What makes us so eager to believe in our own corruption? Why does veneer theory keep returning in so many permutations? I suspect it has a lot to do with convenience. In a weird way, to believe in our own sinful nature is comforting. It provides a kind of absolution. Because if most people are bad, then engagement and resistance aren’t worth the effort.
Belief in humankind’s sinful nature also provides a tidy explanation for the existence of evil. When confronted with hatred or selfishness, you can tell yourself, ‘Oh, well, that’s just human nature.’ But if you believe that people are essentially good, you have to question why evil exists at all. It implies that engagement and resistance are worthwhile, and it imposes an obligation to act.
In 2015, psychologist Matthew Hollander reviewed the taped recordings of 117 sessions at Milgram’s shock machine.39 After extensive analysis, he discovered a pattern. The subjects who managed to halt the experiment used three tactics:
1. Talk to the victim.
2. Remind the man in the grey lab coat of his responsibility.
3. Repeatedly refuse to continue.
Communication and confrontation, compassion and resistance. Hollander discovered that virtually all participants used these tactics–virtually all wanted to stop, after all–but that those who succeeded used them much more. The good news is: these are trainable skills. Resistance just takes practice. ‘What distinguishes Milgram’s heroes,’ Hollander observes, ‘is largely a teachable competency at resisting questionable authority.’40
If you think resistance is doomed to fail, then I have one last story for you on the subject. It takes place in Denmark during the Second World War. It’s a story of ordinary people who demonstrated extraordinary courage. And it shows that resistance is always worthwhile, even when all seems lost.
5
The date is 28 September 1943.
In the headquarters of the Workers Assembly Building on 24 Rømersgade in Copenhagen, the Social Democratic Party leaders have all convened. A visitor in a Nazi uniform stands before them. They are staring at him in shock.
‘The disaster is at hand,’ the man is saying. ‘Everything is planned in detail. Ships will anchor at the mooring off Copenhagen. Those of your poor Jewish countrymen who get caught by the Gestapo will forcibly be brought on board the ships and transported to an unknown fate.’41
The speaker is trembling and pale. Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz is his name. He will go down in history as ‘the converted Nazi’, and his warning will work a miracle.
The raid was set to take place on Friday 1 October 1943, following detailed plans drawn up by the SS. At the stroke of 8 p.m., hundreds of German troops would begin knocking on doors up and down the country to round up all the Danish Jews. They would be taken to the harbour and boarded onto a ship equipped to hold six thousand prisoners.
To put it in terms of the shock experiments: Denmark didn’t go from 15 volts to 30 and from 30 volts to 45. The Danes would be told to give the highest 450-volt shock at once. Up until this moment there had been no discriminatory laws, no mandatory yellow badges, no confiscation of Jewish property. Danish Jews would find themselves being deported to Polish concentration camps before they knew what had hit them.
That, at least, was the plan.
On the appointed night, tens of thousands of ordinary Danes–barbers and bartenders, builders and businessmen–refused to press that last switch on the shock machine. That night, the Germans discovered that the Jews had been forewarned of the raid and that most had already fled. In fact, thanks to that warning, almost 99 per cent of Denmark’s Jews survived the war.
How can we explain the miracle of Denmark? What made this country a beacon of light in a sea of darkness?
After the war, historians suggested a number of answers. One important factor was that the Nazis had not fully seized power in Denmark, wishing to preserve the impression that their two governments were working together in harmony. As a consequence, resistance against the Germans wasn’t as risky in Denmark as in other countries, such as occupied Holland.
But ultimately one explanation stands out. ‘The answer is undeniable,’ writes historian Bo Lidegaard. ‘The Danish Jews were protected by their compatriots’ consistent engagement.’42
When news of the raid spread, resistance sprang up from every quarter. From churches, universities and the business community, from the royal family, the Lawyers Council and the Danish Women’s National Council–all voiced their objection. Almost immediately, a network of escape routes was organised, even with no centralised planning and no attempt to coordinate the hundreds of individual efforts. There simply wasn’t time. Thousands of Danes, rich and poor, young and old, understood that now was the time to act, and that to look away would be a betrayal of their country.
‘Even where the request came from the Jews themselves,’ historian Leni Yahil noted, ‘these were never refused.’43 Schools and hospitals threw open their doors. Small fishing villages took in hundreds of refugees. The Danish police also assisted where they could and refused to cooperate with the Nazis. ‘We Danes don’t barter with our Constitution,’ stormed Dansk Maanedspost, a resistance newspaper, ‘and least of all in the matter of citizens’ equality.’44
Where mighty Germany was doped up on years of racist propaganda, modest Denmark was steeped in humanist spirit. Danish leaders had always insisted on the sanctity of the democratic rule of law. Anybody who sought to pit people against each other was not considered worthy to be called a Dane. There could be no such thing as a ‘Jewish question’. There were only countrymen.
In a few short days, more than seven thousand Danish Jews were ferried in small fishing boats across the Sound separating Denmark from Sweden. Their rescue was a small but radiant point of light in a time of utter darkness. It was a triumph of humanity and courage. ‘The Danish exception shows that the mobilization of civil society’s humanism […] is not only a theoretical possibility,’ writes Lidegaard. ‘It can be done. We know because it happened.’45
The Danish resistance turned out to be so contagious that even Hitler’s most loyal followers in Denmark began to experience doubts. It became increasingly difficult for them to act as if they were backing a just cause. ‘Even injustice needs a semblance of law,’ Lidegaard observes. ‘That is hard to find when the entire society denies the right of the stronger.’46
Only in Bulgaria and Italy did the Nazis encounter comparable resistance, and there the Jewish death toll was analogously low. Historians emphasise that the scale of deportations in occupied regions hinged on the extent of each country’s collaboration.47 In Denmark, Adolf Eichmann would tell Willem Sassen years later, the Germans had more difficulties than elsewhere. ‘The result was meager… I also had to recall my transports–it was for me a mighty disgrace.’48
To be clear, the Germans stationed in Denmark were no softies–as attested by the highest ranking Nazi there, Werner Best, better known as ‘the Bloodhound of Paris’. Even Duckwitz, the converted Nazi in Copenhagen, had been a rabid anti-Semite throughout the 1930s. But as the years progressed, he became infected by the Danish spirit of humanity.
In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt makes a fascinating observation about the rescue of the Danish Jews. ‘It is the only case we know,’ she wrote, ‘in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their “toughness” had melted like butter in the sun…’49
9
The Death of Catherine Susan Genovese
1
There’s one more story from the 1960s that needs to be told. Another story that exposes a painful truth about human nature. This time it’s not about the things we do, but the things we fail to do. It’s also a story that echoes what so many Germans, Dutch, French, Austrians and others across Europe would claim after millions
of Jews were arrested, deported, and murdered in the Second World War.
Wir haben es nicht gewußt. ‘We had no idea.’
It is 13 March 1964, a quarter past three in the morning. Catherine Susan Genovese drives her red Fiat past the NO PARKING sign just visible in the darkness and pulls up outside the Austin Street subway station.
Kitty, as everyone knows her, is a whirlwind of energy. Twenty-eight years old, she’s crazy about dancing and has more friends than free time. Kitty loves New York City, and the city loves her. It’s the place where she can be herself–the place she’s free.
But that night it’s cold outside, and Kitty’s in a hurry to get home to her girlfriend. It’s their first anniversary, and all Kitty wants to do is cuddle up with Mary Ann. Quickly switching off her lights and locking the car doors, she heads off towards their small apartment, less than a hundred feet away.
What Kitty doesn’t know is that this will be the final hour of her life.
‘Oh my God, he stabbed me! Help me!’
It’s 3:19 a.m. The screams pierce the night, loud enough to wake the neighbourhood. In several apartments, lights flick on. Windows are raised and voices murmur in the night. One calls out, ‘Let that girl alone.’
But Kitty’s attacker returns. For the second time, he stabs her with his knife. Stumbling around the corner, she cries out ‘I’m dying! I’m dying!’
Nobody comes outside. Nobody lifts a finger to help. Instead, dozens of neighbours peer through their windows, as though watching a reality show. One couple pulls up some chairs and dims the lights to get a clearer view.
When the attacker returns for a third time, he finds her lying at the foot of a stairwell just inside her apartment building. Upstairs, Mary Ann sleeps on, unaware.
Kitty’s attacker stabs her again and again.
It’s 3:50 a.m. when the first call comes into the police station. The caller is a neighbour who spent a long time deliberating what to do. Officers arrive on the scene within two minutes, but it’s too late. ‘I didn’t want to get involved,’ the caller admits to the police.1
These six words–‘I didn’t want to get involved’–reverberated around the globe.
Initially, Kitty’s death was one of the 636 murders committed in New York City that year.2 A life cut short, a love lost, and the city moved on. But two weeks later, the story made the papers, and in time Kitty’s murder would make it into the history books. Not because of the killer or the victim, but because of the spectators.
The media storm started on Good Friday–27 March 1964. ‘37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police,’ read the front page of the New York Times. The article opened with the following lines: ‘For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.’ Kitty could still have been alive, the story said. As one detective put it, ‘A phone call would have done it.’3
From Great Britain to Russia and from Japan to Iran, Kitty became big news. Here was proof, reported Soviet newspaper Izvestia, of capitalism’s ‘jungle morals’.4 American society had become ‘as sick as the one that crucified Jesus’ preached a Brooklyn minister, while one columnist condemned his countrymen as ‘a callous, chickenhearted and immoral people’.5
Journalists, photographers and TV crews swarmed Kew Gardens, where Kitty had lived. None of them could believe what a nice, neat, respectable neighbourhood it was. How could residents of a place like this display such complete and horrifying apathy?
It was the dulling effect of television, claimed one. No, said another, it was feminism that had turned men into wimps. Others thought it typified the anonymity of big-city life. And wasn’t it reminiscent of the Germans after the Holocaust? They, too, had claimed ignorance: We had no idea.
But most widely accepted was the analysis furnished by Abe Rosenthal, metropolitan editor at the New York Times and a leading journalist of his generation. ‘What happened in the apartments and houses on Austin Street,’ he wrote, ‘was a symptom of a terrible reality in the human condition.’6
When it comes down to it, we’re alone.
This is the most famous picture of Kitty Genovese. It is a mug shot taken by the police in 1961, shortly after she was arrested for a misdemeanor (she worked at a bar and booked patrons’ bets on horse races). Kitty was fined fifty dollars. The mug shot was cropped by the New York Times and transmitted around the globe. Source: Wikimedia.
2
I was a student when I first read about Kitty Genovese. Like millions of people, I devoured journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s debut book The Tipping Point, and it was here that I learned about those thirty-eight eyewitnesses.7
The story grabbed me, just as the stories about Milgram’s shock machine and Zimbardo’s prison had. ‘I still get mail about it,’ Rosenthal said years later. ‘[People] are obsessed by this story. It’s like a jewel–you keep looking at it, and different things occur to you.’8
That fateful Friday the 13th became the subject of plays and songs. Entire episodes of Seinfeld, Girls and Law and Order were devoted to it. During a 1994 speech in Kew Gardens, President Bill Clinton recalled the ‘chilling message’ of Kitty’s murder, and a US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, even used it as an oblique justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. (He suggested that Americans who opposed the war were just as apathetic as those thirty-eight witnesses.)9
The moral of this story seemed clear to me, too. Why didn’t anybody come to Kitty Genovese’s aid? Well, because people are callous and indifferent. This message was already gaining traction in the period that Kitty Genovese became a household name–it was the same era that Lord of the Flies became a bestseller, Adolf Eichmann stood trial, Stanley Milgram send shockwaves around the world and Philip Zimbardo launched his career.
But when I began reading up on research into the circumstances surrounding Kitty’s death, I found myself on the trail of a whole different story. Again.
Bibb Latané and John Darley were two young psychologists at the time. They’d been studying what bystanders do in emergencies and noticed something strange. Not long after Kitty’s murder, they decided to try an experiment. Their subjects were unsuspecting college students, who were asked to sit alone in a closed room and chat about college life with some of their peers over an intercom.
Except there were no other students: the researchers instead played a pre-recorded audio tape. ‘I could really-er-use some help,’ moaned a voice at some point, ‘so if somebody would-er-give me a little h-help-uh-er-er-er-er-er c-could somebody-er-er-help-er-uh-uh-uh [choking sounds]… I’m gonna die…’10
What happened next? When a trial subject thought that they alone heard the cries for help, they rushed out into the corridor. All of them, without exception, ran to intervene. But among those who were led to believe five other students were sitting in rooms nearby, only 62 per cent took action.11 Voila: the bystander effect.
Latané and Darley’s findings would be among the most pivotal contributions made to social psychology. Over the next twenty years, more than a thousand articles and books were published on how bystanders behave in emergencies.12 Their results also explained the inaction of those thirty-eight witnesses in Kew Gardens: Kitty Genovese was dead not in spite of waking up the whole neighbourhood with her screams, but because of it.
This was exemplified by what one building resident later told a reporter. When her husband went to call the police, she held him back: ‘I told him there must have been thirty calls already.’13 Had Kitty been attacked in a deserted alleyway, with only one witness, she might have survived.
All this only fuelled Kitty’s fame. Her story found its way into the top ten psychology textbooks and continues to be invoked by journalists and pundits to this day.14 It’s become nothing less than a modern parable on the perilous anonymity of big-city life.
3
For years I assumed the bystander effect was just an inevitable part of life in a metropolis. Bu
t then something happened in the very city where I work–something that forced me to reassess my assumptions.
It’s 9 February 2016. At a quarter to four in the afternoon Sanne parks her white Alfa Romeo on Sloterkade, a canal-side street in Amsterdam.15 She gets out and heads to the passenger side to take her toddler out of the car seat when, suddenly, she becomes aware the car is still rolling. Sanne barely manages to jump back behind the wheel, but it’s too late for brakes. The car tips down into the canal and begins to sink.
The bad news: dozens of bystanders saw it happen.
No doubt even more people heard Sanne’s screams. Just as in Kew Gardens, there are apartments overlooking the site of the calamity. And this, too, is a nice, upper-middle class neighbourhood.
But then something unexpected happens. ‘It was like an instant reflex,’ Ruben Abrahams, owner of a real estate agency on the corner, later tells a local TV reporter. ‘Car in the water? That can’t be good.’16 He runs to get a hammer from his office toolbox and then sprints right into the icy canal.
A tall, athletic guy with greying stubble, Ruben meets me one cold January day to show me where it all happened. ‘It was one of those bizarre coincidences,’ he tells me, ‘where everything came together in a split second.’
When Ruben jumps into the canal, Rienk Kentie–also a bystander–is already swimming towards the sinking automobile, and Reinier Bosch–yet another bystander–is in the water, too. At the last instant, a woman had handed Reinier a brick, something that moments later will prove crucial. Wietse Mol–bystander number four–grabs an emergency hammer from his car and is the last to dive in.
Humankind Page 16