"What draws humans repeatedly to war?" asks Jill Neimark today in her review of Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century by English ethicist Jonathan Glover (September 2000, Yale University Press, ISBN: 0-300-08700-4). Pleasure, she writes, is one reason; transcendence is another. But there are other reasons, justifications, and means.

As a New Yorker, in the wake of the WTC attacks, she observes that such an event "could not have happened without the help of both science and religion. Technology gave us the wide-bodied jets, and religion appears to have given the mandate to attack, and now to avenge. Bin Laden speaks of a jihad in the service of Allah; President Bush, according to the New York Times, believes that he "has come face to face with his life's mission," that fighting terrorism is what God has asked him to do."

Science and religion; religion and science. Just like pleasure and transcendence, they are part and parcel of what make us so spectacularly and so deplorably human.

Read on, and behold our humanity.

--Stacey E. Ake

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Subject: "Never Such Innocence Again": A Review of Jonathan Glover's Humanity From: Jill Neimark Email: <neimark@i-2000.com>

Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word - the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again. --Philip Larkin

My city was bombed. As I write this we are still reporting the dead as missing. But outside hospitals, families who are never going to have a body to bury-not even a piece of a body-have created a pictorial graveyard, a tableau of the incinerated. It's a wall of missing persons, but that's not the truth: it's the only graveyard we have, a crescendo of faces akin to the slow-building litany of names on Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial.

This is the first time war has come to my shore. And it could not have happened without the help of both science and religion. Technology gave us the wide-bodied jets, and religion appears to have given the mandate to attack, and now to avenge. Bin Laden speaks of a jihad in the service of Allah; President Bush, according to the New York Times, believes that he "has come face to face with his life's mission," that fighting terrorism is what God has asked him to do. "Holy warriors" hijacked airplanes and transformed them into bombs. But throughout history human beings have been hijacking science and religion, and transforming them into far deeper and more disastrous weapons.

War is as ancient as we are. Why?

One of the bravest books of last year addressed this question: Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, by Jonathan Glover (Yale University Press). Ten years in the making, it's a searing, intimate biography of our recent history, told from the perspective of massacre, torture, atrocity-a book of unflinching honesty intended to make us face and tame the "monsters inside us." One of the reasons the world trade center bombing was so shattering to Americans-and why the prospect of a Third World War seems both possible and unthinkable-is that we deny the inhumanity woven into our humanity. We live in perpetual innocence; or we did until now.

"For those of us whose everyday life is in relatively calm and sheltered places," says Glover, "the horrors of Rwanda or Bosnia or Kosovo seem unreal...we bystanders look away. Repressing each atrocity maintains the illusion that the world is fundamentally a tolerable place. Yet it is almost certain that, as you read this sentence, in some places people are being killed and in others people are being tortured." Glover quotes a mind-numbing fact: war has killed an average of over a hundred people an hour throughout the twentieth century.

What draws humans repeatedly to war? Pleasure, for one. "Battle can have a sublime beauty for those who experience it," says Glover. He cites William Broyles, a lieutenant in Vietnam, who speaks of the passion for intense experience, camaraderie, a love of games-even the deadly game of war. But, Broyles says, there are other, more troubling attractions: "War is for men at some terrible level the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation into the power of life and death. It is like lifting off a corner of the universe and looking at what's underneath." Broyles describes the "look of beatific contentment on the colonel's face that I had not seen except in charismatic churches...I smiled back, as filled with bliss as he was...I stood on the edge of my humanity, looked into the pit, and loved what I saw there." War gives yet another pleasure: transcendence. It speaks to the soul. One Nazi officer says: "I knew very well what I was going to do in the SS. We all knew. It was something in the soul, not the mind."

Every war offers up the same shattering stories. It's hard to face that unspeakable cruelty is a universal trait. Iraqi officers hold a nine-year-old prisoner and then tell his overjoyed parents the boy is about to be released. As they shepherd him from the car, his parents see that his ears, nose and genitalia have been cut off, and that he's holding his eyes in his hands. Then he is shot to death. Nazis sell the hair of women from Auschwitz for making mattresses, and take human ash, with pieces of teeth or bones, as gravel for the paths of nearby villages. In Rwanda, a baby is killed with a machete and thrown down a toilet: "In desperation and in the hope of avoiding an even worse death under the machete, very many people jumped [into the river] and drowned, including many women with babies strapped to their backs." (Although the situation is far different, that desperation reminds me of the awful choreography of free-fall when people leapt to their deaths from the upper floors of the burning World Trade Center.)

How do "sane" people commit these kind of acts? Amazingly, as Glover points out, an "ethical" human being can accommodate and even commit horrific acts of cruelty if they deceive themselves: "When mass murder is sufficiently re-interpreted, people can support it with an unimpaired sense of moral identity...The growth of such a delusional system is a personal moral disaster. It can also be a political disaster." This is, unfortunately, where religion makes its entrance and the concept of God is hijacked and turned into a lethal weapon.

Mass murder is not seen as murder if the perpetrator is being guided by God, and the enemy is demonized. In World War II, the Japanese saw themselves as a superior race. "A year before the war," reports Glover, "the politician Nakajima Chikuhei said that...the Japanese were racially pure descendants of the gods, they were 'the sole superior race in the world.'" Americans and British were described as bestial, insensitive, demons, devils, fiends, monsters, hairy, twisted-nose savages. At the same time, Americans called Japanese yellowbellies, yellow bastards, yellow monkeys. "Australian General Sir Thomas Blamey said of the Japanese soldier that 'he is a sub-human beast.'"

Stalin was seen as a religious leader: "It seems that his penetrating look pierces my little room and goes out to embrace the entire globe," Glover quotes one writer as saying. "With my every fiber, every nerve, every drop of blood I feel that, at this moment, nothing exists in this entire world but this dear and beloved face."

"If my presence on earth is providential," said Hitler, "I owe it to a superior will...I believe that it was the will of God to send a boy from here into the Reich, to make him great, to raise him up to be the Fuhrer of the nation."

Now history repeats itself, and yet it seems new to many of us. America mourns, and much of the world mourns with America. But what is different? We each claim that God is on our side, and we need to purge the world of darkness: satanic America; evil terrorists. The real horror for us now is how science has raised the stakes. As Glover notes. "The decisions of a few people can mean horror and death for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of other people." In the last few weeks, I've had many discussions about the possibility of biowarfare, or suicide bombers jumping into the exposed containment pools outside nuclear reactors around our country. The toll could go into the millions in a matter of days.

War is a suicide pilot at the helm of a plane whose two wings are science and religion. As Glover says near the close of Humanity: "We have experienced the results of technology in the service of the destructive side of human psychology. Something needs to be done about this fatal combination. The means for expressing cruelty and carrying out mass killing have been fully developed. It is too late to stop the technology. It is to the psychology that we should now turn."

Whether we can change ourselves is endlessly debatable, but we can't make the effort if we don't first know ourselves, if we don't understand the darkness humanity encompasses, along with its greatness and beauty. Glover's book is the first step.

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Published   2001.09.26