Less Than Human

by Smith, David Livingstone

  This is obviously a problem from a military perspective. Although it sounds very nasty, and Marshall never put it quite this way, his observations imply that military training should concentrate on overriding the recruit’s moral integrity, so that he or she will have no scruples about killing on command. Moral reservations are—in Marshall’s words—a “handicap” that prevents the soldier from doing his job.

  Of course, these traditional methods would be out of place and ineffective in a modern military context. The U.S. armed forces overhauled their system of military training to try to solve the problems that Marshall identified. They began to train soldiers to fire immediately at man-shaped targets that pop into view, instead of the static, bull’s-eye targets used during World War II and earlier. Apparently as a result, U.S. soldiers’ ratio of fire increased during the Korean conflict, and by the time the Vietnam War rolled around, American troops had become much more efficient killers. But this solution created a whole new problem. The troops did better in battle, and the ratio of fire skyrocketed, but so did the incidence of combat-related psychological disorders.10

  Marshall suggested in Men Against Fire that there is a strong connection between the terror of killing and what’s nowadays called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). He wrote, “Studies by Medical Corps psychiatrists of combat fatigue cases … found that fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure.”11

  This implied that killing is traumatic—so traumatic that it can precipitate psychological breakdown. Soldiers’ reports of their personal experiences give this credence. Sometimes they describe becoming emotionally detached or dissociated, which makes war seem unreal, like a dream or a movie, and which insulates them from the moral enormity of their actions. Others describe shaking uncontrollably, vomiting, losing bladder and bowel control, and being overwhelmed by feelings of guilt. Historian William Manchester’s description of killing a Japanese sniper on Okinawa is a good example of how the experience of taking life in close combat can impact on the killer. The sniper had been firing on Manchester’s unit. He saw that the shots were coming from a fisherman’s shack, and decided to enter it. He kicked the door open and caught the man off guard. Manchester’s first shot was wide of the mark, but the second one hit the sniper in the heart. “He dipped a hand in it and listlessly smeared his cheek red.… Almost immediately a fly landed on his left eyeball,” as the frightened young Marine pumped bullet after bullet into the slumping corpse. He then paused.

  I don’t know how long I stood there staring. A feeling of disgust and self-hatred clotted darkly in my throat, gagging me. Jerking my head to shake off the stupor, I slipped a new fully loaded magazine into the butt of my .45. Then I began to tremble, and next to shake, all over. I sobbed, in a voice still grainy with fear: “I’m sorry.” Then I threw up all over myself. I recognized the half-digested C-ration beans dribbling down my front, smelled the vomit above the cordite. At the same time I noticed another odor; I had urinated in my skivvies.… I knew I had become a thing of tears and twitching and dirtied pants. I remember wondering dumbly: Is that what they mean by conspicuous gallantry?12

  Observations of a connection between combat guilt and psychological damage go back a long way. In his sensitive study of psychological trauma suffered by veterans of the American Civil War, Eric T. Dean notes that these men sometimes felt that they had been tainted by an unpardonable sin.

  For instance, one veteran was operating under the delusion that he had been accused of murder and that a corpse had been secreted in his house. Another thought that he was guilty of heinous crimes committed during his early life. Others were brooding over transgressions or convinced that they were hopeless sinners: “said he was guilty of great crimes … he thinks he is lost for all eternity”; “delusion seems to be that he has done something terrible.”

  Later, during World War I, Nobel laureate Jane Addams described “hearing from hospital nurses who said that delirious soldiers are again and again possessed by the same hallucination—pulling their bayonets out of the bodies of men they have killed.”13

  Rachel MacNair points out in her book Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress that even Nazi killers, who are conventionally portrayed as monsters devoid of even a shred of moral sensibility, had difficulty stomaching the work of extermination. For example, Rudolf Höss, the first commander of Auschwitz, reported that Adolf Eichmann had told him, “Many of the Einsatzkommandos, unable to endure wading through blood any longer, had committed suicide. Some had even gone mad. Most of the members of the Kommandos had to rely on alcohol when carrying out their horrible work.”14

  Psychological studies have strongly confirmed the relationship between killing and psychological damage. A study of almost 3,000 U.S. Army soldiers by University of California psychologist Shira Maguen and her coworkers found that the 40 percent of them who reported killing in combat were significantly more prone to psychological problems than the rest. This effect was independent of combat exposure—in other words, it can’t be explained by saying that the men who killed in combat were also the men who were most extensively engaged in combat and therefore exposed to other stressors. In their 2009 report, they demonstrated “highly significant” correlations between killing in combat and the severity of PTSD, dissociation, violent behavior, and general psychological impairment. And then, of course, there’s suicide. In the United States, veterans are twice as likely as members of the general population to die from suicide, and research suggests that veterans’ suicides are often linked to persistent feelings of guilt about what they’ve done. A publication by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs plainly states, “Research suggests that for veterans, the strongest link to both suicide attempts and thinking about suicide is guilt related to combat. Many veterans have very disturbing thoughts and extreme guilt about actions taken during times of war.”15

  The label “PTSD” presents the psychological effects of combat as a “disorder.” But is it? Is a bullet wound or the loss of a limb a disorder? Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay doesn’t think so. He argues that psychological damage is an injury, and coined the term moral injury. Boston University psychiatrist Brett T. Litz took up the term, and defined it as psychological damage caused by “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”16

  An article by Litz and five coauthors published in 2009 in the Clinical Psychology Review notes that there’s considerable evidence that moral injury has powerful negative psychological consequences. They give some sobering statistics. In 2003, 32 percent of U.S. marines and soldiers reported that they were responsible for the death of an enemy combatant, and 20 percent admitted responsibility for the death of a noncombatant. Perhaps even more significantly, 27 percent reported that they faced ethical challenges in combat to which they didn’t know how to respond.* Almost a third of U.S. combat troops experienced significant moral conflict during their deployment, and this figure very likely underreports the true extent of the problem. Small wonder, then, that of the approximately 1.7 million military personnel that have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, as many as three hundred thousand—close to 17 percent—may be suffering from PTSD and many more may be suffering from less easily diagnosable psychological injuries.17 Litz and his coauthors note that:

  We are doing a disservice to our service members and veterans if we fail to conceptualize and address the lasting psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioral, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations, that is, moral injury.18

  Why does killing produce such guilt? Marshall reasoned that it comes from social programming. Taking human life is the ultimate forbidden act. It is interdicted by a social taboo that runs so deep that it can’t easily be sloughed off.

  If this explanation is correct, then soldiers from cultures with a more permissive at
titude toward bloodshed should function more effectively in combat. In the developed world, killing is only permissible at the behest of the state, but in some traditional cultures individuals have much greater latitude. There are societies in which men are expected to avenge the death of members of their family or clan by taking a life in return. If this happened in Los Angeles, we’d think of it as a gangland murder. The cultural context makes all the difference.

  In a controversial article published in The New Yorker in 2008, Jared Diamond claims that children growing up in such societies are exposed to bloodshed at an early age, and suggests that this early conditioning makes them guilt-free killers in adulthood.

  Traditional New Guineans … have from childhood onward often seen warriors going out and coming back from fighting; they have seen the bodies of relatives killed by the enemy, listened to stories of killing, heard fighting talked about as the highest ideal, and witnessed successful warriors talking proudly about their killings and being praised for them. If New Guineans end up feeling unconflicted about killing the enemy, it’s because they have had no contrary message to unlearn.19

  Diamond contrasts this allegedly easygoing attitude with that of American veterans who so often return from war conflicted about what they’ve done. “It’s no wonder,” he remarks, “that many soldiers who kill suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. When they come home, far from boasting about killing, as a Nipa tribesman would, they have nightmares and never talk about it at all, unless to other veterans.” This comparison is misleading on two counts: it incorrectly equates feuding and warfare, and it presents a shallow, two-dimensional picture of the psychology of men and women in traditional societies. Feuding and war both aim at killing, but there’s a profound difference between them. In a feud, the killing is personal. The killers have a score to settle, and this is a powerful motive for extracting revenge. In contrast, war is impersonal—hostilities are directed at an abstraction, “the enemy,” rather than at any individual. Feuders see themselves as putting something right, whereas soldiers see themselves as doing their duty.20

  Soldiers often lose their nerve precisely when they’re confronted with the fact that those whom they are trying to kill are fellow human beings who they have no grudge against. This principle is famously illustrated by a passage written by George Orwell describing an experience that he had during the Spanish Civil War. Early one morning, Orwell and a comrade set out to search for fascists. Hiding in a ditch to avoid being spotted by the enemy, they watched as:

  At this moment, a man presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards.… Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at “Fascists”; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a “Fascist,” he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.21

  Lieutenant Emilio Lussu, an Italian soldier who fought in World War I, recounts something similar. During the night, Lussu had crept into a position overlooking the Austrian trenches. As dawn broke, he could plainly see them “as they really were, men and soldiers like us, moving about, talking, and drinking coffee.” Lussu spotted a young officer, and took aim. At that moment, the Austrian lit a cigarette. “That cigarette formed an invisible link between us,” he wrote. Lussu knew that it was his duty to shoot, but

  I began to think that perhaps I ought not to do so. I reasoned like this: To lead a hundred, even a thousand, men against another hundred, or thousand was one thing; but to detach one man from the rest and say to him, as it were, “Don’t move. I’m going to shoot you. I’m going to kill you”—that was different.… To fight is one thing, but to kill a man is another. And to kill him like that is to murder him.22

  William D. Ketcham, a Union veteran of the American Civil War, told a story of aiming at a Confederate officer, pulling the trigger, and missing his mark. “I did not elevate the sight,” he later confessed. On another occasion, Ketcham shot a man and afterward, when he inspected the corpse, noticed that it had multiple gunshot wounds. “[T]hat survey of the target satisfied my mind that I was not responsible for his death,” he wrote in his memoir, “and his blood was not on my hands and I have always been glad that I knew that fact.”23 Because blood feuds are motivated by passion, it’s easy to see the killers would be less inhibited—less troubled by moral scruple—than soldiers are. Imagine that you found your parent or child, brother or sister, lying face down in the dirt with an arrow protruding from their back. Wouldn’t you be capable of doing almost anything to avenge them?

  In war, the motivation to kill is nowhere near as strong, because the soldier kills out of duty rather than out of passion. That’s why wars require propaganda to drum up motivation. And one of the most popular themes in propaganda is to represent the war as a feud. To personalize it by inducing potential combatants to believe that their families are threatened by the enemy, who wants nothing better than to kill their mother, rape their sister, and bayonet their baby.

  Even though feuding tribesmen have a stronger motivation to kill than soldiers normally do, it would be wrong to assume—as Diamond seems to think—that they don’t have any inhibitions at all. To suppose this is a modern version of the old, ethnocentric fantasy of the bloodthirsty savage. If you want to really understand a culture’s attitude toward lethal violence, you’ve got to look beyond the superficial braggadocio of warriors. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, whose work I briefly discussed in Chapter Two, points out that tribal people are typically ambivalent about war. For instance, he found that in mourning ceremonies for fallen warriors among the Melpa of Papua New Guinea, “war was characterized as evil and associated with guilt,” noting as well that this “does not contradict the fact that one can participate in it with enthusiasm, and a certain athletic zeal, for guilt and enthusiasm can be activated simultaneously.”

  It is probably for this reason that the attacker, to excuse himself, typically claims that the other parties initiated the hostilities, and that he was compelled to protect himself. This is a common position taken by members of traditional societies and representatives of civilized nations, regardless of the type of government.24

  Ceremonial purification after battle is another manifestation of ambivalence about killing. In many cultures (including the fearsome Yanomamö), warriors who have killed are required to undergo ritual purification before reentering society. Freud discussed this in his book Totem and Taboo, where he interpreted cleansing rituals as manifestations of guilt. The anthropologist Harry Holbert Turney-High followed Freud’s example in his book Primitive War:

  War and killing push men into some kind of marginality which is at least uncomfortable, for there seems to be a basic fear of blood-contamination, an essential dread of human murder. If man did not consider human killing something out of the ordinary, why has there been such common fear of the enemy dead, the idea of contamination of even a prestigeful warrior of the we-group? We have seen that the channeling of frustration into hatred toward the enemy is good for the internal harmony of the we-group, but the enemy is human, too. Humanity is capable of ambivalent attitudes towards its enemies.25

  There’s another reason to be skeptical of Marshall-style explanations. If the reluctance to kill is purely the result of learning to conform to a social taboo, why is this taboo so much more powerful than the other ones? Normally, we don’t have a lot of difficulty violating social rules. For example, we’re not supposed to lie, but most of us lie a great deal; we’re not supposed to steal, but every year many people evade paying income tax; and we’re not supposed to commit adultery, but infidelity is all too common. All of these social taboos forbid us to do things that we’re strongly tempted to do, which is why they’re often more honored in the breach than in the o
bservance. However, the interdiction against killing doesn’t seem to fit this pattern at all. How many are unable to resist a temptation to kill others? Homicide is remarkably rare, even in countries with elevated homicide rates. In Colombia, South America, which consistently has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, there were on average only 62.7 killings per 100,000 people between 2000 and 2004. Why is killing so different from lying, stealing, and adultery? When we consider people’s learning histories, the disparity is even starker. Most people have never been told not to kill another human being, nor have they been punished for killing or threatening to kill someone. But they’ve frequently been told by not to lie, steal, and so on, and have been punished for these infractions. One would imagine that, if resistance to killing boils down to social learning, killing should be a lot easier to do than lying and stealing. But it isn’t.

  THE INFORMATION EXPLOSION

  Humans may be hard-wired to get edgy around the Other, but our views on who falls into that category are decidedly malleable.

  —ROBERT SAPOLSKY, “PEACEFUL PRIMATES” A NATURAL HISTORY OF PEACE 26

  If our resistance to killing isn’t a result of learning all on its own, then it must be based in part on something innate. There must have been some feature of our evolution that accounts for why humans have such robust inhibitions against taking human life. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to dream up evolutionary scenarios about how this might have happened. Facts about the social behavior of our remote ancestors are thin on the ground, and it isn’t helpful to churn out hypotheses that have no evidence to answer to. But it’s not helpful to throw in the towel either. So, I’m going to tread a cautious middle course. I’m going to set out what I think is a plausible evolutionary hypothesis of how dehumanization became part of our psychological repertoire. I don’t claim that it’s the best possible explanation. There may well be better ones. And I’m certainly not claiming that it’s true. But it’s the best story that I’ve been able to come up with so far, and I think that it’s worthy of consideration.