EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (19 page)

Van Vugt and Iredale found that men gave more money to the public fund when a woman as opposed to a man sat next to them. Men also gave more money when the woman sitting next to them was attractive than when she was not, and contributed increasingly larger sums when they played in the company of other male competitors. None of these audience effects were observed for women. Van Vugt and Iredale conclude that a man’s contribution to a public good is like the gazelle’s stotting or the peacock’s showy tail: an ostentatious, but honest display of power.

These studies, and many others, suggest that we often tout our wealth and power by showing off, burning through resources just because we can. Men do this more often than women, using their magnanimous gestures as a seductive recruiting technique. And many women are indeed impressed, in part because such costly displays are honest indicators of male status. Men are also more likely to use aggression as a means of both gaining status among women and defending their own personal honor. In cultures of honor, men not only fight other men to defend women, but often kill women if they refuse a pre-arranged marriage, commit adultery, or seek divorce. Not taking care of business in this way is a sign of weakness in such societies. Here, men aggress to impress. Here, men are morally justified by their culture’s norms to kill women that have strayed from such norms. Here, atrocious acts are justified on moral grounds, treating women as pawns that can be manipulated by powerful men. Here, aggression is carried out in a public forum, involving bludgeoning with stones, the use of swords to behead the victim, and multiple gun shots fired at different parts of the body to prolong pain until death. Though honor cultures span different time periods and continents, many are driven by male desire for reproductive power and thus, control over female behavior. As I mentioned in the discussion of lethal killing in animals, and especially the case of infanticide, men are motivated to kill women who refuse marriage, seek divorce, or commit adultery because these actions point to a man who has lost control and thus, lost reproductive power over women. Killing such women allows men to regain control and seek women that are more likely to submit, a point made by numerous scholars. These historical analyses are further supported by experimental studies aimed at the idea that aggression not only defeats the competition, but elevates the status of winners by honestly displaying their power.

The psychologist Viktor Griskevius and his colleagues ran an experiment to better understand how a person’s motivation to attain high status might lead to the use of aggressive displays that impress both same-sex competitors and opposite sex mating partners. Subjects read one of two scenarios designed to trigger feelings of competition or romance, and then had to decide what they would do in response to an acquaintance who carelessly spilled a drink all over them. Women responded to both scenarios by stating that they would exclude the careless acquaintance from any future social interactions. In contrast, men stated that they would physically strike the acquaintance, but their imagined willingness to act with such violence in the context of mating was only boosted when other men were present. Men’s motivation to use aggression was thus fueled by the presence of other competitors, a mating arena in which the most impressive stand out. Aggression therefore serves two functions: it provides competitive muscle when resources are limited, and sends an honest signal to potential mates about the aggressor’s capacity to incur costs. Rape genocide represents an extreme version of the use of aggression to impress, and a horrifying example of how evil actions function as a form of conspicuous consumption.

Whether we look back in time to the genocides in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, or fast forward to the ongoing genocides in the Sudan and Congo, rape is a trademark of these conflicts. In every case, rape is not a byproduct of frustration or a desire to have sex, but a systematic and strategic technique used by the perpetrators to control the reproduction of women, either by killing or impregnating them. Rape genocides are also designed to strike fear and generate paralysis. Rapes are often committed in front of husbands and other family members, which crushes all sense of honor and power in the men, and strikes fear in all women and children who rightly imagine that they may be next. Often, those who are raped, and not killed, are kept in a relatively healthy condition until the child is born. This forces the victim into a series of moral nightmares: carrying to term an unwanted fetus, giving birth to an innocent child that looks like the rapist, wanting to end the child’s life but faced with the strong cultural norms that prohibit abortion. Rape genocides exemplify the use of excessively cruel means to bring about excessive harms. They are acts of evil that function to intimidate innocent victims.

The historical observations and experimental studies I have reviewed provide a link between violence and power, including reproductive power or
fitness
in the language of evolutionary biology. These connections suggest that aggressive displays send important information about the aggressor’s resources. Excessive acts of violence are just one step away in this process, and like conspicuous consumption for luxury items, not only reveal power, but an unlimited power and willingness to destroy. When millions are raped, slashed, burned, chopped up, and gored before dying, there are only two possible explanations: the responsible individuals are either clinically mad with no sense of moderation or healthy schemers who strategically use such means to destroy their victims. The mad men are the psychopaths and lust killers that I discussed earlier — individuals afflicted with either brain damage or developmental disorders. The schemers are like stotting gazelles, wanting to impress others of their awesome powers by performing high risk displays in front of an audience or by signaling that they are crazy and unpredictable, capable of unimaginable destruction. The schemers deploy proactive, premeditated, and cold violence — like predators. As the sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky noted in his commentary on the Nazi concentration camps “Individuals demonstrated commitment by acting, on their own initiative, with greater brutality than their orders called for. Thus excess did not spring from mechanical obedience. On the contrary; its matrix was a group structure where it was expected that members exceed the limits of normal violence.”
⁵⁵
Unfortunately for society — past, present and future — the Nazis are not an isolated case. As some of the earliest archaeological evidence reveals, we have a long and globally dispersed record of cruelty. These horrific acts were carried out as both sacrifices to the gods and to showcase the perpetrators’ incredible powers — an unbounded willingness to escalate. When Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadic, and Ratko Mladic launched their ethnic cleansing initiative, they didn’t just displace or kill Albanians and Croatians, they raped their women, gouged people’s eyes, and repeatedly smashed their skulls before killing them off. Admiral Luis Maria Mendia, one of the leaders in Argentina’s “Dirty war,” convinced victims to board a plane under the pretext of a freedom flight, and then once in flight, threw them out of the plane, adding sheer terror to the brutality of their death. In the massacre of Nanking, the Japanese policy was explicitly cruel, with the goal of crushing the Chinese will to fight back. Japanese soldiers dumped victims into pits and buried them alive or poured gas over their bodies and then lit them on fire, all while smiling. Accounts such as these litter the pages of history, revealing the consistent effectiveness of this strategy to frighten and intimidate victims. They reveal that the desire to impress with excess is part of the human repertoire, a routine that we often call upon in cases of conflict.

Why oh why?

Why did we evolve the capacity for gratuitous cruelty? The answer begins, so I suggest, in a special property of the human brain. Some time after we diverged from a chimpanzee-like common ancestor the human brain was remodeled to allow creative new connections between previously unconnected circuits. Our newly connected brain enabled us to explore new problems using a combination of older, but nonetheless adaptive parts. Some of these novel explorations led to highly adaptive consequences, as when we developed the ability to self-deceive in the service of pumping ourselves up to do better in the context of competition; or when we invented new technologies to solve difficult environmental problems, such as using spears to capture prey at a distance; or, when we acquired the know-how to stockpile and enhance resources such as food, water and fertile land that are critical to individual survival and reproduction; or when we evolved the richly textured social emotions of jealousy, shame, guilt, elation, and empathy, feelings that motivate individuals to recognize the importance of others’ well-being and interests and to correct prior wrongs; or, when we tapped into the rich connection between reward and aggression to punish cheaters trying to destabilize a cooperative society. But these same adaptive explorations also resulted in incidental costs that have destroyed the lives of innocent individuals. The capacity to deny others’ moral worth enabled us to justify great harms, including self-sacrifice as living bombs designed to annihilate thousands of non-believers. The capacity to create advanced weaponry enabled us to kill at a distance, thereby avoiding the aversiveness of taking out those staring back. The capacity to stockpile resources led to the growth of greed, increasing disparities among members of society, the inspiration to steal, and heightened violence both to defend and to obtain. The capacity to experience social emotions such as jealousy led to blind rage and a driving engine of homicide, including cuckolded lovers who kill their spouses and stepparents who kill their stepchildren. The capacity to feel good about harming others enabled us to recruit this elixir in the service of causing excessive harm in any number of novel contexts, from ethnic cleansings to bizarre fetishes that include self-mutilation. And the list goes on. This is the yin and yang of a combinatorial brain. This is the natural history of evil, its ancestry and adaptive significance. It is a capacity that lives within all of us, but some of us are more likely than others to deploy it. This variation is also part of human nature, a critical component in the evolutionary process.

Recommended books:

Buss, D. (2006).
The Murderer Next Door.
New York: Penguin.

Dennett, D. (1991).
Consciousness Explained
. New York: Back Bay Books.

Ellison, P. T., & Gray, P. (Eds.). (2009).
Endocrinology of Social Relationships
. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

French, P. (2001).
The Virtues of Vengeance
. Kansas: University of Kansas Press.

Goldhagen, D.J. (2009).
Worse than War
. New York: Public Affairs.

Kekes, J. (2005)
The Roots of Evil
. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kiernan, B. (2007).
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur
. New Haven: Yale University Press.

McCullough, M.E. (2008).
Beyond Revenge.
New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Miller, G. (2009).
Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior
. New York: Viking Press.

Mithen, S. (1996).
Prehistory of the Mind
. London: Thames & Hudson.

Pinker, S. (2011)
The Better Angels of Our Nature
. New York: Viking Press.

Wilson, M. & Daly, M. (1988).
Homicide
. New York: Aldine Press.

Wrangham, R.W., & Peterson, D. (1996).
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence
. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

Zahavi, A., & Zahavi, A. (1997).
The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 4:

Wicked in waiting

The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies.

— Bible, Psalm 53:8

No one has a say over their genes or their parents, including the environment that is created on their behalf. For individuals raised in poverty, abused by parents or abandoned by them, there may come a time when it is possible to purge the past, rise above it, and lay down new tracks. Success in this endeavor depends upon biological potential and the environment’s toxicity. Though every healthy human being acquires the same basic biological ingredients, individual differences in how our biology expresses itself can either provide immunity against toxic environments or deep vulnerabilities. The unlucky ones inherit genes that predispose to sensation-seeking and risk-taking, callous and unemotional attitudes toward others, weak self-control, and narcissistic leanings. With this lottery ticket, it takes little to trigger a mind capable of gratuitous cruelty. And yet some resist.

Individual differences, rooted in our biology, are an important source of variation for natural selection. In fact, without heritable variation, selection has nothing to work with. As the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr noted, “He who does not understand the uniqueness of individuals is unable to understand the working of natural selection.”
⁵⁶
This chapter presents the scientific evidence on individual differences linked to the problem of evil. This evidence helps explain the source of individual differences, including its role in sculpting different personality profiles that either deviate greatly from societal norms or follow them to perfection. This evidence helps us understand that living among us, there are those who are poised to act in wicked ways, and others who will resist despite the relevant temptations.

What’s normal?

Much of our fascination with evil stems from the distinct impression that evildoers are anomalies. Their actions are inhuman, unimaginable, rarely witnessed, and detrimental to our species’ survival. This impression carries with it an assumption about what is expected or typical of our species, as well as what is possible. It assumes that those considered evildoers have thoughts, feelings, and desires that fall outside of the repertoire of an average human being. Their actions are unimaginable, so we think, because most human minds lack the capacity to imagine butchering human bodies, either for the fun of it or without any feelings at all. Like so many simple claims that go unchallenged, we should be puzzled by this one. We should ask: what’s normal?

The evolutionary history of each species’ brain provides only a partial accounting of what the brain can do. To illustrate, consider the domesticated dog and its ancestor the wolf. Though dogs live with humans and are often raised by them, they never acquire a human language. In this sense, the domesticated dog is just like the wolf. But what dogs can do, with greater facility than any wild wolf, is understand a variety of human gestures such as pointing and the movement of our eyes. This capacity emerged following a period of human domestication. Wolves were not part of this selective regime. But — and this is the most interesting twist in the story — wolf puppies raised by human caretakers develop into adults that can read pointing and looking quite well. This tells us that even wolves evolved the potential to read human gestures, but only human environments favor this skill. This tells us that what animals express is not necessarily indicative of their potential. To uncover their potential, we must alter the environment or wait for such changes to happen naturally.

When we ask
What’s normal
?, we are asking two questions: what is the evolved repertoire and what is the evolved capacity? The evolved repertoire tells us something about the relationship between a species’ biology and the environments that have shaped their behavior. The evolved capacity tells us about a reservoir of behaviors that may only emerge in novel environments.

What’s normal human behavior? The same distinctions apply to us as to dogs and wolves, with the extra complication that our species adds because of historical twists and turns orchestrated by legal, political, ethical, religious, and medical points of view. History presents us with hundreds of cases where an accepted normal mutated into an unaccepted abnormal, or where abnormal mutated into normal. In the United States, homosexuality was considered a mental disease before the 1970s, with its own entry in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSMMD)
. It was considered abnormal, a deviation from our species evolved repertoire as a heterosexually reproducing species. None of the other primates exhibit homosexuality as a stable class of sexual orientation, nor do any other primates strictly engage in homosexual interactions; bonobos or pygmy chimpanzees have both homo- and heterosexual interactions, but there are no bonobos that only engage in homosexual interactions. Homosexuality was, therefore, considered unnatural. What is unnatural is bad, and in this case, morally bad. Two events turned this attitude around. The first was an underground movement of gay psychiatrists. The second was a discovery by Evelyn Hooker who noted that the manual’s classification entry was based entirely on clinical interviews of gay prisoners. Once Hooker and others carried out interviews with gay men lacking criminal records, the old classification scheme was effectively dead. Homosexuality was freed from its jail sentence as a mental disease — as abnormal — and transformed (at least in some parts of the world) into an accepted normal. Homosexuality is part of our evolved capacity.

When clinicians diagnose individuals with a mental disorder, they are making a statement about deviance, about what falls within and outside the range of normal or typical mental states. Unfortunately, there are no clear categories, no bright lines separating normal from abnormal or uncommon. As the distinguished psychologist William James noted, however, the best way to understand normal human functioning is through the mind of the abnormal or atypical. Let’s follow this logic by returning to two clinical cases briefly mentioned in the last chapter: autism and psychopathy. The reason for looking closely at these two in particular is because both are characterized by compromised capacities for self-control and empathy — capacities that are deeply connected to the problem of evil.

Autism is a developmental disorder that is typified by difficulties understanding what others believe and feel, and to repetition of behavior. Some individuals appear entirely locked out of the world, rocking back and forth to their own internal rhythm. Others, diagnosed with a sub-class of the autistic spectrum known as Asperger’s, are high functioning individuals such as Dr. Temple Grandin, who not only teaches college-level courses, but has done wonders as a spokesperson for autism, as well as the animal welfare movement. This range already tells us that autism is represented by a spectrum, once identified by purely behavioral measures, but joined today by genetic and neurobiological markers. The budding genetic evidence is particularly helpful for explaining the observed variation. For example, the MAOA gene, located on the X chromosome, is involved in the regulation of social behavior and has different forms that map to differences in brain activity and stress physiology
⁵⁷
. The different forms correspond to the number of copies of the genetic material. This copy number is, in turn, partially responsible for the spectrum of autism observed, especially the degree of social dysfunction, including stress and aggression. Add this source of variation to the observation that the odds of autism are much higher in boys than girls, in children of parents with careers in math, engineering, and the physical sciences, and of fathers who reproduce late in life, and you have a package of factors that can tilt individuals toward one end or the other of this developmental disorder.

Once we admit to a spectrum and begin to pinpoint the factors that push individuals to stand on one end or the other, we must admit to admitting virtually everyone onto this spectrum. All of us, at some point in our life, have lacked sensitivity to the feelings and beliefs of others. All of us have been self-absorbed and locked out from the rest of the world. All of us have failed to express empathy and compassion to others, often repeating such failures over and over again. All of us have been a bit abnormal in this sense, due to differences in nature and nurture. All of us fall, on occasion, within the spectrum of autism as well as other disorders of the mind such as psychopathy.

Like autism, psychopathy is not one neat and tidy disorder, but a spectrum. As I mentioned in the last chapter, psychopaths are impulsive, narcissistic, and lacking in social emotions such as empathy, remorse, and guilt. These behaviorally defined characteristics are complimented by genetic and neurobiological markers, some pointing to risks in the pre-school years, and linked to the same MAOA gene noted earlier. The spectrum that defines psychopaths ranges from hyper-smart, calculating, and powerful politicians to low IQ, downtrodden, serial murderers. Everyone of us occasionally shows our psychopathic face: self-absorbed, impatient, manipulative, and uncaring. What is abnormal, then, is living with these characteristics, all the time. Clinically diagnosed psychopaths, like clinically diagnosed individuals with autism, have the characteristic traits as stable components of their personality. An honest clinician will tell you, however, that stability is difficult to define, as are the essential traits. An honest brain scientist will also tell you that, despite the observation that psychopaths have hyperactive dopamine brain circuits that may drive sensation seeking, along with smaller frontal lobe circuits that may minimize their sensitivity to punishment and the capacity for self-control, these differences are statistical. What “statistical” means is that if you were to stack up all of the brains with hyperactive dopamine circuits and smaller frontal lobes into one pile, most, but not all would be from psychopaths. You would also find psychopaths in the pile of brains showing normal dopamine activity and average-sized frontal lobes. These brain differences are interesting, but they are not yet like fingerprints, absolutely and uniquely distinctive and diagnostic of a disorder. Such honesty reveals the challenges we face in answering the seemingly simple question
What’s normal?

Lawyers, judges and juries face the same problem as clinicians, often relying upon documents such as the DSMMD to determine when someone has acted outside the range of normal behavior. But for legal cases, there are two relevant dimensions to the normalcy problem. The first concerns whether the supposed criminal was sane or insane. An insanity defense requires evidence of a disease or defect of the mind. It requires evidence that the individual lacked the capacity to appreciate the criminal nature of the act as well as the capacity to conform. This is the part that relies on the DSMMD, as well as clinicians who can testify based on their expertise. The second concerns a more general understanding of what a prototypical or normal human would or could do in a given situation. The idea seems straightforward enough, but as I mentioned above, is only deceptively straightforward.

Crimes of passion provide a useful illustration of the challenges we face, especially with respect to understanding how harm is ignited in the face of moral norms against it. Highlighting the truism that love makes you crazy, the crime of passion defense is invoked for cases where, in the heat of the moment, an individual finds and kills his or her spouse in bed with a lover. The defining feature of a crime of passion is that it was not planned and most people faced with the same situation would act similarly, unable to control their emotions.

The crime of passion defense seems straightforward. Like autism and psychopathy, however, it too relies upon a diagnosis of what a prototypical or average person would do in the same situation. This diagnosis requires an understanding of two difficult mental states: planning and self-control. Planning involves imagining the future, time traveling to a new world, dreaming up what we might do and how we might feel. We plan in the short and long term, filling up our mental sticky notes with to-do lists. Self-control enters into planning because what we imagine for ourselves — what we desire — is often inappropriate or unethical because it harms others or ourselves. As noted in
chapters 1
and
2
, the capacity to keep desire in check relies on moral engagement. Moral engagement requires self-control. Moral disengagement requires denial in order to loosen the grip of self-control and enable desire to have its way.

When Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband John Bobbitt’s penis, she fulfilled her desire to harm another. She carried out this gruesome act despite the moral and legal sanctions against it. But she did not plan this act in advance and nor did it occur in the heat of the moment, triggered by finding her husband in bed with a lover. It followed in the wake of his repeated philandering, attempted rape and psychological abuse. As an act, it fell between the cracks of a long-term plan and a reflexive response — it was hatched on the night of the fatal attack, triggered by seeing a carving knife in the kitchen. Lorena either lost self-control for that fatal moment or she was in complete control, aware of what she was about to do and justified by her own moral convictions, believing that harming John was just deserts. John was most definitely not innocent. The jury delivered a “not guilty” decision, appealing to a crime of passion defense. This decision effectively excused Lorena’s harmful act as normal and justified given the mitigating circumstances.

When we consider our sense of evil in the world, we must pause to consider our own biases and prejudices about what’s normal. We must ask about the human potential, about our evolved capacities and our ability to behave in novel ways in novel environments. When we say that a person, group or nation is evil, we are saying something important about human nature, about our capability as a species. We are saying something important about the relationship between nature and nurture.