In Our Time - Atrocity in the 20th Century

Episode Date: October 23, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the widespread and chilling atrocities of the 20th century. Just over a hundred years ago, in the ‘Genealogy of Morals’, Nietzsche wrote “there can be no doubt that morality will gradually perish: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe”. What if he is right? Certainly the twentieth century can claim the bitter palm of being the century with the biggest body count, the most advanced savagery, the finest of death delivery systems and, in that sense, the true Dark Ages of humankind. For inhumanity there has never been a century like it in the history of man: 58 million people died in the slaughter of two world wars. Stalinist Russia killed 20 million of its own people. The Nazis killed 6 million Jews. 2 million people were killed in Vietnam, 3 million in Korea, and in 1994 in Rwanda 1 million ordinary people were suddenly turned on and killed by their neighbours. And all the while in this bloody century the private and individual murder of one human by another has risen inexorably.What are the conditions that allow man to be inhuman to man on such a scale? And can a scientific study of the mind ever uncover the routes of inhumanity or evil?With Jonathan Glover, philosopher and Director of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics, King’s College, London; Dr Gwen Adshead, consultant psychiatrist, Broadmoor Special Hospital.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, for inhumanity, there's never been a century like it. 58 million people died in the slaughter of two world wars. Stalinist Russia killed 20 million of its own people.

It's estimated that Mao killed about 40 million in China, the Nazis killed six million Jews, two million people were killed in Vietnam, three million in Korea, and in 1994 in Rwanda, one million ordinary people were suddenly turned on on killed by their neighbours. And all the while, in this bloody century, the private and individual murder of one human being by another has risen inexorably. What are the conditions that allow man to be inhuman to man on such a scale? And can a scientific study of the mind ever uncover the roots of inhumanity or evil?

I'm joined by Jonathan Glover, a philosopher, and director of the central of medical law and ethics at King's College London. His new book, Humanity, A Moral History of the 20th century, has prompted this discussion. And Dr. Gwen Ad's head, whose main job is as a consultant psychiatrist at Broadmoor Special Hospital, and she's written several books on ethics.

Jonathan Glover, people were very optimistic about humanity at the start of this century. What was the basis for their optimism? Well, I think in Europe, at least, there had been a hundred or so years of largely unbroken people, since the Napoleonic wars. People believed that human beings were progressing,

were making moral progress, people believed there was a moral law that we all knew how we should behave. And it was thought that barbarism was a thing of the past we were gradually growing out of. Do you think there's conditions now appear, before we get into the 20th century, do you think those conditions now appear

almost freakish? Yes, I think they do. I think that it isn't true that the 20th century is unique in barbarism. Barbarism has disfigured all of human history with a few isolated, calm bits. We do seem to have stepped up to place, though. Well, that quite a lot is technology, I believe.

A few people can decide something which results in vast numbers of people being killed, often far away. But can we just come back to the beginning of the century to set the scene, last of all? Was it the rule, the imperial rule, of the British and the Navy ruling the waves, the American

Constitution, America being allowed to develop peacefully in all sorts of ways and so on. Were there any key factors in that hundred years which gave people a feeling at the end of the 90th, early, 20th century? As you said, that barbarism had been confined to the museum and so on. Well, I think it was really just that

the settlement at the end of the Napoleonic wars had lasted really pretty well. I mean, there had been the Franco-Prussian War and there was a lot of bloodshed in colonial conquests and colonial wars. But I think it was basically that the political settlement had lasted, and then there are reasons why it started to disintegrate

at the beginning of the 20th century. Now, it's difficult to distinguish, although you said that all centuries have known their barbarism, including the 19th century, although not much in Europe. And I agree with that, but by any body count factor, and it's not just technology, I think we can dispute that. The 20th century has been particularly barbarous. It's difficult to know where to start from.

We look at Stalin and Mao and Rwanda and so on, but the Holocaust is... I'll come to, Gwen, in one moment, but one of the things that people are still puzzling about is the Holocaust involved so many, in heavy quotes, ordinary people, unquote, on the German side, who then committed what we can still carefully speak of as atrocities. Now, can we tackle, how did they overcome

what could have been called their restraints to do that? Well, I think there are a number of different ways. One was that there was a system of belief which said that the Jews were, to blame for the defeat in the First World War, Hitler and his followers tended to believe that the stamp in the back theory, particularly the Jews had done this stab in the back. Second, there was very powerful propaganda

which dehumanised the Jews, so that it was easy to, there were films showing Jews looking particularly horrible, with intercut with shots of rushing hordes of rats, for instance. So there was a buildup of dehumanisation and hatred. There was also, segregation of the Jews. They were firstly removed and then killed later. Then there was the trampling on their dignity. One of the great protective barriers is respect for people's dignity

and the humiliations imposed upon the Jews. When the Nazis took over Vienna, the Jews being forced to scrub the streets with toothbrushes amid juring SS men, these humiliations removed the barrier of respect for people's dignity. Then again there was the fragmentation of responsibility. Every person thought that they were only a cog in a machine. This person is only arranging the train time table. This person is only arresting them and taking them to somewhere else where they're going to go. This person is only supplying some gas for a camp and so on. So was this accretion?

I come back to that in a second, but Gwen Anne said, do you find any response in what Jonathan Glover said in the individual patients you deal with in Broadmo? Do you find any connection there between what we're talking about? but it's a mass event, and what we're talking about with you is individual people who have committed wicked and even evil acts. Very much so. I think that, I suppose the best analogy that I can draw

is something between, I suppose, a melody played on an individual instrument and taken up and elaborated by an orchestra that sort of distinction between the individual and the sort of larger group. Because I think that many of the themes that you've, just outlined about a sort of gradual process of dehumanisation, a sort of whittling away gradual humiliations, are things that I certainly see not only, sometimes in the histories of the people that I work with

who have committed acts of literally sometimes unspeakable violence, but also in terms of sometimes what they've actually done. I think one of the things, one of the things I'm very struck by when I'm working with individuals is all the devices that they use to try and make it all right for them, to have done what they've done because most people that, all the people that I'm working with

are struggling to live in a way with what they've done. And that's true as much in prisons. I used to be visiting psychiatrists at one of the British prisons. And I think it's just as true for ordinary prisons as well in a special hospital.

And what I'm always struck by is the individual trying to make sense of what he's done. And what I hear in their stories and what they say often when they're arrested on remand is often a quite recognizable script rather like what you've been saying, Jonathan, about,

I only did this. The victim was really much more blameworthy than it appears. It's all like a small-scale version of what you've been describing. So you think that the individual can be translated into the mass without something else happening? That's one of the things that fascinates me, is mass behaviour. Do different rules, different qualities apply when we're talking about mass behaviour? I agree with you. I think it is the most interesting thing, really, is about something, what happens between the gap between the individual and the group. I mean, I'm a group therapist by training,

so I'm particularly interested in how groups work together, and I run groups in the hospital where I work. And I think what's interesting is to look at what are the sort of dynamics that happen between a group of individuals when you get them together as a group. And there's been quite a lot written, actually, about what happens to people when you put them in a large group. and I think there's a question in my mind about whether there's something about very large groups,

very large communities that can actually link, that actually respond to this question of conformity that you raise in your book, for example, and the Milgram experiments and so forth about how people who can respond with conformity only obeying orders and it's not really my responsibility. I wonder if there is something about individuals joining groups that does seem to, you can lose your responsibility in a larger group.

Jonathan, what do you see the connection between research? individuals and does that give you enough? Is that a good source of information for talking about what's happened to masses of people involved in the sense? I think it's a good source but a partial source. I think in order to understand the Nazis, it is actually illuminating to look at the sort of upbringing that the leading Nazis and the people who ran the camps had. They were given horrendously authoritarian, disciplinarian type upbringings, the exact opposite of the sort of upbringing that the people who bravely rescued Jews in.

in Poland, for instance, characteristically had, where they were encouraged to have a morality based on sympathy and reasoning and discussion rather than obedience and conformity. But the individual psychopathology can't, I think, be the whole story. Because, as you said, it's a matter of often ordinary people who haven't had any special horrible upbringing who, one way or another, participate in terrible atrocities. I think one of the things that normally restrains people,

I mean, it's not by any means the only thing, but normally restrains people in everyday life from committing atrocity, is simply group pressure. And in some societies, the group pressure works the other way. In some societies, the pressure is against you. You're stigmatized if you help a Jew, or in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, you help a reactionary. You're stigmatized, and that sort of pressure makes people conform.

I enjoyed the book very much indeed, and you've heard of Aristotle at one stage. He said virtues cultivated by the practice of virtuous acts, and the opposite is true. Vice can be cultivated, if that's a word, strengthened, encouraged by the practice of wicked acts, I presume. I think there's a lot to Aristotle's remark. I think that very often people start to behave in a way they do because they're conforming, because they're under social pressures, and then they rationalise it,

and it becomes a habit which they justify. The acquisition of virtue and prosocial behaviours is a developmental task, I think that children do engage in. And you can see the tension between virtuous and vicious behaviour in very young children, really from very early age, as early as 18 months. And there's a very nice research that shows how children acquire more virtuous behaviour and indeed ones who acquire more antisocial behaviour and demonstrate that.

I mean, how they're quite, it's by nurturers, it's by teaching an example. It seems to be mainly by nurture that there doesn't seem to be really any convincing evidence for a gene for either antisocial behavior or indeed for virtue. And I think by far the most important impact is something about environment. But I think the relevant point here, I suppose, is that development doesn't stop in childhood. People continue to develop throughout adulthood. And I think that this may help us to understand how it is that a community, a political community, could get itself, could lose its moral identity, perhaps in the way that happened in Nazi journey.

And I think Victor Kleimper is diaries, the second body which has just been published, they're a fascinating account of what it was to be a Jew in Dresden and the gradual, as you say, the gradual accretion, the gradual diminution of identity there. Can I turn from, as it were, a Holocaust to a Russian example? Again, taking something from your book, Jonathan, which is full of...

marvelous thing from yourself and from other people. There's this quotation from Soljianitsyn, where he's talking about a question which again seems to me to be central and rather that anybody could do these things, that we're all capable of doing this thing. Solzhenitsyn seems to reinforce that. He says if only there were evil people

somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, if only it weren't necessarily only to separate them for the rest of us, but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. It is after all only because of the way things were out that they were the executioners and we weren't. Directly contradicted by another coach for you from Primo Levy, which is saying to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease.

Now, I'm on Levy's side there. I think that everybody's capable of all sorts of evil. I don't think it's accurate. It's some kind of cop-out. What do you think? Well, I am roughly on the same side as you, but I think it's a bit more complicated. As Primo Levy says, it does no service to truth to pretend that everybody is the same.

There are real differences between those who are Nazis and those who are their victims. And as he says, it does no service to truth just to blur the distinction. But all the same, I think that it's in part a matter of the good fortune or bad fortune of the kind of upbringing you've had when young, for instance, and other factors that makes the difference. the kind of person you are makes a difference to whether you participate in atrocities or not. But the kind of person you are is in turn partly the product of factors

outside your own control. But lots of people can have authoritarian upbrings. I mean, many people in this country, Britain, had very stern upbringings when they were children, very stern indeed, before the first were war and between the wars from one's own family, you know, how people were very strictly monitored

at home and in school. Yet they didn't go out. and start sort of behaving in an evil way? I'm not saying that that's just one causal factor. There are all sorts of causal factors. I'm less confident than Gwen is that there's no genetic component, for instance. I think that if one looks at, say, the difference between levels of violence in men and women, one wonders a bit whether there isn't an innate component.

But I think it's something we have to... I'm glad we're talking about this because it really gets on my nerves when people say, you know, English and the British could have been just as fascistic as the judge. Germans in the thirties and forties, all the evidence is against that in any sensible, reasonable, reasonable, relative sense, and yet he goes on. It seems to me to be more than a cano. It seems to be to be just mistaking the way people behave.

If that were true, then you, Gwen, would find that we were all capable of being the psychopaths who deal with at Broadmoire. Well, it is a complex area, and to sort of collapse into sort of, in a sort of simple cause-and-effect statements, I think, is too, in a way to be responded to the anxiety that these type of... questions raise because I think that there's a distinction between saying that everybody has the capacity to get into evil states of mind is quite different from saying everybody has capacity to act evenly and it's quite another to say that that would necessarily happen and I think

that it's quite important to distinguish that I mean for example you just take the question of early childhood experience you're absolutely right that it's quite clear that only a proportion of people who are, for example, exposed to repetitive fear and humiliation as children go on to become perpetrators of violence in adulthood. However, it is equally true to say that nearly all the individual perpetrators of severe violence that we see in the hospital and, indeed, in prisons too, nearly all of them have been exposed to extremes of fear and violence in childhood. So that the equation is not a two-way equation.

So I think what that tells us is that the developmental capacity, to do these things is complicated, and it's affected not only by child experience, not only by genes, and what you just said about gender, it's wildly provocative, but we can come back to it. But I think that,

I think that we can't underestimate the question about political identity. And whether the British could have been as fascistic, I mean, if we'd had a government like Hitler's, if we'd had, we didn't. But that's the point, doesn't it? I mean, all Europe was going fascist,

and we got one Mosley and he was booed off the field. Absolutely. So I think that if we had perhaps somehow gotten to that collective state of mind. I mean, there's nastiness around. There's anti-Semitism. And that's different from what was going in in Germany and Austria and Spain and all over the place. But I think also to be politically fascist, of course, is not the same as I don't think should be equivalent with the idea of being evil.

I mean, this is not the same thing. There's something about a political. identity, which is not quite the same, I think, and this is moral identity. And the one thing, the other thing I would say, is that even if you thought that there was an intertwining of experience in terms of victims and perpetrators, even if there's something that, I mean, Prima Levy does talk about this, both the oppressors and the victims need refuge and protection.

But the point is that they both have a moral valence that's quite different. And what we decide about them morally seems to me to be quite different. Jonathan. I want to say two things. One is that we had a different history. leading up to the 30s. We hadn't had the humiliation of defeat in the First World War and the economic collapse to the degree that Germany did. So it's a bit hard to tell how we would have behaved if we'd had that history. But the other thing is that I'm sure you're right, that culture makes a difference. If one looks at the different occupied countries under the Nazis, one finds that the response to Nazism was very different. So it isn't just a matter of individual upbringing. Culture makes a huge difference. Jonathan Steinberg has a wonderful study of the difference between. Italians and Germans, who both were officially on the same side, both officially committed to the policy of sending off the Jews.

And the wonderful way in which the Italians, all the way down to the most humble soldier, had a history and tradition of resisting and refusing. So when the Nazis came to demand that the Italians rounded up the Jews, they were given the runabout in all sorts of ways. They were told the orders hadn't come through yet. So they went to the Nazis, went up to the higher people, and they said, we can't understand how the orders haven't got through. all sorts of ways. Different cultures lead people to behave in different ways, and that's a very important factor. Yes, because they still managed to get rid of quite a few Jews from Italy there, didn't

they did, but not nearly to the same extent that happened in Germany or in Poland. Or in Hungary, yeah. You talk, if the servants of evil regime has become embroidered in its activities little by little, what if it's leaders? How are they able to

get away with it to impose their will, Jonathan? I mean, we're talking about will. It brings us to Nietzsche quite soon, and Hitler did take from Nietzsche said he's revealed something of the primal being in me, Hitler said of Nietzsche. But how do leaders figure in this equation? Well, leaders sometimes are, as I think Hitler was, virtually psychopathic. I mean, Hitler seems to me a person with absolutely no moral restraints.

And all his preoccupation with morality was all about cleansing Germany. from prostitutes and so on, as well as cleansing people from what he thought was racial impurity. Sometimes they're psychopaths who happen to get power in times of great crisis. Sometimes they're cold fanatical ideologists, as Stalin was. Stalin, I think, wasn't, as it were, emotionally a psychopath, but was simply a person who, in a weird way, really believed in a system of belief which said that killing vast numbers of people was somehow the path to a best number of people, better society.

You say, you've said, Gwen, that we are born inhuman, and we have morality instilled in us through some empathy with our parents and so on. Oh, I'm not, yes, I'm not sure I would necessarily claim that people are born inhuman. I think that... I think, well, no, I thought I was quoting you. No, but let's take the point. I think there's something about perhaps acquiring the capacity of human, that I think it does happen as a developmental task

and continues to happen through life. And I don't think it's simply a feature of childhood that continues to happen through life. And I think that what you've been describing in relation to Hitler and Stalin, who of course have had many psychological autopsies done on them, and I think there is a very real question

about whether it makes sense to look at those men in terms of their individual psychopathology because they were historical creation. were men in their time and their place and they had political power, and I think that's important. But from your studies and what you've observed, do you think that the idea,

goes back to the idea of original sin and before, that virtue has to be instilled is very important that if it isn't, then in the gap, that would be filled up by wickedness. I think that virtue, I think that virtue and certainly a moral identity does have to be acquired.

and the capacity to be human is an acquired capacity. I think it may be that the capacity is innate in everyone, but for it to flourish, to use an aristotelian term, for it to be fully developed, is a developmental task that takes a whole lifetime, and some people never achieve it, and some people never achieve it, some people who don't achieve it partially, and very few people, I think, never achieve it at all.

But those people, I think, are very rare, and we don't see them all that often. The people that I work with more are usually people who've lost their capacity, their capacity for interpersonal or relating to be human, has been diminished or whittled away in some way, just like Hitler and Stalin. There are some people who think that the godlessness of the 20th century,

the comparative godlessness, has been a huge contributing factor to the barbarism. What's your view of that? I think the evidence goes both ways. I mean, first it should be said that, of course, belief in God can lead to fanaticism. Intolerance, cruelty, crusades and so on. And I speak here as an atheist with some feeling.

But on the other hand, I'm also aware that many of the people who behaved most bravely and courageously did so on grounds of principled religious commitment. And as a non-religious believer, I see one of the central human tasks is to create a way of being moral that doesn't require appeal to religious authority. When I said at the start of the program I just recited a few statistics about the millions and millions

that have been killed in this century your repost was well there's been barbarism every century with which I agreed and the increase in numbers is larger to do with technology so do you actually think that human nature

has not become more unleashed this century that there's a steady pulse of wickedness which goes in a more or less regular rate throughout the century and what's happened now is it just hit the fan because of the atom bombs and capacities for getting people to concentration camps and that's all of them.

It may fluctuate over time. I think people have always had both a capacity for great evil and a capacity for great moral heroism and goodness. What I do think is that technology provides circumstances in which it's far easier for large numbers of people

to do really terrible things because the effects of what they do are at a distance and invisible. I think communication has something to the other changes have been this century, is something to do with communication, the fact that you can spread your message about the evilness of your victim. You can spread that message very easily, it can be transported, and I think that's one thing. And I wonder whether there's also been a sort of an engagement with images of violence this century that there perhaps wasn't in previous centuries, that it's possible, particularly through television

and things in the cinema to see depictions of violence and have an image presented with an image of violence in a very rigid way rather like the way that you described in your book, Jonathan, where you described very a rigid polarised

the aggressive, violent, triumphant person and the victims who just disappear. When curiously enough, one of the most vivid examples of inexplicable violence recently in Rwanda was more than encouraged by the radio. Absolutely. So I want to say that,

In one way, the media of mass communications do provide us with some hope, because there's also the sense, for the very first time in history, really, there's a sense of a kind of world public opinion, which is starting to find atrocities intolerable, so that when atrocities happen in Kosovo or in East Timor, there's a widespread sense that something has to be done. Now, what is done is not always effective and sometimes arguably misguided and at considerable cost. But I think we're seeing the beginnings of a shared human consciousness. that we are aware that all this is going on all over the world now, as soon as it happens, and as a result, there's some hope that we might start to shape institutions that would curb and control it.

See, I think it's interesting you say that, because I think you're right, because I think that Shelley talked about, just as you do actually, Shelley talked about the imagination being an instrument for moral good. And I wonder whether, and I can think of a man that I work with in the hospital who's used his imagination both for good and for good, for terrible evil. He has used his creativity, both to be a beautiful artist and create beautiful things, but also to be an appalling sadist. And I wonder whether that what we have to struggle with, perhaps in the next century, is something about how we use our imagination,

and the images that we fill our imagination with, how we use our imagination, profoundly affects, I think, how we act. Shelley said that the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and I was surprised after I'd finished my book to find how much more often I'd quoted poets than philosophers. Absolutely. Can we come back in talking of quotations to a quotation I used when trailing this program from Nietzsche over 100 years ago, where he said there can be no doubt that morality will gradually perish. This is the great spectacle in 100 acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe.

He does seem to have been on the right track if you just look at the evidence, Jonathan. Well, he thought that the death of God, which he believed in, and he believed that God had died. There wasn't a credible belief anymore. he thought that would mean the collapse of the Judeo-Christian morality and he thought that would be both terrifying and wonderful. My belief is that we ought to try and keep certain key aspects of Judeo-Christian morality about loving our neighbour, about caring for other people, instead of the sort of ruthless struggle that Nietzsche believed in,

we ought to try and develop that kind of morality in a way that doesn't depend upon a religious authority, which many of us now can't accept. Do you see any evidence that we can do, that, that we're in control enough to do that, that people would be responsive to that being encouraged in them? Oh, yes, yes, I do. No, I do, because coming back to this question about innateness and about being how, I'm born

inhuman or human, I think, that what we do know is that we have an innate drive to relate to each other. We actually, there is an innate drive, I think, to make relationships as people. We're not born to be alone. Well, those relationships can be war, can't they? I think that the challenge then is what we make of those relationships and how we treat others, particularly the vulnerable. Thank you very much.

We've been talking around the book Humanity, A Moral History of the 20th Century, by Jonathan Glover with Gwen Adsehead. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.