Harm is a thick concept. It’s best understood as morally unacceptable damage. This definition implies that you can only harm a thing if it has some moral standing. There’s an important connection here with pain and suffering, but not the connection that Goodall had in mind in her discussion of cruelty. Harm can be painless, and pain can be harmless, but the kinds of beings that can feel pain are the kinds of beings that can be harmed. Feeling pain is diagnostic of a creature’s moral standing, but isn’t constitutive of it.
What kinds of beings have moral standing? What makes the difference between things that can suffer harm and things that can’t? In some cases the answer is clear: People have moral standing and inanimate objects don’t—people can be harmed, but inanimate objects can only be damaged. But where do all the other life-forms stand? Oddly enough, our judgments about this depend in large measure on where we position them on the great chain of being. This ancient, discredited, prescientific model of the cosmos still unconsciously serves as a guideline for our moral judgments. Recall that the great chain of being classifies things both in terms of their descriptive properties and in terms of their value; it’s therefore thick from top to bottom. Inanimate objects are at the bottom of the chain, and have no value in themselves. Microorganisms and plants don’t fare much better, which is why even the most zealous vegans can weed their garden and wipe out untold millions of germs with disinfectants (“green” ones, of course) without suffering a single pang of guilt. Intuitions get foggier as we climb higher. Is swatting a mosquito cruel? How about stepping on a cockroach or skewering a writhing worm on a fishhook? Plunging a living lobster into boiling water, or gutting a trout for dinner? Killing a chicken? Slaughtering a lamb? Performing an abortion? Executing a criminal?
There’s no fact of the matter about exactly where in this sequence damage gives way to harm, and destruction becomes cruelty, but the principle governing such judgments is both clear and embarrassingly narcissistic: the closer we judge a creature is to us on the hierarchy, the more inclined we are to grant it moral standing.
This principle has some resonance with David Hume’s moral theory, which I briefly described in Chapter Two. Remember that Hume thought morality comes from sympathy, and that we have sympathy with others only to the extent that they resemble us. At first glance, this way of looking at things fits very nicely with the moral scheme of the great chain. Look at our attitude toward nonhuman species. We care much more about the kinds of animals that are closest to us on the chain than we do about those that are more remote (people who want desperately to protect mountain gorillas from poachers don’t lose any sleep over the fate of the tiny parasites that scramble around in their fur).
Despite appearances, the two approaches are incompatible. Here’s why.
Hume was what philosophers call an empiricist. In everyday speech, an empiricist is somebody who relies entirely on observation as a source of knowledge. Philosophers give the word a somewhat more technical meaning. In philosophy-speak, empiricism is the theory that our knowledge of the world boils down to knowledge of our sense impressions and that we “construct” our picture of the world solely from these raw materials. Look around the room. You see objects like windows and furniture. Perhaps you see other people in the room as well. Empiricists claim that all that you’re really seeing are visual impressions—colored patches of various shapes and sizes from which you construct a picture of the room. Empiricism implies that objects (for example, the book that you are reading) are really just bundles of sense impressions. Hume’s older contemporary George Berkeley, illustrated this idea using the example of a cherry.
I see this cherry, I feel it, I taste it … it is therefore real. Take away the sensations of softness, moisture, redness, tartness, and you take away the cherry. Since it is not a being distinct from sensations; a cherry, I say, is nothing but a congeries of sensible impressions, or ideas perceived by various senses: which ideas are united into one thing (or have one name given them) by the mind.25
When Hume spoke of resemblance, he meant similarity in appearance—because, as an empiricist, he thought that appearances are all that we can ever know. But we’ve seen that appearances play second fiddle to essences in our intuitive judgments about natural kinds, and the great chain of being is a hierarchical classification of natural kinds. So it can’t be that judgments about creatures’ moral standing are based on their appearance. Instead, these judgments must be based on our beliefs about their essences—the kinds of things that they are. Retuning to an example used earlier in this book: if Dracula existed he would not be a creature with the same moral standing as a human being because, even though he looks human, he isn’t a member of the human kind (to appreciate this, think of how odd it would be to put him on trial for his “crimes”). Our intuitive moral psychology seems to conform to the following principle: We grant moral standing to creatures to the extent that we believe that their essence resembles our own.
This principle points to another reason why chimpanzees can’t be cruel. I’ve already argued that for a chimpanzee to be cruel, it would have to grasp the concept harm. Now it’s clear that to understand harm you’ve got to have a notion of natural kinds. Minimally, you’ve got to have a notion of your own kind. So, if I’m right, a chimp could be cruel only if it could conceive of the creature that it is brutalizing as the same or a similar kind as itself. Granting this level of cognitive sophistication to chimpanzees would stretch credulity well beyond its breaking point.
This analysis explains more about how dehumanization produces moral disengagement. To dehumanize a person is to deny that they have a human essence. However, denying that a person is human is only half the story, because it’s about what people aren’t rather than what they are. We’ve seen that dehumanizers affirm the subhumanity of their victims, not merely their nonhumanity. To the Nazis, Jews weren’t just nonhumans; they were rats in human form. And to the genocidaires of Rwanda, Tutsis were cockroaches.
Dehumanized people are never thought of as charming animals like butterflies and kittens. That’s because dehumanizers always identify their victims with animals that motivate violence. The thinking goes something like this: Rats are vermin, and should be exterminated. So, if Jews are rats, then they should be exterminated, too. Jews are rats. Exterminating rats isn’t cruel, because rats have no moral standing—so, exterminating Jews isn’t cruel. In fact, it’s morally good to exterminate rats because they harm human beings by spreading filth and disease—so, it’s morally good to exterminate Jews.
8
AMBIVALENCE AND TRANSGRESSION
The conclusion that we must draw from all these observances is that the impulses which they express towards an enemy are not solely hostile ones. They are also manifestations of remorse, of admiration for the enemy, and of a bad conscience for having killed him. It is difficult to resist the notion that, long before a table of laws was handed down by any god, these savages were in possession of a living commandment: “Thou shalt not kill”, a violation of which would not go unpunished.
—SIGMUND FREUD, TOTEM AND TABOO1
IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, I argued that Mark Twain was right to say Homo sapiens are the only cruel animals and the only animals that go to war. In this chapter, I’m going to assess one of his other claims. Twain wrote that in between murderous military campaigns he (humankind) “washes the blood off his hands, and works for ‘the universal brotherhood of man’ with his mouth.” The idea so bitingly expressed in these few words is that we are hypocrites about war. We slaughter our fellow human beings in war while paying lip service to the ideal of peace.
Folk-wisdom has it that actions speak louder than words, and that words are cheap. When a person says one thing but does another, it’s natural to think that the act expresses their genuine commitments and the words are nothing but a coverup. Why not apply the same reasoning to the behavior of whole populations—tribes, nations, religions, maybe even the whole human race? Perhaps, then, our vaunted commitment to
peace is nothing but a sham—a colossal self-deception.
There’s more than a little truth to this accusation. One reason to think so is the fact that we (contemporary Americans) go to great lengths to avoid acknowledging the simple and obvious truth that war is all about killing people. Read the newspapers and listen to the speeches of our politicians. Young men and women are called to “serve their country” by going to war. When they’re killed, we’re told that they “gave their life for their country” (a foolish idea: soldiers’ lives are taken, not given). But how often do you hear young people asked to go to war to kill people for their country? U.S. Army psychologist David Grossman drives home the point that the discourse of war is “full of denial.”
Most soldiers do not “kill,” instead the enemy was knocked over, wasted, greased, taken out, and mopped up. The enemy’s humanity is denied, and he becomes a strange beast called a Kraut, Jap, Reb, Yank, dink, slant, or slope. Even the weapons of war receive benign names—Puff the Magic Dragon, Walleye, TOW, Fat Boy and Thin Man—and the killing weapon of the individual soldier becomes a piece or a hog, and a bullet becomes a round.
Why all this dishonesty? Grossman suggests that the answer lies in our visceral horror of taking human life. “Killing is what war is all about,” continues Grossman, “and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt. The deceptive language of war helps us to deny what war is really about, and in doing so it makes war more palatable.”2 If Grossman is right, then Twain’s cynical assessment is too harsh. We butcher human beings and condemn killing because we’re torn between two conflicting attitudes. We humans like to kill. We find it pleasant, exciting—even intoxicating. But we’re also horror-struck and sickened by the spilling of human blood. Both attitudes are genuine, and both are part of human nature.
MORAL INJURY
I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you, and I don’t think it is. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse.
—SENATOR BOB KERREY3
One of the most compelling demonstrations of the violent, demonic aspect of human nature is the eerie elation that ordinary men sometimes experience in the heat of combat. There are many examples of this in the literature of war. I’ll quote a few to give their flavor.
We can start with Israeli military psychologist Ben Shalit, who recounts an observation that he made during his national service in the navy.
The gunner … was firing away with what I can only describe as a beatific smile on his face. He was exhilarated by the squeezing of the trigger, the hammering of the gun, and the flight of his tracers rushing out into the dark shore. It struck me then (and was confirmed by him and many others later) that squeezing the trigger—and releasing a hail of bullets—gives enormous pleasure and satisfaction. These are the pleasures of combat, not in terms of the intellectual planning—of the tactical and strategic chess game—but of the primal aggression, the release, and the orgasmic discharge.4
What was the gunner experiencing? We’ll never know. But other descriptions are more explicit. J. Glenn Gray, the philosopher-soldier whom I introduced back in Chapter One, goes further:
Anyone who has watched men on the battlefield at work with artillery, or looked into the eyes of veteran killers fresh from slaughter, or studied the bombardiers’ feelings while smashing their targets, finds it hard to escape the conclusion that there is delight in destruction.5
German writer Ernst Jünger’s recollection of his service in World War I gives a taste of the “combat high” from a first-person perspective.
With a mixture of feelings, evoked by bloodthirstiness, rage, and intoxication we moved in step, ponderously but irresistibly toward the enemy lines.… I was boiling with a mad rage which had taken hold of me and all the others in an incomprehensible fashion. The overwhelming wish to kill gave wings to my feet.… The monstrous desire for annihilation, which hovered over the battlefield, thickened the brains of the men and submerged them in a red fog. We called to each other in sobs and stammered disconnected sentences. A neutral observer might have perhaps believed that we were seized by an excess of happiness.6
Finally, Vietnam War veteran William Broyles Jr. offers chillingly frank reflections on the euphoria of slaughter. In an essay entitled “Why Men Love War,” Broyles recalls a colonel who was “a true intellectual … a sensitive man who kept a journal.” Although this man was “far better equipped for winning hearts and minds,” he was given a combat command. One night, a North Vietnamese sapper unit attacked his base (sappers are elite combat engineers). Most of his combat troops were away on an operation, so the colonel had to muster “a motley crew of cooks and clerks” who routed the attackers and killed dozens of them.
That morning, as they were surveying what they had done and loading the dead NVA—all naked and covered with grease and mud so they could penetrate the barbed wire—on mechanical mules like so much garbage, there was a look of beatific contentment on the colonel’s face that I had not seen except in charismatic churches. It was the look of a person transported into ecstasy. And I—what did I do, confronted with this beastly scene? I smiled back, as filled with bliss as he was. That was another of the times I stood on the edge of my humanity, looked into the pit, and loved what I saw there.7
Off the battlefield, the pleasures of violence are savored vicariously. Public executions have always been a crowd-pleaser. In countries where this form of entertainment is unavailable there is boxing, wrestling, mixed martial arts, and various team sports that simulate warfare. And, of course, there’s literature, movies, and computer games, from the Iliad and Star Wars to Modern Warfare 2. And then there’s war porn. An article in Newsweek magazine, published in 2010, explains that when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq broke out, both the military and individual soldiers began posting combat footage on the internet.
But almost as soon as these images became available, civilians and soldiers alike started splicing the clips together, often adding soundtracks and spreading them across the Web. Today there are thousands of war-porn videos, and they’ve been viewed millions of times. Like sexual porn, they come in degrees of violence, ranging from soft-core montages of rocket-propelled grenades blowing up buildings to snuff-film-like shots of an insurgent taking a bullet to the head. And even as the U.S. begins its march toward the end of two long conflicts, these compilations continue to attract viewers. With a videogame sensibility, they fetishize—and warp—the most brutal parts of these high-tech wars.8
Judging from these examples, human nature is violent in the extreme. This is exactly what Richard Wrangham’s hypothesis that we have inherited a dominance drive from our primate ancestors would suggest. But matters aren’t so simple. When you read these examples, you were probably fascinated, maybe even titillated by them. But you were probably also sickened by them. This feeling would be more pronounced if you encountered the carnage in the flesh rather than through the pale medium of the printed word. Smelling blood and the stomach-turning stench of ruptured entrails, seeing dismembered and eviscerated human bodies, and hearing the agonized screams of the injured, is a far cry from merely reading about them.
Now, reposition yourself. Imagine that you are the perpetrator rather than an observer. Imagine that you are directly responsible for killing, maiming, and mutilating other human beings.
How do you feel?
In the movies, it’s all very easy. You just pull the trigger and blow away the enemy. And death is usually tidy—there’s a corpse with a barely detectable bullet hole lying in a pool of its own blood. In real life, things are different. Killing is hard.
One of the first people to publically acknowledge this was a controversial U.S. Army historian named Samuel Lyman Atwood (“SLAM”) Marshall. Marshall got his information by talking to U.S. infantrymen immediately after firefights in the European theater of World War II, and he claimed that these conversations revealed that the majority of these men—up to three quarters of them—n
ever fired their weapon at an enemy soldier, even when under attack. Marshall wrote about this problem (which he called the “ratio of fire”) in a short but influential book entitled Men Against Fire. In the book he pointed out that men enter military service with a fully formed set of moral convictions, the most important of which is that it’s wrong to take human life.
He is what his home, his religion, his schooling, and the moral code and ideals of his society have made him. The Army cannot unmake him. It must reckon with the fact that he comes from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable. The teaching and ideals of that civilization are against killing, against taking advantage. The fear of aggression has been expressed in him so strongly, and absorbed by him so deeply and pervadingly—practically with his mother’s milk—that it is part of the normal man’s emotional makeup. This is his great handicap when he enters combat. It stays his trigger finger even though he is hardly conscious that it is a restraint upon him. Because it is an emotional and not an intellectual handicap, it is not removable by intellectual reasoning such as: “Kill or be killed.”
It is therefore reasonable to believe that the average and normally healthy individual—the man who can endure the mental and physical stresses of combat—still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility.… At the vital point he becomes a conscientious objector, unknowing.9
Less Than Human Page 25