Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  Perhaps most important, Abe’s singular act isn’t singular. There are now travel agencies specializing in serving American Vietnam War vets returning to Vietnam for reconciliation ceremonies with ex–Viet Cong. Veterans have spearheaded organizations such as Friends of Danang, doing service projects in Vietnam, building schools, clinics, and literal bridges.51

  This picture segues into another extraordinary act. Arguably the single most shocking event of the Vietnam War, an atrocity that finally shook America’s self-perception as a force of good, was the My Lai Massacre.

  On March 16, 1968, a company of American soldiers, under the command of Lieutenant William Calley Jr., attacked the unarmed civilians of the village of My Lai.52 The company had been in Vietnam all of three months and had had no direct enemy contact. They had, however, suffered twenty-eight deaths or injuries due to booby traps and mines, reducing the company’s number to around one hundred. The common interpretation, one that we readily recognize by now, is that they had a fierce, vengeful desire to connect faces to this faceless enemy. The official rationale was that the village harbored Viet Cong fighters and civilian sympathizers; there is minimal evidence to support this. Some of the participants reported being instructed to kill only Viet Cong fighters; others that they should kill everyone, burn houses, kill livestock, and destroy wells.

  Regardless of these conflicting reports, the rest, as they say, is agonizing history. Between 350 and 500 unarmed civilians, including infants and elderly people, were killed. Bodies were mutilated and dumped down wells, huts and fields set ablaze, numerous women gang-raped before being killed. Calley was described to have personally shot children under their mothers who had died sheltering them. The Americans encountered no enemy fire, found no military-aged men. It was destruction of biblical proportions, or Roman proportions, or Crusader, or Viking, or . . . This destruction was photographed. The horror is worsened because My Lai was not a solitary atrocity, and the government labored to conceal events and slapped Calley on the wrist, sentencing him to three years of house arrest.

  There was by no means universal participation by Americans (ultimately twenty-six soldiers were criminally charged, with Calley the only one convicted; “just following orders” was the order of the day).*53 Individual thresholds varied. One soldier killed a mother and child and then refused to do more. Another helped herd civilians together but refused to fire. Some refused orders outright, even in the face of threats of court-martial or being shot. One, PFC Michael Bernhardt, refused and threatened to report events to superiors; officers subsequently placed him on more dangerous patrols, perhaps hoping he’d be killed.

  Iconic photos of the nightmare. Left: civilians seconds before being killed; the woman in the back holding her child had just been raped. Right: dead villagers

  And three men halted the killings. Predictably, they were outsiders. The catalyst was Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., age twenty-five, who was flying a helicopter, along with two crew members, Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn. Perhaps pertinent to what occurred was the fact that Thompson descended from Native American survivors of the Trail of Tears death march; his religious parents raised him, in the 1950s in rural Georgia, to oppose segregation. Colburn and Andreotta were observant Catholics.

  Thompson and his crew had flown over the village, intending to aid the infantry fighting Viet Cong. Instead of evidence of a battle, they saw masses of dead civilians. Thompson initially thought that the village was under attack, with Americans protecting villagers, but couldn’t figure out where the attack was coming from. He landed the copter amid the chaos and saw one soldier, Sergeant David Mitchell, firing into a mass of injured, wailing civilians in a ditch and another, Captain Ernest Medina, shoot a woman point-blank; Thompson realized who was doing the attacking. He confronted Calley, who was higher ranking than him and told him to mind his damn business.

  Thompson saw a group of women, children, and elderly men huddling by a bunker with American soldiers approaching them, preparing to attack. Discussing what happened next, more than twenty years later, he described his feelings about those soldiers: “It’s—they were the enemy at that time, I guess. They were damn sure the enemy to the people on the ground.” He did something of dizzying strength and bravery, something that proves every word in this book about how Us/Them categorizations can change in an instant. Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter between the villagers and the soldiers, trained his machine guns on his fellow Americans, and ordered his crew to mow them down if they attempted to further harm the villagers.*,*

  Left: Glenn Andreotta; Right, right to left: Hugh Thompson, Lawrence Colburn, and Do Hoa, who they rescued from the ditch as a child, My Lai village, 1998

  Thus we have one person impulsively changing history in twenty countries, another who overcame decades of hatred to catalyze reconciliation, others who overcame every reflex of their training to do the right thing. Time for one last singular person, one who inspires me enormously.

  The person was the Anglican cleric John Newton, born in 1725.54 Well, that doesn’t sound too exciting. He’s best known for composing the hymn “Amazing Grace.” Oh, cool; that, along with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” always move me. Newton also was an abolitionist, a mentor to William Wilberforce in his parliamentary battle to outlaw slavery in the British Empire. Okay, getting better. Now get this—as a young man, Newton had captained a slave ship. Bingo, that’s the setup—a man overseeing and profiting from slavery, a flash of religious and moral insight, dramatic recategorization of Us and Them, dramatic expansion of his humanity, dramatic commitment to make amends for the savagery he had done. You can practically see chapter 5’s neural plasticity on fire in Newton’s brain.

  Nothing resembling this occurred.

  Newton, the son of a ship captain, goes to sea with his father at age eleven. At eighteen he is pressed into service in the navy, tries to desert, and is flogged. Newton manages to escape and works on a West African slave ship. Get ready for him to see the similarity between the captivity of these people and his own experience, to have a revelation.

  No such thing occurs.

  He works on the slave ship and is apparently so detested by everyone that they dump him in what is now Sierra Leone with a slaver who gives him to his wife as a slave. He’s rescued; the ship he is on, returning to England, is caught in a horrific storm and starts to sink. Newton calls out to God, the ship doesn’t sink, and he has a spiritual conversion to evangelical Christianity. He signs up to work on another slave ship. Get ready now—he’s found God, has just been a slave himself, and is poised to suddenly recognize the horror that was the slave trade.

  Nope.

  He professes some sympathy for slaves, grows deeper into his evangelical conversion. He eventually becomes captain of a slave ship and works another six years before stopping. At last he’s seen his actions for what they are.

  Not that either.

  It’s because his health was declining from those tough voyages. He works as a tax collector, studies theology, applies to become an Anglican priest. And he invests his money in slave-trading ventures. In the parlance of my native Brooklyn, from when it was not yet trendy, can you believe this fuggin’ guy?

  He becomes a popular preacher, known for his sermons and pastoral concern; he composes hymns, speaks out for the poor and downtrodden. Presumably, somewhere along the way he stops investing in slavery; maybe because of his conscience, maybe because better investments come along. Still, not a word about slavery. Finally he publishes a pamphlet denouncing it, thirty-four years after stopping being a slaver. That’s a lot of time spent as a blind wretch. Newton’s is a rare voice among abolitionists, someone who has witnessed those horrors, let alone inflicted them. He becomes the major abolitionist voice in England and lives to see England ban the slave trade in 1807.

  There’s no way I could ever be Thompson, Andreotta, or Colburn. I’m not brave; I run away to solit
ary African field sites instead of confronting difficult things. Maybe, at best, I would have been one of the soldiers standing in confusion, compelled by the inhibitions that Grossman discusses into repeatedly checking my rifle to make sure it was loaded, rather than firing it. I see little indication that as an old man I will achieve the grace and moral stature of a Zenji Abe or a Richard Fiske. Bouazizi’s act is incomprehensible to me.

  But Newton, Newton is different; Newton is familiar. He takes convenient comfort from the Bible’s embrace of slavery, spends decades resisting the possibility of his personal morality moving past its conventions. He shows great empathy but applies it selectively. He expands his circle of who counts as an Us, but only so far. We saw how the person who emerges from the crowd to run into the burning building typically acts before thinking, displaying an ingrained automaticity of doing the harder, better thing. There’s no automaticity with Newton. We can practically see his dlPFC laboring with all that rationalizing—“There’s nothing I can do,” “It’s too big for one person to challenge,” “Better to be concerned about the needy who are close to home,” “I can use the profits from the investments for good works,” “Those people really are so fundamentally different,” “I’m tired.” Yes, journeys begin with a single step, but with Newton it’s ten steps forward, nine self-serving ones back. Thompson’s moment of moral perfection feels as unattainable to me as aspiring to be a gazelle or a waterfall or an incandescent sunset. But there’s hope for us, with our foibles and inconsistencies and frailties, as we watch Newton slowly lurch his way toward being a moral titan.

  1788 illustration created by abolitionists of the number of slaves (487) a British ship could legally hold during a trans-Atlantic voyage. In actuality, ships transported far more people than that.

  Finally—the Potential for Collective Power

  There is an anecdote from the Peninsular War of 1807–14, told by Major General George Bell, then an ensign: There was a bridge separating the opposing British and French, with a sentry posted by each side to sound an alarm should the enemy rush across the bridge.55 A British officer was making rounds and found the British sentry there in an unlikely situation—carrying British and French muskets, one on each shoulder, seemingly guarding the bridge for the two opposing armies, with no French sentry in sight. His explanation? His French counterpart had snuck off to buy some liquor for them to share and, naturally, he was watching the other guy’s gun.

  Fraternizing between enemy soldiers is remarkably frequent in war. It’s most common when they’re the same race and major religion and when they are enlisted men rather than officers. It’s also more common when individual enemies, rather than groups, encounter each other, when it’s the same person day after day (e.g., guarding the bridge opposite you), when someone could have shot you but didn’t. Fraternizing rarely involves discussions about life, death, and geopolitics; instead it’s things like bartering food (since the other side’s rations can’t be as bad as yours), cigarettes, or alcohol or complaining about the miserable weather, the miserable officers.56

  In the Spanish Civil War, Republican and Fascist troops regularly met at night to drink, barter, and exchange newspapers, everyone on the lookout for officers. In the Crimean War there was regular bartering across enemy lines of Russian vodka for French baguettes. One British soldier in the Peninsular War described how in the evenings, British and French troops played cards around campfires. And in the American Civil War, Yankee and Rebel soldiers would fraternize, barter, trade newspapers, and, with piercing poignancy, hold joint baptismal services the evening before a battle that would clearly be a bloodbath.

  Thus enemy soldiers have frequently found common ground. A little over a hundred years ago, two such events occurred on a stunning scale.

  It must be admitted that some good came of World War I—thanks to the subsequent collapse of three empires, people in the Baltic, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe gained independence. But from anyone else’s perspective, it was a pointless slaughter of fifteen million people. The war to end all wars, leading to the ruinous peace to end all peace, turned out to be just another of centuries of examples of Europe devouring its young with meaningless conflict. But amid the quagmire of World War I came two examples of hope that, for want of a better word, seem almost miraculous.

  German and British soldiers posing together

  First is the Christmas Truce of 1914, when officers up and down the trenches tentatively shouted, “No shoot,” in another language and met opposing officers in no-man’s-land. The truce began as an agreement to halt hostilities during Christmas dinner and for retrieval of the dead.

  Things spread from there. As extensively documented, soldiers on both sides loaned each other shovels for digging graves. And then helped out. And then held joint burial services. Which led to exchanges of food, drink, and tobacco. Eventually, unarmed soldiers swarmed into no-man’s-land, prayed and caroled together, shared dinner, exchanged gifts. Enemy combatants took group portraits; buttons and helmets were exchanged as souvenirs; plans were made to meet when the war was over. Most famously, soccer matches were held with improvised balls, with scores rarely kept.57

  One historian records a chilling anecdote concerning a German soldier writing home about the truce, mentioning that not everyone participated—there was one soldier who condemned the others as traitors, an obscure corporal named . . . Hitler. But for most of the five hundred miles of trenches, the truce held through Christmas, and often even New Year’s. It took officers’ threats of court-martial to get everyone back to fighting, soldiers wishing their counterparts a safe war. Stunning, moving, heartbreaking. And with only sporadic exceptions, it never happened again, as even brief Christmas truces to retrieve the dead led to court-martials.

  Why did the 1914 truce work? The unique static nature of trench warfare meant that soldiers faced each other day after day. This prompted often-friendly taunting across the lines in the period preceding Christmas, establishing a vague sense of connection. Moreover, the repeated interactions produced a “shadow of the future”—betray the truce, and expect no-holds-barred revenge.

  The success was also aided by everyone sharing the same Judeo-Christian tradition and Western European culture; many knew the others’ language, had visited the others’ country. They were of the same race, and pejoratively calling the enemy “Fritz” completely differs from the pseudospeciation of the Vietnam War’s “gooks,” “slants,” and “dinks.”

  Additional factors explain why the truce mostly involved British and German troops. While the French fought passionately on their own soil, Brits had no particular animosity toward Germans and typically perceived themselves as fighting to save les derrières of the French, their frequent historical enemy. Ironically, during the truce British soldiers would tell Germans that they both should be fighting the French. Meanwhile, by chance, most of the German soldiers were Saxons, who expressed a cousinly affinity for British Anglo-Saxons, suggesting that they should both be fighting the Prussians, the resented dominating group in Germany.

  And perhaps most important, the truce was aided by top-down approval. Officers typically negotiated; figures such as the pope called for a truce; it was a holiday that stood for peace and good will toward all men.

  Thus we have the Christmas Truce. Remarkably, something even more miraculous occurred during the war. In what has been termed the Live and Let Live phenomenon, soldiers in the trenches repeatedly evolved stable truces without exchanging a word, without a shared religious holiday, without the sanction of officers and leaders.

  How did this occur? As documented by the historian Tony Ashworth in Trench Warfare: 1914–1918, it would begin passively. Troops on both sides ate around the same time, and guns would go silent then—who wants to interrupt dinner in order to kill someone or be killed? The same would occur during awful weather, when everyone’s priority became flooded trenches or avoiding freezing to death.58

&nbs
p; Mutual restraint also emerged in circumstances shadowed by the future. Wagon trains delivering food were easy artillery targets but were left unharmed, to prevent reciprocal shelling. Similarly, latrines were spared.

  These truces emerged when soldiers chose not to do something. But truces were also established by overt action. How? Have your best sniper put a bullet into the wall of an abandoned house near enemy lines. Then have him do it again and again, repeatedly hitting the same spot. What are you communicating? “Look how good our guy is. He could have aimed at you instead but chose not to. What are you going to do about it?” And the other side would reciprocate with their best sniper. An agreement to shoot over each other’s heads had been established.

  The key was ritualization—shooting repeatedly at the same inconsequential target, renewing the commitment to peace daily at the same time.

  Live and Let Live truces could withstand perturbations. Soldiers signaled the other side that they had to shoot for real for a while—officers were coming. The system survived violations. If some gung-ho rookie lobbed a shell into the others’ trenches, the most common convention was two shells back, often aimed at important targets. And then the peace would resume. (Ashworth describes such a violation, where Germans unexpectedly fired a shell into British trenches. Soon a German shouted, “We are very sorry about that; we hope no one was hurt. It is not our fault, it is that damned Prussian artillery.” And back flew two British shells.)

  Live and Let Live truces emerged repeatedly. And repeatedly brass in the rear would intervene, rotating troops, threatening court-martials, ordering savage raids requiring hand-to-hand combat that would shatter any sense of shared interests between enemies.

  We see the evolution—initial low-cost overtures with immediate benefits, such as not shooting during dinner, transitioning through gradations of increasingly elaborate restraint and signaling. And we recognize the modified Tit for Tat in dealing with truce violations, with its propensity toward cooperation, punishment for violations, mechanisms for forgiveness, and clear rules.