A Criminal History of Mankind (10 page)

How is this possible? Are human beings really so much more wicked than tigers and scorpions? The answer was provided by a series of experiments at Harvard conducted by Professor Stanley Milgram. His aim was to see whether ‘ordinary people’ could be persuaded to inflict torture. They were told that the experiment was to find out whether punishment could increase someone’s learning capacity. The method was to connect the victim to an electric shock machine, then ask the subject to administer shocks of increasing strength. The ‘victim’ was actually an actor who could scream convincingly. The subject was told that the shock would cause no permanent damage but was then give a ‘sample’ shock of 45 volts to prove that the whole thing was genuine. And the majority of these ‘ordinary people’ allowed themselves to be persuaded to keep on increasing the shocks up to 500 volts, in spite of horrifying screams, convulsions and pleas for mercy. Only a few refused to go on. In writing up his results in a book called
Obedience to Authority
, Milgram points the moral by quoting an American soldier who took part in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and who described how, when ordered by Lieutenant Galley, he turned his sub-machine gun on men, women and children including babies. The news interviewer asked: ‘How do you, a father, shoot babies?’ and received the reply: ‘I don’t know - it’s just one of those things.’

And these words suddenly enable us to see precisely why human beings are capable of this kind of behaviour. It is because we have
minds
, and these minds can overrule our instincts. An animal cannot disobey its instinct; human beings disobey theirs a hundred times a day. Living in a modern city, with its impersonality and overcrowding, is already a basic violation of natural instinct. So when Lieutenant Galley told the man to shoot women and children, he did what civilisation had taught him to do since childhood - allowed his mind to overrule his instinct.

The rape of Nanking illustrates the same point. Rhodes Farmer wrote in
Shanghai Harvest, A Diary of Three Years in the China War
(published in 1945): ‘To the Japanese soldiers at the end of four months of hard fighting, Nanking  promised a last fling of debauchery before they returned to their highly disciplined lives back home in Japan.’ But this shows a failure to understand the Japanese character. The
Japanese Yearbook
for 1946 comes closer when it says: ‘By 7 December, the outer defences of Nanking were under attack, and a week later, Japanese anger at the stubborn Chinese defence of Shanghai burst upon Nanking in an appalling reign of terror.’ In fact, the Chinese resistance - ever since their unexpected stand at Lukouchiao in July 1937 - had caused the Japanese to ‘lose face’, and they were in a hard and unforgiving mood when they entered Nanking. But then, we also need to understand why this loss of face mattered so much, and this involves understanding the deep religious traditionalism of the Japanese character. The historian Arnold Toynbee has pointed out, in
East to West
(pp. 69-71) that if the town of Bromsgrove had happened to be in Japan, the Japanese would know exactly why it was so named, because they would have maintained a sacred grove to the memory of the war-god Bron. And there would probably be a Buddhist temple next door to the pagan shrine, and the priest and the parson of the temple would be on excellent terms. When, in the nineteenth century, the Japanese decided to ‘Westernise’, they poured all this religious emotion into the cult of the Emperor, who was worshipped as a god. The war that began in 1937, and ended in 1945 with the dropping of two atom bombs, was an upsurge of intense patriotic feeling similar to the Nazi upsurge in Germany. The outnumbered Japanese troops felt they were fighting for their Emperor-God, and that their cause was just.
This
is why the stubborn Chinese resistance placed them in such an unforgiving frame of mind. Like Milgram’s subjects, they felt they were administering a salutary shock-treatment; but in this case, anger turned insensitivity into cruelty.

Wells, oddly enough, failed to grasp this curiously impersonal element in human cruelty. Having seized upon the notion that slum conditions produce frustration, he continues with a lengthy analysis of human cruelty and sadism, citing as typical the case of Marshal Gilles de Rais, who killed over two hundred children in sexual orgies in the fifteenth century. In fact, de Rais’s perversions throw very little light on the nature of ordinary human beings, whose sexual tastes are more straightforward. The Japanese who burnt Nanking, the Germans who destroyed Oradour, were not sexual perverts; they had probably never done anything of the sort before, and would never do anything of the sort again. They were simply releasing their aggression in obedience to authority.

Fromm is inclined to make the same mistake. He recognises ‘conformist aggression’ - aggression under orders - but feels that human destructiveness is better explained by what he calls ‘malignant aggression’ - that is, by sadism. Sadism he defines as the desire to have absolute power over a living being, to have a god-like control. He cites both Himmler and Stalin as examples of sadism, pointing out that both could, at times, show great kindness and consideration. They became ruthless
only when their absolute authority was questioned
. But this hardly explains the human tendency to destroy their fellows in war. So Fromm is forced to postulate another kind of ‘malignant aggression’, which he calls ‘necrophilia’. By this, he meant roughly what Freud meant by ‘thanatos’ or the death-urge - the human urge to self-destruction. Freud had invented the ‘death wish’ at the time of the First World War in an attempt to explain the slaughter. It was not one of his most convincing ideas, and many of his disciples received it with reservations - after all, anyone can see that most suicides are committed in a state of muddle and confusion, in which a person feels that life is not worth living; so the underlying instinct is for more life, not less. Even a romantic like Keats, who feels he is ‘half in love with easeful death’, is in truth confusing the idea of extinction with that of sleep and rest. If human beings really have an urge to self-destruction, they manage to conceal it very well.

Fromm nevertheless adopts the Freudian death-wish. He cites a Spanish Civil War general, one of whose favourite slogans was ‘Long live death!’ The same man once shouted at a liberal intellectual: ‘Down with intelligence!’ From this, Fromm argues that militarism has an anti-life element that might be termed necrophilia. But he demolishes his own case by citing two genuine examples of necrophilia from a medical textbook on sexual perversion: both morgue attendants who enjoyed violating female corpses. One of them described how, from the time of adolescence, he masturbated while caressing the bodies of attractive females, then graduated to having intercourse with them. Which raises the question: is this genuinely a case of necrophilia, which means sexual desire
directed towards death
? Many highly-sexed teenage boys might do the same, given the opportunity. It is not an interest in death as such, but in sex. A genuine necrophile would be one who preferred corpses
because
they were dead. One of the best known cases of necrophilia, Sergeant Bertrand (whom I discussed in Chapter 6 of my
Origins of the Sexual Impulse
} was not, in this sense, a true necrophile; for although he dug up and violated newly buried corpses, he also had mistresses who testified to his sexual potency. He is simply an example of a virile man who needed more sex than he could get.

So Fromm’s whole argument about ‘necrophilia’, and his lengthy demonstration that Hitler was a necrophiliac, collapses under closer analysis. The Spanish general was certainly not a necrophile by any common definition: he was using death in a rather special sense, meaning idealistic self-sacrifice for the good of one’s country. He certainly has nothing whatever in common with a morgue attendant violating female corpses. Hitler was undoubtedly destructive, but there is no evidence that he was self-destructive or had a secret death wish. On the contrary, he was a romantic dreamer who believed that his thousand-year Reich was an expression of health, vitality and sanity. Fromm’s ‘necrophilia’, like Wells’s notion of cruelty, fails to provide a satisfactory explanation of human cruelty; it is not universal enough.

The notion of ‘losing face’ suggests an interesting alternative line of thought. It is obviously connected, for example, with the cruelty of Himmler and Stalin when their absolute authority was questioned. They were both men with a touchy sense of self-esteem, so that their response to any suspected insult was vindictive rage. Another characteristic of both men was a conviction that they were always right, and a total inability to admit that they might ever be wrong.

Himmlers and Stalins are, fortunately, rare; but the type is surprisingly common. The credit for recognising this goes to A. E. Van Vogt, a writer of science fiction who is also the author of a number of brilliant psychological studies. Van Vogt’s concept of the ‘Right Man’ or ‘violent man’ is so important to the understanding of criminality that it deserves to be considered at length, and in this connection I am indebted to Van Vogt for providing me with a series of five talks broadcast on KPFK radio in 1965. Like his earlier pamphlet
A Report on the Violent Male
, these have never been printed in book form.

In 1954, Van Vogt began work on a war novel called
The Violent Man
, which was set in a Chinese prison camp. The commandant of the camp is one of those savagely authoritarian figures who would instantly, and without hesitation, order the execution of anyone who challenges his authority. Van Vogt was creating the type from observation of men like Hitler and Stalin. And, as he thought about the murderous behaviour of the commandant, he found himself wondering: ‘What could motivate a man like that?’ Why is it that some men believe that anyone who contradicts them is either dishonest or downright wicked? Do they really believe, in their heart of hearts, that they are gods who are incapable of being fallible? If so, are they in some sense insane, like a man who thinks he is Julius Caesar?

  Looking around for examples, it struck Van Vogt that male authoritarian behaviour is far too commonplace to be regarded as insanity. Newspaper headlines tell their own story:

HUSBAND INVADES CHRISTMAS PARTY AND SHOOTS WIFE

Grief stricken when she refuses to return to him, he claims.

ENTERTAINER STABS WIFE TO DEATH - UNFAITHFUL HE SAYS

Amazed friends say he was unfaithful, not she.

WIFE RUN OVER IN STREET

Accident says divorced husband held on suspicion of murder.

WIFE BADLY BEATEN BY FORMER HUSBAND

‘Unfit mother,’ he accuses. Neighbours refute charge, call him a troublemaker.

HUSBAND FOILED IN ATTEMPT TO PUSH WIFE OVER CLIFF

Wife reconciles, convinced husband loves her.

Marriage seems to bring out the ‘authoritarian’ personality in many males, according to Van Vogt’s observation. He brought up the question with a psychologist friend and asked him whether he could offer any examples. The psychologist told him of an interesting case of a husband who had brought his wife along for psychotherapy. He had set her up in a suburban house, and supported her on condition that she had no male friends. Her role, as he saw it, was simply to be a good mother to their son.

The story of their marriage was as follows. She had been a nurse, and when her future husband proposed to her she had felt she ought to admit to previous affairs with two doctors. The man went almost insane with jealousy, and she was convinced that was the end of it. But the next day he appeared with a legal document, which he insisted she should sign if the marriage was to go ahead. He would not allow her to read it. Van Vogt speculates that it contained a ‘confession’ that she was an immoral woman, and that as he was virtually raising her from the gutter by marrying her, she had no legal rights...

They married, and she soon became aware of her mistake. Her husband’s business involved travelling, so she never knew where he was. He visited women employees in their apartments for hours and spent an unconscionable amount of time driving secretaries home. If she tried to question him about this he would fly into a rage and often knock her about. In fact, he was likely to respond to questions he regarded as ‘impertinent’ by knocking her down. The following day he might call her long distance and beg her forgiveness, promising never to do it again.

His wife became frigid. They divorced, yet he continued to do his best to treat her as his personal property, determined to restrict her freedom. When this caused anger and stress, he told her she ought to see a psychiatrist - which is how they came to Van Vogt’s friend.

The case is a good example of what Van Vogt came to call ‘the violent man’ or the ‘Right Man’. He is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem - to feel he is a ‘somebody’. He is obsessed by the question of ‘losing face’, so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong. This man’s attempt to convince his wife that she was insane is typical.

Equally interesting is the wild, insane jealousy. Most of us are subject to jealousy, since the notion that someone we care about prefers someone else is an assault on our
amour propre
. But the Right Man, whose self-esteem is like a constantly festering sore spot, flies into a frenzy at the thought, and becomes capable of murder.

Van Vogt points out that the Right Man is an ‘idealist’ - that is, he lives in his own mental world and does his best to ignore aspects of reality that conflict with it. Like the Communists’ rewriting of history, reality can always be ‘adjusted’ later to fit his glorified picture of himself. In his mental world, women are delightful, adoring, faithful creatures who wait patiently for the right man - in both senses of the word - before they surrender their virginity. He is living in a world of adolescent fantasy. No doubt there was something gentle and submissive about the nurse that made her seem the ideal person to bolster his self-esteem, the permanent wife and mother who is waiting in a clean apron when he gets back from a weekend with a mistress...