October’s normally one of my favourite times of the year. Approaching Hallowe’en is an excuse to watch as many horror films as possible. Unfortunately in the UK this year the horror is taking the shape of a live improvised performance in Parliament.
October 19th, amid a chaotic day in Parliament, the Green MP Caroline Lucas tweeted:
“Now Chief Whip has resigned. Her Govt is dissolving. This is really dangerous: we’ve got a rabble of a Govt fighting like rats in a sack - whilst people up & down the country are under unbearable economic strain.
Liz Truss needs to go to the King tomorrow morning.”
Very, very frightening.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro seemed perilously close to re-election. In 2021 he was accused of “crimes against humanity” because of his appalling response to Covid-19. The senate eventually decided not to press a charge of genocide, despite a report prepared by the opposition Senator Renan Calheiros that included details of “genocide against indigenous communities for actions that allegedly left them vulnerable to the coronavirus." Bolsonaro was already facing accusations of active programs to make indigenous communities “disappear” and for enabling a number of measures to wipe out indigenous communities to open up their lands for exploitation.
Ecological destruction has also accelerated during Bolsonaro’s watch. In 2021, the deforestation rate in Brazil had increased by more than 20%. In recent years, the eastern Amazon rainforest has flipped from being an important carbon sink to a carbon source. A paper in Nature found that this shift was occurring because “the intensification of the dry season and an increase in deforestation seem to promote ecosystem stress, increase fire occurrence, and higher carbon emissions in the eastern Amazon.” This rather dry summary belies the horrific nature of these environmental crimes. Jonathon Porritt, who has written a more comprehensive summary of the Bolsonaro’s first term than I will attempt here, has called it ecocide.
Porritt has no hesitation in labelling Bolsonaro a war criminal of possibly greater magnitude even than Vladimir Putin. Porritt says that Bolsonaro’s “immediate war is on Nature. On the Amazon rainforest. The lives of countless millions of people will be the collateral damage resulting from that ongoing devastation.” The only reason that we do not recognise him as a war criminal is that ecocide is not yet seen as of the same magnitude as war crimes or crimes against humanity. Porritt points out that, being a prime instigator of ecological destruction as well as indigenous murder, “Jair Bolsonaro is killing people (far, far more people) tomorrow, in future time, beyond our TV screens, pretty much everywhere in the world.”
The campaigning group Stop Ecocide describes ecocide as “the mass damage and destruction of the living natural world. It literally means ‘killing one’s home.’” There’s another word that has come into use that for me more successfully encapsulates this brutal scouring of the Earth. That word is omnicide: the killing of everything. This term began to circulate in Australia in the wake of the devastating fires in the long summer of 2019—2020. Danielle Celermajer described omnicide as killing that “has no boundaries. Everything is within its sights…. [It means the] killing of all. Not just all humans, as if humans were the only beings that could be murdered. All beings.”
In confronting omnicide, we confront human evil in its starkest form. Evil’s a word that many people shrink from today, as too melodramatic, too judgmental, or perhaps too tied in with beliefs about devils and the supernatural. Still, frankly I can’t think of a better word to describe certain human behaviours, thoughts and acts. And if any act could be described as truly evil, then omnicide surely fits the bill.
What do I mean by evil? I’ll borrow Steven James Bartlett’s definition as “a connection between our species and a group of emotional responses, attitudes and patterns of thought and behaviour that together cause a great deal of suffering, often involve cruelty and aggression, and have resulted in and continue to result in countless deaths and untold individual misery.” (Bartlett, 2005, pp. 3—4). This definition avoids any talk of evil being an ‘essence’ or ‘power.’ It also hints that evil’s likely to be a complex, multifaceted, perhaps confusing phenomenon. Despite this difficulty, a better understanding of evil seems to me a top priority for the human species.
Where does evil come from?
This is a harder problem than it looks. There are complexities. Take one key element of evil acts: murder. The 2019 UN global study on homicide stated that that 90 per cent of all homicides recorded worldwide in 2017 were committed by male perpetrators. The executive summary concluded that “homicide continues to be a largely male phenomenon.” (p. 23). One conclusion might be that there’s something about males that significantly predisposes us towards murderous violence. But there are problems even with this conclusion. For a start, the vast majority of males don’t indulge in murder.
Still, perhaps something in their emotional, psychological or physiological makeup predisposes some males towards murder. Maybe something inherited from our evolutionary past. And in fact some people have speculated in this direction. In the 1990s, observations of chimpanzees led the primatologist Richard Wrangham to draw parallels between chimpanzee and human violence:
“Most animals are nowhere near as violent as humans, so why did such intensely violent behavior evolve particularly in the human line? Why kill the enemy, rather than simply drive him away? Why rape? Why torture and mutilate? Why do we see these patterns both in ourselves and chimpanzees?” (Wrangham & Peterson, 1997, pp. 23).
Wrangham eventually formulated demonic male theory which looked to sexual selection in evolution to explain the persistence of ‘demonic’ features in males. He suggested that murderous violence could be understood in the context of males banding together to defend territory against outsiders (Wrangham & Peterson, 1997, p. 167). Males in this context retained tendencies towards dominance, gratuitous violence, murder, rape, war. Such traits had advantages for survival, so were actively selected for during mating. Wrangham also linked the persistence of these traits to the emergence of patriarchal societies.
Needless to say, this was controversial stuff. A contemporary review of Demonic Males by Philip Regal claimed that it was not a scientific thesis at all but an “extremist position” and “an attack on feminist deconstructionists who believe that male nastiness is purely an artificial construct.” Regal claimed that the theory was very firmly at the “nature” end of the “nature versus nurture” debate, so would be loved or hated, depending on where you stood in those debates.
It’s true that demonic male theory leans heavily in the direction of genetic selection and evolution to explain the persistence of murderous violence in males; although I read it not so much as a political polemic as a genuine attempt to get to grips with the problem. A recent survey of the evidence has also confirmed that lethal aggression in chimpanzees seems best understood as an adaptive strategy: “killers ultimately gain fitness benefits by increasing their access to resources such as food or mates.” (Wilson et al., 2014, p. 414). This is circumstantial evidence in favour of the theory.
Nonetheless, it’s still unclear how directly this sort of conclusion can be applied to human beings. As I discussed last time, more recent archaeological discoveries about the past seem to cast doubt on the idea that ancient societies were quite as hierarchy-ridden and patriarchal as demonic male theory seems to imply. There are also ongoing unresolved debates over ancient warfare that are also relevant to this debate. These debates are over whether warfare is a recent cultural invention or an inborn trait.
So perhaps male violence in humans is mainly the result of upbringing in a violent culture. A 2018 piece by the American Psychological Association points to the socialisation of “masculine ideals” at an early age, ideals that include “toughness, stoicism” and a “lack of emotional sensitivity,” arguing that boys “live under intensified pressure to display gender-appropriate behaviours….” The same piece states that aggressive behaviour “can emerge at an early age” but states that primary “gender role socialisation aims to uphold patriarchal codes by requiring men to achieve dominant and aggressive behaviours.” It goes on to argue that there’s a connection between “masculine culture” and the perpetration of violence.
There seems little doubt that culture plays a significant role in enabling murderous violence. However, this sort of approach also begs many questions. For example, it doesn’t explain why humans and chimpanzees alone amongst the mammals display such comparable violence styles. This sort of observation suggests to me that at least some elements of human evil might have a very long tail that stretches back into evolutionary time, long before the invention of “masculine culture.”
However, the dispute over causes seems unlikely ever to be fully resolved. Robert Sapolsky points out that “...it is impossible to conclude that a behaviour is caused by a gene, a hormone, a childhood trauma, because the second you invoke one type of explanation, you are de facto invoking them all….” (Sapolsky, 2017, ebook). So there’s likely no single, simple source for wickedness; not evolutionary history, not genes, not culture. Instead, the “group of emotional responses, attitudes and patterns” that cause so much misery in human life are likely the outcome of multiple factors interacting in complex and unpredictable ways. This complexity is one reason why debates over the specific origins of evil are likely to persist.
One example: the UN study highlights gang violence as one significant reason why homicide rates remain so high. Between 2000—2017, around 1 million people died in gang violence, about the same number that was killed in armed conflict. Also firearms were involved in over half of all homicides in 2017. So someone looking for the cultural origins of violence could point to the “masculine culture” of gangs and also the widespread prevalence of guns in certain parts of the world. But someone favouring an evolutionary approach might wonder why males liked or had an affinity for hanging about in gangs and perpetuating violence against their rivals. It seems likely to me that both factors make a contribution to the perpetuation of murderous violence, and there are doubtless others.
All in the brain?
Other researchers have looked to the brain to explain evil. In an insightful study, neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor (2009) makes two claims about cruelty. The first is that by and large it is a rational process and that even “in the most extreme cases, perpetrators know exactly what they’re doing.” (Taylor, 2009, p. 7). Those perpetrators are often people like you and me. The second claim is that otherization is fundamental. Otherization is when people who are not in our in-group are perceived as alien, suspicious, inferior, disgusting (Taylor, 2009). This othering begins with off-colour jokes, and in certain extreme circumstances can end with holocausts.
Taylor links this tendency to ‘other’ with disgust. Disgust is associated with disease, and the avoidance of disease. She claims that cruelty involves a threat response, which is a function of our emotional and cognitive systems. The disgust response is automatic and evolved to respond to threats (Taylor, 2009, p. 71). So it’s linked to an old defence system that Taylor claims has served us very badly.
In modern societies, this threat response can be activated not just by direct threats but by beliefs, desires and ideas. Dangerous beliefs today are often activated by propaganda against a feared or hated out-group (think of the average YouTube political video). This threat-response activation against ‘others’ is never trivial, so perhaps we all need fundamentally to re-think how we do politics, especially in the Anglosphere, where the adversarial approach is the norm.
21st Century Evil
Today, a significant portion of wicked acts do not occur face to face but at a distance. Strong Man leaders might be happy to invoke anger and hatred against their enemies, but they will often leave the dirty work of dispatching them to other people. Think too of the ‘desk killers’ who organised the Nazi holocaust and other atrocities (Gretton, 2019). In the ecocide case, decisions made at a distance lead to the felling of a forest, the pollution of an ocean, or the extinction of a species.
In his later book, The Goodness Paradox, Wrangham has suggested that this might be an effect of what he terms self-domestication (Wrangham, 2019). The general idea is that human beings have become less reactively violent and more proactively violent as civilisation has developed. Reactive violence is when individuals react in response to provocation. Proactive violence is planned and premeditated, and in modern civilisation this often includes a bureaucratic element. In contemporary societies, carefully planned, industrial-scale violence is committed across continents and over years and decades. Many of the perpetrators are not directly responsible, at all. And yet without their actions, in air-conditioned offices or in governmental chambers, such violence could not be coordinated.
Minnich (2016) points to the “evil of banality” in facilitating this process. She points out that enacting evil “doesn’t take a Hitler or Idi Amin. It just takes a practised conventionality, a cliched conscience, emotional conformity, susceptibility to small-scale bribery by salary, loot, status, a sense of isolation….” (Minnich, 2016, p. 2) In other words, it takes many of the same factors that also occur in society and in the workplace on an everyday basis. So human evil is not extraordinary, at all. It’s an integral part of the fabric of everyday life.
A planetary disease?
Whatever its origin, the organisation of our global, technological society means that human evil can now be amplified by many orders of magnitude. Modern Information Technology, transport systems, weaponry systems, factories, construction equipment, etc. all contribute to facilitating human wickedness worldwide. The extractive economy, too, has reached such a fever-pitch that the destructive tendencies of human beings seems to be overwhelming our more positive and constructive capacities.
The philosopher Steven James Bartlett has suggested that we have a literally parasitic relationship with the planet (Bartlett, 2005). He characterises the world system (we might say ‘Gaia’) as a host and humans as “an unusually destructive and ubiquitous parasitic species.” (Bartlett, 2005, p. 258). Bartlett claims that we should understand this claim as literally true. He points to the ‘biodiversity holocaust’ as the outcome of the presence of the human ‘exterminator species’ on Earth. (Bartlett, 2005, p. 263).
Bartlett does allow for the possibility of a very different human-Gaia relationship. He calls this an ‘altruistic’ approach. He also ignores the fact, often highlighted by the late microbiologist Lynn Margulis, that parasites can very often shift their relationship with their hosts. A parasitic relationship can become harmless for the host (commensal) or even mutually beneficial (symbiotic).
This raises a final point: the question of whether on a global level it’s human evil that we’re talking about or more specifically the evils and pathologies of a particular entrenched global culture. Omnicide, is, after all, one extreme outcome of global capitalism which depends upon a growth economy and unending material extraction. It’s also in part a legacy of colonialism, the history of which is littered with genocides.
It is possible for human existence to be significantly less destructive. Some other societies at least in the past seem to have been far more benign and far less damaging to the ecology. One classic example is Ladakh or “Little Tibet.” Helena Norberg-Lodge (1991), observing this culture in the 1960s and 1970s, reported a benign and happy society of democratic small farming communities bonded by mutual cooperation. The supporting philosophy, Tibetan Buddhism, also seemed to facilitate a generally beneficent society. A society that was unfortunately increasingly disrupted by modernisation in the 1970s and 1980s. Still, Norberg-Lodge pointed to Ladakh as a model of desirable living, a model for the future, perhaps.
Hostage to bad choices
On the 30th of September Vladimir Putin made a speech once more implying that he might use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine. There are times currently when it seems that the choice the world faces is between a relatively slow ecological-driven collapse or a rapid end in nuclear fire. These choices are driven by people — mostly men — who seem to feel that they have no other option but to follow their worst instincts. The rest of us are being held hostage by these bad choices.
Talking of bad choices….
20th October 2022: Liz Truss has just announced her resignation. It looks like the Tories are going to choose another leader instead of following the opposition’s call for a General Election. I find myself genuinely frightened for the future of this country. Caroline Lucas tweeted:
Anything other than a #GeneralElection2022 is undemocratic. It’s not just Liz Truss’ breathtaking incompetence, it’s the chaos & division amongst the Tory MPs behind her and anyone else they pretend is a “unity” candidate to replace her. 3 Tory PMs & 4 chancellors in 1 year? No.
The tweet reads like an SOS. Unfortunately, I don’t think that anyone was really listening.
Happy Hallowe’en.
References
Bartlett, S.J. (2005). The Pathology of Man: A Study of Human Evil. Charles C. Thomas.
Carey, J. (1999). The Faber Book of Utopias. Faber & Faber.
Gretton, D. (2019). I You We Them: Journeys Beyond Evil: The Desk Killer in History and Today. William Heinemann.
Minnich E.K. (2016). The Evil of Banality: On The Life and Death Importance of Thinking. Rowman & Littlefield.
Sapolsky, R.M. (2017). Behave, London: Vintage, ebook.
Taylor, K. (2009). Cruelty: Human evil and the human brain. Oxford University Press.
Wilson, M.L. et al. (2014). Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts. Nature 513, pp 414—417. URL = <https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13727>
Wrangham, R. (2019). The Goodness Paradox.
Wrangham, R & Peterson, D. (1997). Demonic Males. Bloomsbury.