The Most Dangerous Animal - Softcover

Smith, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312537441 ISBN 13: 9780312537449

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2009

Synopsis

Almost 200 million human beings, mostly civilians, have died in wars over the last century, and there is no end of slaughter in sight.
The Most Dangerous Animal asks what it is about human nature that makes it possible for human beings to regularly slaughter their own kind. It tells the story of why all human beings have the potential to be hideously cruel and destructive to one another. Why are we our own worst enemy? The book shows us that war has been with us---in one form or another---since prehistoric times, and looking at the behavior of our close relatives, the chimpanzees, it argues that a penchant for group violence has been bred into us over millions of years of biological evolution. The Most Dangerous Animal takes the reader on a journey through evolution, history, anthropology, and psychology, showing how and why the human mind has a dual nature: on the one hand, we are ferocious, dangerous animals who regularly commit terrible atrocities against our own kind, on the other, we have a deep aversion to killing, a horror of taking human life. Meticulously researched and far-reaching in scope and with examples taken from ancient and modern history, The Most Dangerous Animal delivers a sobering lesson for an increasingly dangerous world.

About this title

About the Author:

Dr. David Livingstone Smith is the author of Why We Lie as well as a professor of philosophy and cofounder and director of the Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of New England. He and his wife live in Portland, Maine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter OneA Bad-Taste BusinessEvil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.--w. h. auden, herman melvilleon monday, september 20, 2004, Islamic militants in Iraq executed an American construction worker named Eugene Armstrong. Four men, masked and clothed in black, tensely clutched their automatic weapons while the bound and blindfolded Armstrong knelt in front of them. “God’s soldiers from Tawhid and Jihad were able to abduct three infidels of God’s enemies in Baghdad,“ the leader intoned, “... by the name of God, these three hostages will get nothing from us except their throats slit and necks chopped, so they will serve as an example.” The long knife sliced through Armstrong’s flesh. He screamed. Blood gushed from his neck. His body shuddered and became limp. The executioner placed the dripping, severed head on the back of Armstrong’s lifeless body. Do you think that this is a shocking image? When the video was broadcast on national television, it was interrupted before any blood was spilled. Perhaps this discretion was a good thing; the image was, after all, very disturbing. But perhaps it would have been better to show it. Armstrong’s execution was an act of war, and war is terrible. Like many terrible things, it is something that we do not want to think about too much if we can help it.Many people conceive of war in terms of manly, granite-chinned heroes duking it out with the forces of evil. The reality is very different from this comic-book picture. It is something from which we collectively avert our gaze. The news and entertainment media obligingly maintain our illusions, protecting our sensibilities from too potent a dose of reality. This is why, during the dark days of the Cambodian genocide, the Associated Press rejected photographs of a smiling soldier eating the liver of a Khmer Rouge fighter whom he had just gutted and a soldier lowering a human head by the hair into a pot of boiling water. And it is why U.S. newspapers avoided British photographer Kenneth Jarecke’s photograph of the charred head of an Iraqi soldier who was among those burned alive on Mutla Ridge during the closing chapter of the First Gulf War.1 When the British journalist Martin Bell reported on the war in Bosnia, he quickly realized that he was expected to sacrifice reality to “good taste.” The version of the war presented to television audiences was, he remarked, “about as close to reality as a Hollywood action movie,“ later remarking that “in our desire not to offend and upset people, we were not only sanitizing war but even prettifying it.... But war is real and war is terrible. War is a bad taste business.”2The cosmetic transformation of war is nothing new. Painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries denuded war of its horror, portraying soldiers with “neatly-bandaged head-wounds” and “manly and heroic expressions.” Much the same is true of popular literature. The literary misrepresentation of war is exemplified by the writings of Rudyard Kipling, who, despite having no combat experience himself, confidently portrayed war in ludicrously glowing terms. Kipling’s romantic fantasies lured a generation of young men to their deaths in the trenches of World War I. With the advent of photography in the early nineteenth century, representations of war took on a new dimension of realism. But even the early photographers of the American Civil War, Spanish-American War, and World War I were not above manipulating things to suit their expectations. They dragged bodies into position before snapping them and passed off cleaned-up reenactments of military engagements as the genuine article.3The advent of moving pictures opened new vistas for dishonestly representing battle. Most filmmakers steer safely clear of the horror and degradation of war, and most film viewers have no direct experience to act as a corrective to the Hollywood version. Consequently, many of us have an extremely distorted picture of combat. A real battlefield is not much like the typical movie version. “On the screen,“ writes General Sir John Hackett, “there are particular conventions to be observed.”Men blown up by high explosives in real war... are often torn apart quite hideously; in films there is a big bang and bodies, intact, fly through the air with the greatest of ease. If they are shot... they fall down like children in a game, to lie motionless. The most harrowing thing in real battle is that they usually don’t lie still; only the lucky ones are killed outright.4Life imitates art, and the glorification of war in modern cinema has had serious consequences for the lives of its consumers. Amazingly, many young men chose to join the U.S. Marines during the Vietnam War under the influence of John Wayne films. In their minds, going to war was like being a character in a movie: good guys killing bad guys, cowboys killing Indians. In fact, during the first four months of 1968, sixty U.S. soldiers in Vietnam died trying to outdraw one another just as they had seen actors do in cowboy films.5Because of these and other compelling illusions about war, it is easy--in fact, all too easy--to regard the perpetrators of mass violence as depraved monsters or madmen. For example, George W. Bush proclaimed that he ordered the invasion of Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime because he “was not about to leave the security of the American people in the hands of a madman.” French president Jacques Chirac described Osama bin Laden as “a raving madman,“ while British foreign secretary Jack Straw described Bin Laden as “psychotic and paranoid.”6What evidence was there that these people were insane? There is usually none at all. The psychologists who painstakingly sifted through data on the senior Nazi officers brought to justice in the Nuremberg trials found that “high-ranking Nazi war criminals... participated in atrocities without having diagnosable impairments that would account for their actions.”7 They were “as diverse a group as one might find in our government today, or in the leadership of the PTA.”8 If the Nazi leaders were not deranged, what about the rank and file who did Hitler’s dirty work? What about the members of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that committed atrocities like the mass killing at Babi Yar, where 33,000 Jews, as well as many gypsies and mental patients, were machine-gunned to death during two crisp autumn days in 1941? Do you think that these men must have been psychopaths or Nazi zealots? If so, you are wrong. There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that they were anything other than ordinary German citizens. “The system and rhythm of mass extermination,“ observes journalist Heinz Hohne, “were directed by... worthy family men.” The men of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101, a killing squad in Poland who were involved in the shooting of at least 38,000 Jews and the deportation of a further 83,000 to the Treblinka death camp, were ordinary middle-aged family men without either military training or ideological indoctrination. “The truth seems to be,“ writes social psychologist James Waller, “that the most outstanding characteristic of perpetrators of extraordinary evil lies in their normality, not their abnormality.”9 Purveyors of violence, terrorists, and merchants of genocidal destruction are, more often than not, people who fit the profile that Primo Levi painted of his Nazi jailers at Auschwitz: “average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked... they had our faces.” To Hannah Arendt they were “terribly and terrifyingly normal.”10 They could be your neighbors, parents, or children. They could be you.This book is about where war lives in human nature. It is not only, or even primarily, about people like Hitler, Stalin, or Saddam: It is about people like you and me, our ancestors, our children, and our children’s children. It tells the story of why human beings, all human beings, have the potential to be hideously cruel and destructive to one another. Other animals attack and sometimes kill members of their own kind, but they do not organize themselves into groups to destroy neighboring communities. Mark Twain made this point over a century ago.Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, war. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for “the universal brotherhood of man”--with his mouth.11In fact, Twain’s portrait of human nature is far too charitable. Men not only march out to slaughter their own kind on a scale so huge that it beggars the imagination, they often do so in ways that are diabolically cruel. A small taste of this side of human nature is conveyed in the following passage from Thomas Alfred Walker’s classic History of the Law of Nations.When Basil II (1014) could blind fifteen thousand Bulgarians, leaving an eye to the leader of every hundred, it ceases to be a matter of surprise that Saracen marauders should thirty years later be impaled by Byzantine officials, that the Greeks of Adramyttium in the time of Malek Shah (1106-16) should drown Turkish children in boiling water, and that the Emperor Necephorus (961) should cast from catapults into a Cretan city the heads of Saracens slain in the attempt to raise the siege, or that a crusading Prince of Antioch (1097) should cook human bodies on spits to earn for his men the terrifying reputation of cannibalism.12Walker was writing about events that unfolded long ago and far away and that are safely confined to the pages of history books. But others that occ...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0312537441
• ISBN 13: 9780312537449
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288