James Weller "Becoming Evil"書評

ジェノサイド研究。

The common explanations of "extraordinary human evil" (specifically: genocide and mass killing) which Waller rejects include things like uniquely violent cultures, group think and mass psychosis, and psychopathology. This is not to say that none of these explanations have anything to offer; rather, they simply don't fit all of the facts as we know them. Neither social nor psychological explanations alone suffice. In their place, Waller offers four interdependent layers of both social and psychological factors.

The first layer he calls our "ancestral shadow" and relates our evolutionary heritage which has encouraged things like xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and patterns of social dominance. The second has to do with the the social forces which mold the perpetrators of evil: cultural beliefs, moral disengagement, and the role of rational self-interest. The third layer deals with the development of a "culture of cruelty" that allows extraordinary evil to exist: socialization, group cohesion, and the merger of role and person. The fourth and final layer involves the "social death of the victims" - their removal from the "moral universe" through us-them thinking, dehumanization, and blaming them for what is done to them.

One thing which Waller's work has in common with all of the preceding work in this field is the objection that such explanations only serve to excuse people's heinous acts. That is a criticism which does concern Waller and he is careful to avoid the truly objectionable path of providing an explanation without also condemning the acts from a moral perspective. At the same time, however, he argues that condemning them without seeking to understand how they could occur would be just as irresponsible:

To offer a psychological explanation for the atrocities committed by perpetrators is not to forgive, justify or condone their behavior. Instead, the explanation simply allows us to understand the conditions under which many of us could be transformed into killing machines. When we understand the ordinariness of extraordinary evil, we will be less surprised by evil, less likely to be unwitting contributors to evil, and perhaps better equipped to forestall evil.

The desire to see extraordinary evil condemned does not seem to be the only reason why people object to attempts to explain how and why it occurs. Many explanations, including Waller's, tend to argue that such evil is not something unique, unusual, and wholly "alien" to "normal" people. Instead, much research demonstrates that even the most ordinary and well-adjusted people are capable of committing gross acts of barbarism under the right conditions.

Such findings make people uncomfortable - and they should make us uncomfortable. It should be harder to sleep at night once we understand that such evil isn't simply perpetuated by lunatic cultures or lunatic individuals on the fringes of society, but rather that it is perpetuated by people like you an me. We aren't all nearly so dissimilar as we might imagine. We and whatever culture or religion we belong to aren't as superior and enlightened as we like to believe.