Humanity'' is a dissection of
these motives. This is not, as some might fear, an attempt to reduce
history to psychology. Glover makes it clear that the motives are
responses to the larger community and manifest themselves in different ways
in different social and political contexts.
HERE are some of the monsters. Pure, amoral self-interest. Sadism and the
thrill of the battlefield. Tribalism, which elevates the group above the
individual and turns personal enmity into feuding, war and genocide.
Ideology, which can convince people that a struggle between groups -- races
for the Nazis, classes for the Marxists -- is inevitable and necessary for
progress. The ''Hobbesian trap,'' in which a nation is tempted to attack a
neighbor out of fear that it would otherwise attack first, like an armed
homeowner who surprises an armed burglar, tempting each to shoot first to
avoid being shot.
Glover sees two countervailing moral resources. Human responses --
sympathy, empathy and respect -- occasionally break through in people
committing vicious acts. Sometimes they are triggered by the intellect. A
British World War II navigator, safely home after a bombing raid, says to
the pilot, ''What about those poor sods under those fires?'' Entrenched
soldiers say, ''We don't want to kill you, and you don't want to kill us, so
why shoot?'' At other times they are triggered by tangible signs of a
target's humanity. A soldier sees a fleeing man holding up his
trousers. The mundane detail turns him from ''fascist'' to ''person,'' and
the soldier loses the will to fire. An Afrikaner policeman chases a South
African demonstrator, club in hand. She loses her shoe, and chivalry makes
him hand it back. Their eyes meet, and he finds it impossible to club her.
The other resource is moral identity, or self-respect -- the
answer to the question ''Am I the kind of person who could do this?'' People
sometimes resist the pressure to harm others when it conflicts with how they
want to see themselves. A moral identity can come from a religion, a
culture, professional mores (like the Hippocratic oath), a cosmopolitan
humanism or sometimes just an insistent voice inside us.
In Glover's analysis, the horrors of the century took place when
the moral resources were deliberately or accidentally disabled. Again
and again he finds that atrocities are accompanied by tactics of humiliation
and dehumanization: pejorative nicknames, degrading conditions, humiliating
dress. They flip a mental switch and reclassify another individual from
''person'' to ''nonperson,'' making it as easy to torture or kill him as it
is for us to boil a lobster alive. Some of the most indelible images in
''Humanity'' are of the ''cold jokes'' that brutes all over the world have
used to strip their victims of dignity and make cruelty come easier. Those
who poke fun at ''politically correct'' names for ethnic minorities will be
reminded that they originally had a humane rationale.
Sympathy can be turned off by physical distance from the victims, as in
aerial bombardment and remote-control warfare. It can also be suppressed by
sheer willpower. It is frightening to think that our vaunted ability to
subdue emotional urges through the force of intellect and conscience
(allowing us to defer gratification and resist temptation) also allowed Nazi
guards to overcome their visceral horror at what they were doing and to
persevere with distasteful acts that they thought served a higher purpose.
Like sympathy, the moral resource of identity can be insidiously
eroded. No one is a saint, and most people calibrate their conscience
against a level of minimum decency expected of people in their peer group or
culture. When the level drifts downward, people can commit horrible crimes
with the confidence that comes from knowing that ''everyone does it.''
Euphemisms like ''resettlement to work camps,'' phased decisions (in which
bombing targets might shift from isolated factories to factories near
neighborhoods to the neighborhoods themselves) and the diffusion of
responsibility within a bureaucracy can lead conscientious people to cause
appalling outcomes that no one would ever willingly choose on his own.
GLOVER draws hope from the recurring breakthroughs of moral
resources and from the happy episodes in which they conspired to avert
disaster. During the Cuban missile crisis, Nikita Khrushchev and John F.
Kennedy were reminded of the human cost of the nuclear brink they were
approaching, Khrushchev by memories of two world wars fought on his soil,
Kennedy by a graphic briefing of the aftermath of an atomic bomb. And each
understood they were in a Hobbesian trap. Kennedy had just read Barbara
Tuchman's ''Guns of August'' and saw how the leaders of great nations could
sleepwalk into a pointless and awful war. Khrushchev, thinking like a game
theorist, wrote to Kennedy:
''You and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which you have
tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter this knot
will become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the
person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the knot
will have to be cut.''
By identifying the trap, they could set the shared goal of escaping it.
In the teeth of opposition from many of their advisers, both made
concessions that may have literally saved the world.
In discussing topics of such gravity many authors would be tempted to
flaunt a moral superiority, but Glover does not. Though
''Humanity'' is a passionate book, the voice is measured and
elegant, the arguments fair and carefully reasoned. There are also moments
of dark wit. Glover tells how the Bolshevik leaders cultivated a reputation
for hardness, down to their assumed names: Kamenev (man of stone), Molotov
(the hammer), Stalin (man of steel). He notes, ''A democratic politician who
changed his name to 'Man of Steel' would, one hopes, have his political
career finished by the laughter.'' A mordant portrait of the Nazi
philosopher Martin Heidegger should be required reading for the many
academics who continue to treat him seriously.
Glover took on a fearsome subject, and at times it got the better of him.
Topics come and go unpredictably; arguments sometimes dribble off without
resolution. Relevant literatures in moral and political philosophy
and social and evolutionary psychology are barely touched. No matter. This
is an extraordinary book: brilliant, haunting and uniquely important. Almost
40 years ago a president read a best seller, and the world avoided a
holocaust. I like to think that some of the leaders and followers of
tomorrow will read ''Humanity.''
Related Terms:
HUMANITY
A Moral
History
of the Twentieth Century.
By Jonathan
Glover.
464 pp. New Haven:
Yale University Press. $27.95.
Barbarism was by no means unique to the past 100
years, Jonathan Glover tells us, but ''it is still right that much of
20th-century history has been a very unpleasant surprise.''
This was the century of Passchendaele, Dresden, Nanking, Nagasaki and
Rwanda; of the Final Solution, the gulag, the Great Leap Forward, Year Zero
and ethnic cleansing -- names that stand for killings in the six and seven
figures and for suffering beyond comprehension. The technological progress
that inspired the optimism of the Victorians turned out also to multiply the
effects of old-fashioned evil and criminal stupidity.
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