Minding Evil: Explorations of Human Iniquity (At the Interface Probing the Boundaries, 23)

Minding Evil Explorations of Human Iniquity

At the Interface

Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Margaret Sönser Breen

Advisory Board Professor Margaret Chatterjee Professor Michael Goodman Dr Jones Irwin Professor Asa Kasher Dr Owen Kelly Revd Stephen Morris

Professor John Parry Dr David Seth Preston Professor Peter Twohig Professor S Ram Vemuri Professor Bernie Warren Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

Volume 23 A volume in the At the Interface project ‘Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness’

Probing the Bounderies

Minding Evil

Explorations of Human Iniquity

Edited by

Margaret Sönser Breen

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1678-7 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents Preface PART I

PART II

PART III

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Groups, Activism, and the Tools of Ethnic Cleansing No Place Like Home: The Role of Landmines in Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century Frank Faulkner and Graeme R. Goldsworthy

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A Social Psychology of Defiance: From Discontent to Action Mark Burgess, Neil Ferguson, and Ian Hollywood

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Dichotomous Thinking and Culture of Destruction: Revisiting Youth Activism in China during the May Fourth Period Haijing Dai

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Laws, Prisons, and Damaged People Speaking the Language of Evil Samuel H. Pillsbury

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The Unbearable Brutality of Being: Casual Cruelty in Prison and What This Tells Us About Who We Really Are Diana Medlicott

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Damage: A Logic of Evil Wayne Cristaudo

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Evil and the Arts Jack Be Nimble, Jack Be Quick: Reflections on the Necessary Evils of 24 Ted Turnau

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The Devil’s Footprints: The Case of Dr. Emmenberger in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Der Verdacht Vera A. Profit

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The Evil of Creation: The Destructive Aesthetic in the Figure of the Romantic Artist Elizabeth McCarthy PART IV

PART V

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Evil, Despair, and Distorted Realities The Evils of [Same] Sex: The U.S. Gay Marriage Debate Margaret Sönser Breen

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Inside Out and Outside In: Constructions of Evil in Contemporary British Drama Annette Pankratz

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Evil and Despairing Individuals: A Kierkegaardian Account Karen D. Hoffman

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Individuals, Groups, and Evil Actions Relationality and Evil: Judging Bystanders Gideon Calder

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Harm and Transgression in International Criminal Justice Stephen Riley

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Individual and Collective Responsibility for Wrongs of the Past William Andrew Myers

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Notes on Contributors

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Welcome to At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries By sharing insights and perspectives that are both inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary, ATI/PTB publications are designed to be both exploratory examinations of particular areas and issues, and rigorous inquiries into specific subjects. Books published in the series are enabling resources which will encourage sustained and creative dialogue, and become the future resource for further inquiries and research. Minding Evil is a volume which belongs to the research project Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness (www.wickedness.net). This wide ranging project seeks to explore issues connected with evil, suffering, pain and the consequences of human actions. It recognises that even the language of 'evil' is a problem, and attempts to find ways of beginning to make sense of human wickedness. Key themes that are central to the project include: x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

the language of evil the nature and sources of evil and human wickedness moral intuitions about dreadful crimes psychopathic behaviour; is a person mad or bad? choice, responsibility, and diminished responsibility social and cultural reactions to evil and human wickedness the portrayal of evil and human wickedness in the media and popular culture suffering in literature and film individual acts of evil, group violence, holocaust and genocide; obligations of bystanders terrorism, war, ethnic cleansing the search for meaning and sense in evil and human wickedness the nature and tasks of theodicy religious understandings of evil and human wickedness postmodern approaches to evil and human wickedness ecocriticism, evil and suffering evil and the use/abuse of technology; evil in cyberspace

Dr Robert Fisher Inter-Disciplinary.Net www.inter-disciplinary.net

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Preface Minding Evil: Explorations of Human Iniquity brings together fifteen essays, versions of which were presented at the Fifth International Conference on Evil and Wickedness, held in Prague in 2004. The volume examines evil and wickedness from a variety of disciplines, including criminology, cultural studies, gender studies, law, literature, peace studies, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. In so doing Minding Evil keeps in play the doubled meaning of its title: on the one hand, to tend to evil, that is, to oversee, cultivate, and deploy it; on the other hand, to be bothered by evil and so, in learning to identify or recognise it, to try to understand its workings and thus contain or control it and, perhaps, repair or undo it. While the essays taken together work to show the difficulty and at times the travesty of not being able to distinguish between the two meanings, it is this second meaning that remains key. What are the individual and collective responsibilities entailed in minding – being troubled by – evil? This is the central question of this volume. Indeed, the three essays in Part I, “Groups, Activism, and the Tools of Ethnic Cleansing,” engage this question. Part I begins with Frank Faulkner and Graeme R. Goldsworthy’s piece, “No Place Like Home: The Role of Landmines in the Twentieth Century,” in which “minding evil” might well be understood as “min[]ing evil.” Landmines have been in use for millennia. Cheap and highly portable, they are the “poor man”’s weapons of mass destruction. Marking the landscapes of some of the most impoverished and war-ravaged regions of the world, they lie largely outside of international regulation or concern. Accordingly, Faulkner and Goldsworthy conclude, “for displaced persons, and those too powerless to resist upheaval in neglected parts of the world, the future looks bleak.” For them, the terror of landmines includes the indifference of the international community to preventing their spread. Following this essay is one by Mark Burgess, Neil Ferguson, and Ian Hollywood, “A Social Psychology of Defiance: From Discontent to Action.” In this essay the authors take up the issue of protest, both violent and non-violent, as a means of effecting institutional change. Through a series of interviews with people “who had engaged in action with the specific intent of altering existing institutional structures in Northern Ireland,” Burgess, Ferguson, and Hollywood seek to explain why individuals “with similar beliefs and similar backgrounds mak[e] such different decisions regarding their specific mode of collective protest.” Their findings indicate that an individual’s choice to engage in one form of protest rather than another has less to do with a given psychopathology than with a “critical moment,” in which the individual recognises how a “confluence of social forces” shapes his/her understanding of his/her future behaviour.

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____________________________________________________________ The final essay in this section, “Dichotomous Thinking and Culture of Destruction: Revisiting Youth Activism in China during the May Fourth Period,” by Haijing Dai, considers China’s early twentiethcentury May Fourth movement. Typically “viewed as [a] patriotic campaign[ ], which succeeded in promoting ideas of science and democracy,” the May Fourth Movement for Dai “fails to avoid the simplicity and arbitrariness of binary thinking and the culture of destruction.” For Dai, the “seeds of evilness were already sowed in the good will of students in the May Fourth period.” With Part II, the volume’s focus shifts to “Laws, Prisons, and Damaged People.” The first essay in this section, Samuel H. Pillsbury’s “Speaking the Language of Evil,” “combines a discussion of public discourse about evil with contentions about the nature of evil in crime and punishment.” Pillsbury begins by calling on liberals to learn to speak the language of evil. Moral argument, he insists, requires an ability to talk about evil. Turning his attention to crime, Pillsbury contends that the “concept of violent wrongdoing should expand…to include instances of moral indifference.” Pillsbury minds – that is, he is bothered by – “displays [of a] basic lack of concern for the fundamental interests of the persons harmed” on the part of those who cause the harm. After discussing various examples of violent crime, he considers how the state can itself participate in this indifference. The instance he cites is the Three Strikes law in California, whereby life sentences are meted out without regard to particular circumstances but only in light of the offender’s criminal record. Following “Speaking the Language of Evil” is Diana Medlicott’s “The Unbearable Brutality of Being: Casual Cruelty in Prison and What This Tells Us About Who We Really Are.” In this piece Medlicott examines casual cruelty as a normative practice. In this regard, she argues, prison culture is little different from society as a whole. If within the penal system cruelty is often dismissed or justified with the excuse that the prisoner or prisoners “deserved it,” what is overlooked in the process is that cruelty “mirrors our being in the world.” How, then, can one disrupt this image, particularly within prison culture? For Medlicott the answer lies in the principle of restorative justice, which “mirrors the more positive attributes of our humanity, espousing values such as trust, respect for others, and responsibility.” These are the values that, she concludes, “we must cultivate if we are to transcend the limitations of culture and context.” The final essay of this section, Wayne Cristaudo’s “Damage: A Logic of Evil,” offers “a phenomenological inquiry into ‘damage,’ a term that has become widely use to describe a condition of the soul that often resorts to evil in order to ‘liberate itself.’” With particular emphasis on Josephine Hart’s novel Damage and Mikal Gilmore’s biography of his

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____________________________________________________________ brother, serial murderer Gary Gilmore, A Shot in the Heart, Cristaudo’s essay “investigate[s] the ‘logic’ of evil that comes from damage.” That “logic,” Cristaudo indicates, “involves a strategy of negative redemption,” whereby the logic “mimics, yet inverts the pattern of sacrifice at the heart of the redemptive mythos.” Whereas Cristaudo’s essay is concerned with the logic of evil, the selections in Part III, “Evil and the Arts,” consider the aesthetics of evil. The first essay in this section is Ted Turnau’s “Jack Be Nimble, Jack Be Quick: Reflections on the Necessary Evils of 24.” Turnau considers the representation of evil in the American television show 24. Of particular interest is the show’s collapse of time, which, he argues, makes “questions of evil,” especially those raised by the morally ambiguous behaviour of show’s action hero, “difficult to broach because there is no time for reflection.” In a secular society, textual analysis (where, in this case, the show is the text) proves a vital means for understanding evil. The second essay in this section, “The Devil’s Footprints: The Case of Dr. Emmenberger in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Der Verdacht,” sustains this emphasis on the importance of textual analysis by offering a reading of a 1951 novel. In this piece, author Vera Profit presents the question “How might we recognise evil?” Profit’s own Verdacht (or suspicion) is that readers engaging with Dürrenmatt’s novel some six decades after World War II might readily (and rightly) sum up the protagonist Fritz Emmenberger as evil, but in the process fail to understand that evil extends beyond horrific acts committed on a large scale: evil exists in the banality of one’s day-to-day activities. For this reason, Profit focuses on Emmenberger’s unremarkable violence: his dehumanising behaviour towards those whom he has no interest in killing. Shifting attention from the mass murderer to the Romantic artist, the final essay in this section, Elizabeth McCarthy’s “The Evil of Creation: The Destructive Aesthetic in the Figure of the Romantic Artist,” complements Profit’s interpretive practices. McCarthy begins by explaining that the “ideological foundation for [her] essay is an understanding of violence not as a destructive, anti-social force, separate from, and opposed to, productive humanist discourses, but as an implicit part of such discourses.” By comparing the contemporary figure of the serial killer to the Romantic artist, McCarthy offers a reading of how Romantic literature has “propagated a concept of artistic creativity as an asocial and transcendent activity which promotes the devaluation, negation, and often the destruction, of all that is seen as an obstacle to…the creative impulse.” Within the terms of Romantic literature, tending to the artist has often entailed cultivating evil. Part IV, “Evil, Despair, and Distorted Realities,” opens with my own essay, which once again considers both the policing and the

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____________________________________________________________ cultivation of evil. “The Evils of Same Sex: The U.S. Gay Marriage Debate” examines the U.S. gay marriage debates from the mid 1990s to the present. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the gay marriage debates turned largely on the evilness of sex (that is, sexual expression in general and same-sex activity especially) and the consequent need to regulate or normalise it through marriage. Since September 11, 2001, the terms of this debate have intensified as the country has come to re-examine its understanding of social and political security. This larger context has shaped the gay marriage debate so that, on the one hand, sex outside of marriage has been figured as a form of domestic terrorism, while, on the other hand, marriage itself has become a figure for national security. Within the framework of this heightened debate, in which marriage has acted as the filter for minding evil, same-sex marriage will, I believe, be increasingly politically recognised within the next several years. The second essay in this section, Annette Pankratz’s “Inside Out and Outside In: Constructions of Evil in Contemporary British Drama,” refocuses the doubled condition of evil in terms of literature. Pankratz analyses plays by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Caryl Churchill, Mark Ravenhill, and Sarah Kane in order to show not only “how evil originates in social and political structures,” but also how “a disidentification with evil or the exclusion of evil ‘others’ from the social system, is not only impossible, but itself the source of evil.” The contemporary ethical challenge, she concludes, is “accepting evil as part of one’s human nature, [and] at the same time acknowledging the human need to fight against evil.” The third essay of this section, Karen D. Hoffman’s “Evil and Despairing Individuals: A Kierkegaardian Account,” examines the self as a locus for that fight. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death, Hoffman considers deficient moral character as a source of both demonic and banal evil. This interpretation allows Hoffman to analyse in turn the interrelation of demonic and banal evil, “specifically the ways in which demonic evil constitutes an escalation of the despair that characterises banal evil.” Part V, the final section of this volume, is titled “Individuals, Groups, and Evil Actions.” It begins with an essay that, in contrast to Hoffman’s focus on individual moral character, looks at how the concept of “evil” might be applied to relations between people. Gideon Calder’s “Relationality and Evil: Judging Bystanders” centres on two key issues: “whether the moral and cultural ‘relationality’ of bystanders’ acts and omissions makes any difference to judgements as to the ‘evilness’ of such behaviour” and whether “‘evil’ might be applied as much as to relations between individuals, as to the thoughts and actions of individuals themselves.”

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____________________________________________________________ The second selection, “Harm and Transgression in International Criminal Justice,” examines the possibilities for international criminal justice to respond effectively to large-scale evil action. Author Stephen Riley begins his discussion by revisiting Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Karl Jaspers’ The Question of German Guilt in order “to analyse and dissolve the…helplessness that the authors posit by considering the most basic process of international criminal justice: the designation of harm as transgression.” For Riley, while international criminal justice remains subject to any number of problems, “the legal and conceptual problems that Arendt and Jaspers identified are no longer insurmountable,” particularly given “the suffusion of human rights principles into the international arena.” The final chapter in this section and the volume is William Andrew Myers’ “Individual and Collective Responsibility for Wrongs of the Past.” Like Riley, Myers is concerned with a just response to widespread and long-practiced evils. Focusing on the example of American slavery, Myers proposes that “there is a collective responsibility to rectify present unfair social arrangements that have resulted from wrongs of the past.” Importantly, that responsibility stems not from a sense of collective guilt but rather from “membership in a society with specific ideals and commitments…and it pertains to all members of the society.” Members of society must be mindful of present-day wrongs that have resulted from evils of the past. Not to address those wrongs is, in effect, an evil in itself. Minding Evil: Explorations of Human Iniquity analyses evil in a variety of forms and contexts. Evil may be understood as a condition of the damaged individual or the despairing self; a product of indifferent human interrelations or calculated rhetorical and aesthetic strategies; a means for making and also eradicating human community. It is a cultural mainstay. And so, too, must answering it be: in our affirmations of humanity, whether personal, cultural, or political; in our commitment to nourishing the possibilities for human connection. Minding evil necessitates that we be bothered by evil: that we seek to name it and contain it; redress and, where possible, prevent the harm it causes. On a personal note, I would like to thank the contributors to this collection, not only for their essays but also for their ready assistance throughout the editing process. I am also indebted to Eric van Broekhuizen, editor at Rodopi, for quickly and efficiently shepherding the volume through its final publication stages. Most of all, I would like to thank Robert N. Fisher, series editor. This volume is dedicated to him. Margaret Sönser Breen New London, Connecticut

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PART I Groups, Activism, and the Tools of Ethnic Cleansing

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No Place Like Home: The Role of Landmines in Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century Frank Faulkner and Graeme R. Goldsworthy Abstract The widespread use of anti-personnel mines (APMs) in Cambodia, as a textbook case of mine warfare, has been described as, amongst other considerations, an “…instrument of terror for social and economic control over civilian populations.”1 This is a telling description of one of many uses to which mines can be put, and is redolent of the ethos of ethnic cleansing, which may be described as follows: “The practice of mass expulsion or killing of people from opposing ethnic or religious groups within a certain area.”2 However one may view this practice, the inference is that ethnic cleansing is the use of a demographic purgative to provide Lebensraum for one’s own kind. This paper will, in the light of the above observations, explore the use of APMs to achieve these ends. It will do so by initially investigating the status of mines in international law, and in the provision of legal instruments to codify these weapons in terms of their intrinsic properties. Subsequent to this, the text will move on to discuss the nature of these weapons, assuming that they traditionally lend themselves efficaciously to the enforced movement of peoples, and will subsequently apply this analysis to the modern interpretation as described above. The final part of the work will draw these matters together and present suitable conclusions. Key Words: landmines, international law, ethnic cleansing, weapons of mass destruction. 1.

Landmines and International Law In an age when much rhetoric emanates from Washington, D.C., and London about the apparent proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and the clear and present danger these weapons represent to humanity around the world, it should be remembered that landmines and their derivatives have been described as weapons of mass destruction in slow motion. That is, they have an innate capacity to systematically eradicate large numbers of human beings – over time. Contrary to what has become in today’s “group speak” a benchmark and thus received wisdom, this statement is factually incorrect and a contradiction in terms. The terminology for WMD is arrived at because they achieve a military-political objective by contracting time: that is, they take hours or days to do what conventional weapons accomplish in weeks, months, or even years.

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________________________________________________________ Be that as it may, there is no doubt that landmines are the effective indiscriminate killers they are designed to be: they take life without recourse to any human agency once deployed and, unless cleared, continue to do so long after the cessation of hostilities. This is, by most “civilised” criteria, an unacceptable facet of warfare, and one that many observers believe should be subjected to legal proscription. The rationale for a legal exercise to at least manage or militate against excessively injurious weapons forms the basis of the Inhumane Weapons Convention (IWC) of October 1980, supporting legislation to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and its 1977 Additional Protocols regarding the safeguarding of civilians in war.3 The accepted thesis here is that the instruments of conflict should not be without limit, and that non-combatants ought to be afforded every protection in the event of hostilities breaking out. These legal instruments are also used in general support of the customary laws of war, that is having the moral and legal authority to go to war in the first place, and subsequently to achieve military objectives through the minimum use of force, that is of proportionality. Given the inception of the 1997 Ottawa Treaty and Convention banning any kind of activity associated with making, selling, and using landmines for the signatories, it would appear that the ethical argument has gathered as yet not practical, but at least a moral momentum.4 Adopting the harsh tenets of Realpolitik, legal instruments designed to proscribe the use of mines in war or other types of conflict are only as good as the powerful actors in the international community allow them to be. In other words, having a codified, multinational contract to ban these devices is fine, provided the signatories abide by both the spirit and the letter of the law to which they have agreed. In an anarchic global polity, this is next to impossible due to the problem of enforcement, and the fact that global politics appears to operate in a moral vacuum where only the will of the strongest in our post-cold war uni-polar world prevails. It is noticeable that a number of major land powers, including the United States, the Russian Federation, China, Pakistan, India, and Israel are not signatories to the Ottawa Treaty. Even Finland, an E.U. member state, has not bowed to pressure to sign. Moreover, many of these states are currently using landmines as part of a national defence posture. All have volatile frontiers. Therefore, one may be forgiven for questioning the moral imprimatur with which Ottawa invests itself, especially in the light of use of mines by U.S. forces in the Gulf region during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. One concedes, in mitigation, that it is preferable to have some kind of arms control treaty dealing with landmine warfare rather than nothing at all; but, especially in view of the applications to which these devices can be put, one may question the weight of ethical principle when faced with the exigencies of military necessity. With these thoughts in

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____________________________________________________________ mind, the paper will now move on to analyse the realities of mine warfare when applied to control of peoples caught up in hostile scenarios. 2.

The Landmine-Population Nexus According to standard military doctrine, APMs have moved on from being a classic “area denial” device of World War One battlefields to a weapon platform that can redirect or influence the movement of troops (and, by implication, non-combatants) into so-called “killing zones” or “free-fire areas.”5 In effect, this entails taking control of the combat area to ensure a perceived advantage, and to wrest the initiative of mobility from the enemy. This methodology has been useful for decades, notably in conflicts that featured a high degree of mobile warfare with the advent of mechanised armies, almost in the manner of chess players striving for a decisive edge. Both manual and mechanical mine laying methods have, in conjunction with the anti-tank (AT) variant, provided a mixture of APM models tailored to particular outcomes, dependent upon the nature of the task to be performed. For example, the use of APM and ATM in mixed patterns during the North African Campaign 1941-43 during World War Two was designed to deal with fast armoured thrusts supported by of infantry. From an operational viewpoint, this type of warfare suited the prevailing battlefield conditions and, used in conjunction with other types of weapon systems, were indeed effective.6 The myth peddled for years by the anti-landmine campaigners that landmines have little or no “military utility” needs laid bare, landmines are indeed effective weapons: they do what they are designed to do. Soldiers in combat tend not to waste their time on activities not conducive to their protection, their very survival, or need to gain the upper hand over an adversary. Since 1945 the roles for APMs have altered dramatically, especially during the long South-East Asian conflict centred on Vietnam. Aerial warfare and the design and deployment of new generations of mines afforded radically new applications for these devices to be scattered over a much greater geographical area, notably one in which lines of engagement became blurred, and the type of war changed from rigid cutand-thrust to a much more pronounced “hit and run” affair. This highly mobile, random form of mine deployment had clear advantages over clumsier, more pedestrian form of mine laying; it meant mass disruption of logistical systems, speed of interception, and maximum impact on the enemy’s morale and will to prevail. However, the use of air delivered, scatterable mine seeding by helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft especially over dense jungle removed the ability to locate and neutralise remaining munitions. It should be evident by now that, whilst APMs possess a capability to influence the progress and conclusion of a particular action,

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________________________________________________________ the continued presence and active properties of these devices present a hazard to those who come into contact with them. This has serious repercussions for communities caught up in internecine struggle and the kind of sub-state warfare that features in particular the enforced removal of whole populations. 3.

Warfare and Ethnic Cleansing In every historical era, within every civilisation, wars among tribe, clan, ethnic groups, religious communities, and nation states has been prevalent, because they are rooted in the very identities of people. Wars along “fault lines” tend to be particularistic, in that they do not involve broader ideological or political issues of direct interest to nonparticipants, although they may raise humanitarian concerns in outside groups. They also tend to be vicious and bloody, since fundamental issues of identity are at stake. In addition they tend to be lengthy; they may be interrupted by truces or agreements brokered by third parties or by direct intervention such as witnessed in the former Yugoslavia. In that case military and humanitarian intervention became so politicised it may indeed have contributed to the terrible nature of the war. Further, such truces, as proved in the Balkans, invariably tend to break down, and the conflict is resumed. On the other hand, decisive military victory by one side or another in an identity civil war increases the likelihood of the dispersal or expulsion of the defeated population or indeed genocide. Removing any large number of people from a given geographical area is, by any criteria, a complex and multilateral undertaking. As reportage from the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) has illustrated, the mass removal of a whole ethnic group is a large exercise that requires careful planning and execution. Therefore, according to one apparent proponent of this philosophy, this kind of initiative requires, firstly, “…the creation of a suitable psychosis. It can be created in many ways.”7 There is very little doubt that psychological conditioning precedes forcible brutalising of a whole ethnic group.8 The ostensible objective of this practice is to de-humanise the person or persons to be removed, and the ulterior aim is to totally sanitise the area of concern of any trace of the offending group – that is, absolute removal by whatever means are deemed to be necessary, including genocide. In the case of the by now well-documented purging in the FRY, this is tantamount to eradication of the “multi-ethnic self,9 as well as the evident realisation of a monoethnic identity, all for greater Serbia or Croatia or even the Serb-free Kosovo. As the Nazis would have recognised, this is a drive towards the state vision of racial purity, heroic historical triumph, and the realisation of supposed genetic inevitability. Generally speaking, the institution of a state-sponsored and executed

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____________________________________________________________ programme of wholesale human eradication or removal requires the involvement of much of the state apparatus; it is unlikely that the military or paramilitary arms of state force could accomplish such a task unaided. As recent FRY history informs, mass proselytising through the mediums of myth, folklore, and invocation of the “hero in history” model (as in Prince Lazar and the 1389 Field of the Blackbirds conflict against the Ottomans) helps to prepare the population for an unpleasant, but necessary, episode of washing out the undesirables – the “other” – from the sacred lands steeped in the blood of Serb ancestors. These things are mechanisms for achieving desired aims, which in this case is using the formal and informal instruments of the state as a demographic purgative. Systematic obliteration, by whatever means, of an entire people from a target area involves far more than the mere forcible eviction of individuals and their possessions; in the classic methodology of mine warfare alluded to earlier, it is a further demonstration of the capacity to airbrush reality from history, and detach culture from its roots. In the final analysis, area denial is far more than its tactical implications – it is also the root-and-branch destruction of all tangible connections between the land and the people. As one displaced Bosnian Muslim puts it, with perhaps a hint of irony, “…Bosnia is a dead country, at least for Muslims. This is Serbia now…what is the point of holding on to something that is already lost?”10 This point is readily reinforced by so-called “scorched earth” policies, adopted throughout conflictual history by retreating forces. Stalin, as a case in point, was a wholesale practitioner of this strategy during World War Two, the clear objective being to deny material assets to the advancing German armies.11 For ethnic cleansing, the outcomes are, perversely, to deny any identifying iconography, which is tantamount to wiping a civilisation from the face of the earth. For the Muslims of Bosnia, this includes the destruction of mosques, meeting places, the holy Qu’ran, prayer mats, anything that connects the people with their former habitat. In conjunction with the use of wholesale terror, these practices are the apparent norm. Consider the attempted genocide in East Timor as an example of what Noam Chomsky calls “…the site of the worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust,”12 and what he further refers to, in another geographical but no less severe scenario, as the “‘surreal sense of victimhood’ that calls for the cleansing of Serbia.”13 Euphemistically, it is possible to rationalise ethnic cleansing, and the planned dismantling of a society, as “low-intensity conflict” and “counter-insurgency” measures needed to “normalise” or “pacify” a perceived unstable situation. The ways of achieving this are legion and beyond the scope for now, of this analysis.

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________________________________________________________ 4.

Mines and Movement To be ethnically cleansed is similar, in some respects, to the status of refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs). Each occurs during periods of overt hostility; all involve influence by external and internal factors; each is characterised by insecurity, fear, and loss of habitat; whichever category an individual may find him or herself in, familiar surroundings present life-threatening hazards. The presence of foreign or hostile forces is perhaps the most evident indication of peril, but it is by no means the only aspect. For refugees and IDPs, escape from familiar environs is expected to be temporary; for ethnically purged persons, the intention is to ensure permanent displacement. The means to do this includes the use of APMs, as a silent, deadly, and often invisible deterrent to returnees, assuming that the ultimate sanctions of execution or extra-judicial murder have not been resorted to. Furthermore, as one authoritative source would have it, mines are now frequently used to destabilise whole areas, as well as being used to empty territory.14 There are a number of applications by which this can be effected, which will be looked at in toto initially, then discussed in depth separately: seeding arable land with APMs; mining dwelling space; rendering economic assets unusable; disrupting communications; hampering peace-keeping operations; and impeding the delivery of humanitarian aid. A prerequisite of “terror mining”15 is to deny the use of fertile land for growing food; for populations heavily dependent on agrarian activity for survival, non-use of agricultural resources poses a serious obstacle to continued existence in situ. The only viable alternative is to move elsewhere in pursuit of stability and resource renewal – something that cannot happen where APMs have been deployed in an area denial capacity. Development workers active in mine contaminated environments must maintain a continual process of risk assessment according to the basic criteria of land known to be clear of mines, land suspected to be mined, and finally land known to be mined.16 These are evolutionary processes, and in many cases rely on anecdotal evidence to substantiate reports of mining. The final prognosis suggests that land may only be safe for use when the area has been subjected to a full investigation of the impacted area followed by complete clearance of the redundant minefields (called in Mine Action terms a “full level three survey”), and then after investigation considered fit for use. However, this kind of process is expensive and time-consuming – something that the local community may not have the luxury of withstanding. It is also recognised that, certainly in terms of ethnic conflict, the usual constraints that limit use of APMs no longer apply. One side may well use mines to enforce evacuation of an enemy from the land, to the point of permanently despoiling it, even if they do not plan to use

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____________________________________________________________ the land themselves.17 This, it would seem, is part of the perverse logic of mine warfare in the practice of ethnic cleansing. The practice of mining or booby-trapping houses is a common event in warfare, and as a deterrent is particularly efficacious for denying habitation to the target community. In some cases, the mining of important cultural places extends to, for example, denying access to temples, mosques, shrines, or indeed any religiously significant site that binds communities together.18 Taken in conjunction with other APM-related applications, a flexible outcome is a multi-purpose weapon that lends itself well to anti-morale, terrorising strategies designed to expunge the target population from a given area. Because APMs are non-discriminatory in application and execution, problems may occur for the forces that choose to use them in the above ways. Unfamiliarity with deployment methods, or indeed where these weapons may have been sited, can result in casualties amongst friendly forces and civilians.19 However, it is accepted that forces resorting to this kind of eviction tactic will doubtless be prepared, and that plans for safe removal of APMs after operations will be in place. After all, removing an ethnic group by extreme means, then subjecting one’s own people to the same hazards, rather defeats the objective of using these tactics in the first place. Warfare of any type invariably considers some kind of economic activity. Whilst it may on occasions describe itself as ideological, religious, or even humanitarian in a post-modern sense, the incentive to go to war in many instances is prompted by the forcible sequestration of economic assets. As von Clausewitz would have it, war may be likened to business competition, which is also about human interests and activities.20 Logically, therefore, activities in war or related conflict-based expression concern the seizure of economic assets, and the denial of such to a perceived “enemy,” be they hostile invading forces or undesirable ethnic groups to excised from the land. This more or less reinforces the notion that ethnic removal from a given area is a multi-faceted affair, and one that requires harnessing the resources of the instrumental party. Universal strategies for achieving a desired outcome necessarily involve, especially in a policy as sensitive as the one in question, control of communications and access to any means of disseminating information. APMs lend themselves well to this form of economic expression, in that barrier-building around television and radio stations, power lines, post offices, and civic buildings prohibits the widening appreciation of activities in the target area, and therefore precludes any prophylactic measures by outside bodies. In other words, secrecy of operation is a necessity when conducting ethnic cleansing, as the world discovered

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________________________________________________________ rather too late in East Timor, when the Suharto Government presented the world with a fait accompli. By initiating a stranglehold on the edifices of economic and political power, the cleansing forces have a decided advantage in the overall scheme of things. Control of transport, agriculture, communications, and all the other aspects of economic life is a form of denial; it segregates one group from another; and achieves autonomy of identity that is a marker for ethnic cleansing programmes. Landmines are, certainly for those states that have not signed or ratified the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, a highly effective means toward establishing control of an area. Further to this, AP mines have proved to be highly effective when terrorising or controlling civilians, as this paper has demonstrated; however, the weapon extends its lethal properties in regional conflicts such as during the 1990s in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Targeted civilian communities, by definition, are rendered powerless to neutralise mines due to a lack of expertise. They lack the equipment and training for mine clearance, and the incidence of even a few casualties renders population movement severely constrained, and to be directed at will, by those elements deploying the devices. If the cleansing extends to incurring more fatalities, so much the better. Besides being amply demonstrated in Cambodia, Angola, and other large swathes of Africa, the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as stated by the commander of the American sector in October 1997, could not be returned to normal, nor could the refugees/IDPs be resettled until the “serious” mine problem was brought under control.21 Peacekeeping or peace enforcement agencies, alongside humanitarian aid Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) attempting to operate in areas of ethnic cleansing, and infested by APMs, have also suffered casualties and also found their efforts severely restricted due to large concentrations of minefields, many of them unmarked.22 Not only does this obstacle inhibit the free movement of peacekeeping forces attempting to restore order to a war-torn country, it also places unacceptable burdens on entities trying to document war atrocities impeded through the insidious practice of mining mass grave sites after the liquidation squads had done their work and against those agencies trying to bring humanitarian relief to beleaguered communities. 5.

Cambodia: Year Zero The fall of the Lon Nol regime in April 1975, ushered in nearly four years of Khmer Rouge reign of terror in Cambodia – renamed Democratic Kampuchea. The return to “year zero” and a Maoist–agrarian utopia sealed the country from the outside world. One of the greatest acts of internal ethnic cleansing in history then took place in the incoming weeks as the

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____________________________________________________________ predominantly northern Khmers of the NADK force marched all the southern urban population and other ethnic Khmer peoples from their homes and forcibly relocated them in agricultural areas of the country. The movement of the population, including along possible escape routes, was controlled by huge swathes of minefield belts throughout the country and along the borders with Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. These belts were laid from stocks supplied by the Chinese, from old Vietnamese stocks, and from the large quantities of American-made mines supplied to the fallen Lon Nol regime. For the Khmer Rouge the use of landmines was a direct policy tool in the control and terrorising of the population, who were now little more than a slave labour force. In addition, the first grim warnings of the effects of mine warfare and resulting land wastage emerged from this period as valuable tracts of rice producing land became unworkable owing to the deployment of these huge minefield belts. The diabolical use of mines to terrorise civilian communities by the NADK was highlighted clearly in an Asia Watch report published in 1993: ... At ploughing season the Khmer Rouge forced villagers to plough four hectares of land for them before working their own land, a day’s work... no-one ever refused out of fear (and) the Khmer Rouge continued to lay mines to expand control over territory and surrounding villages; charging villagers for safe access through the mines to forests and fields.23 By 1979, exasperated at continued incursions into Vietnamese territory by NADK units, the Hanoi government – with Soviet blessing – invaded Cambodia and “liberated” the country from Pol Pot’s murderous regime. This action by the Vietnamese initiated the rise of a coalition of resistance forces operating from an area of Cambodian territory by the Thai border. The U.S., Thailand, and the United Kingdom supported a group of insurgent forces known as the Non-Communist Resistance (NCR), whilst the Chinese continued to succour the NADK. Mine warfare played a high profile role in this latest round of fighting in a country already littered with minefields. Fresh supplies of mines flooded in from sponsor states to the various factions, as Cambodia continued to play the role of pawn in the wider ideological superpower struggle. Part conventional, part guerrilla war in nature, the front lines in north-west Cambodia were extremely fluid. Mines were continually laid to protect key points and areas of control, sown in places in belts up to three kilometres or more wide. Control and marking was virtually non-existent, with professional military advisors from the U.S., Thailand, and Britain for the NCR; from China for the NADK; and from the Soviet Union for the Vietnamese-backed CPAF,24 training their client forces

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________________________________________________________ in the art of mine warfare and booby-trapping techniques, ignoring instruction in mapping or recording. The fluidity of the lines, offensive and counter-offensive, drove hundreds of thousands of civilians to flight and consequently over minefields. Rice production all but ceased, and up to two million Cambodians became destitute refugees in camps along the Thai border, many of which were under the control of the various factions. One of the most mine-infested areas grew around the border town of Poipet in northwest Cambodia, where the British demining NGO, the HALO Trust,25 was sub contracted by the U.N. to clear land for returning refugees in 1993. The Project Manager summarises the problem: ...This area (of Poipet) is basically a shantytown. Now it’s actually on top of a minefield. We found one of the CPAF officers who was here through a lot of it (the fighting), and he told us the history. Back in 1980 the Vietnamese laid a minefield (Soviet AP mines) and over the next few years the mines sank and disappeared. A few years later a new Vietnamese commander arrived and thinking there were no mines there, demanded a new minefield. So they laid one (Soviet AP mines). When the Vietnamese left CPAF forces laid a new minefield, since the previous (second) minefield had itself sunk. So, now there are three minefields, one on top of the other and they’ve built a village on it. There have been a lot of casualties here. A lot of it has been demined by the locals themselves, but because these three fields have sunk down so much, no one knows exactly what is in there. What the concentration is, we don’t know exactly, so clearing the area, well – that is a major task.26 During the fighting which swayed back and forth over large parts of the provinces of Bantay Meanchey and Battambang in north-west Cambodia during the 1980s, the landmine was one of the single most important assets available to field commanders. A Red Cross worker in Battambang commented that the sheer numbers available exacerbated the mines problem and how mines were issued to poorly trained conscripts “like bullets.”27 Perhaps the most significant episode of mine laying in Cambodia followed the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces in 1989, leaving the CPAF to fend for themselves. This withdrawal was a precondition for new U.N. peace initiatives but created a military vacuum, exploited by both the NCR and NADK who immediately took the offensive to secure territory and thus influence in any new Cambodian state. This vacuum had two notable effects.

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____________________________________________________________ In addition to the withdrawal of 200,000 hardened troops, eastern bloc aid to the Phnom Penh regime was suspended. The CPAF, still a fledgling force, fell back on the one major resource available, large stockpiles of both AP and AT mines. These mines were laid in new areas, but with the additional intent to terrorise as well as block approaching forces. The density of mines deployed, sometimes up to six per square metre, shocked Western military experts, who acknowledged that such densities were totally unnecessary for standard access or approach denial. Blocked by belts of mines, opposing forces simply shelled one another’s territory inflicting hundreds of civilian casualties, people who could not safely leave because the escape routes were infested with mines. The price continues to be paid today. 7.

Conclusions APMs as a weapon system have been deployed, in some form, for millennia, and there is every reason to assume that matters will not improve for the foreseeable future. This premise is based on current analysis suggesting that whatever legislation is introduced to proscribe these devices, governments will actively seek to navigate a way through and continue to trade in and use landmines in some variant. This is not altogether unexpected; in a uni-polar world where the rules of conduct are being re-written to suit national (especially superpower) interests, there will presumably always be a place in state arsenals for this kind of weapon. The prevailing global political climate, in the continuing aftermath of 11 September 2001, will be subject to change and transformation dependent upon the will and external force projection of the United States. The ongoing War on Terror will exact a toll on countries deemed to be “states of concern” or tagged as members of the “axis of evil.” In any event, as contemporary behaviour aptly informs, some forms of demographic attrition will be overlooked provided they do not interfere with the overall scheme of things. There is a very strong argument for indicating that the use of landmines – or those systems that fall outside of the legal definition – will feature heavily in order to gain a decisive advantage, or to merely displace whole populations seen as “undesirable” to elements with vested interests to pursue. Factored into this equation must be, amongst other unilateral decisions taken by the U.S. and other key land military powers, their continued disregard for the Ottawa Treaty. Those countries view the Ottawa treaty as an indulgence for those with either no land border security issues or indeed living under the umbrella of U.S. military protection. Of some serious moment is the emerging problematic of cluster munitions (CMs): unexploded bomblets from this weapons system, which fail to explode on impact, display similar characteristics to

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________________________________________________________ landmines in that they become “victim operated” CM, which are now routinely deployed to replicate the area denial and AP role of more traditional minefields and are thus seen as landmines in all but name,28 have escaped proscription due to legal manoeuvring by the U.S. and U.K., amongst others.29 Had these countries not done so, perhaps another 35 U.S. weapons systems would also have attracted a ban in international law. For the U.K., this would have meant outlawing the HB 876 “Area Denial” weapon system that forms part of the Royal Air Force’s JP233 “Runway Busting” munition, and for which there is no known method of neutralising or disarming except by using a stand-off method.30 In the final analysis, the constantly evolving global political situation forces new challenges onto the agenda. For example, how the international community approaches arms control will be of significant concern as we move further into the conflict-ridden twenty-first century. Weapons produced by the developed world – what with the Military Industrial Complex working to the closest margins of cost-benefit coefficients – will undoubtedly become more lethal and more destructive. This is especially true of the “war on terror” should it drag on for more many years, as seems likely, and the western democracies seek to retain the mandate to prosecute such a war from their electorates. For this the “zero casualty” war option must be pursued,31 and this requires weapons systems that minimise human casualties to the user. In short, battlefield technology will easily continue to outstrip single-issue arms control instruments. However, for displaced persons, and those too powerless to resist the impetus for upheaval in neglected parts of the world, the future looks bleak. How the international community can and should act, strengthened by the moral force – and not the debasement of international law – through the sanction of weak, emotionally derived legal instruments such as the Ottawa Treaty, which lack intellectual vigour, remains open to question.

Notes 1. Paul Davies, War of the Mines: Cambodia, Landmines and the Impoverishment of a Nation (London: Pluto Press, 1994), 13. See also John Pilger, Distant Voices (London: Pan Books 1992), 237. 2. Oxford English Reference Dictionary, 1996, s.v. “ethnic cleansing.” 3. Frank Faulkner, “Anti-Personnel Landmines: A Necessary Evil?” International Relations, 13.4 (April 1997): 51-54. 4. See Melissa Curley et al., “Does the Security Debate Have to be Presented Polemically? Landmines and the Case for a Micro-Security Approach,” Journal of Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement, 8.3 (Autumn 1999): 1-21.

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____________________________________________________________ 5. See, for example, Rae McGrath, Landmines: Legacy of Conflict (Oxford: Oxfam Publications, 1994), 20-24; U.S. Department of State, Hidden Killers: The Global Landmine Crisis (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of State, 1994), 9-11. 6. The thick barrier minefields laid by the British before their final position at El Alemain, effectively blunted Rommel’s last offensive action to capture the Suez Canal, his armour simply could not get through. The Axis powers first significant defeat on land followed and arguably the turned the tide of World War 2. 7. Vaso Cubrilovic, quoted in Stevan M. Weine, When History is a Nightmare: Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in BosniaHerzegovina (London: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 88. 8. See, as an instance, Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997). 9. Weine, 88. 10. David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (London: Vintage, 1995), 116. 11. Andrew Gregorovitch, World War II in Ukraine: Stalin’s Scorched Earth Policy, www.infoukes.com/history/ww2/page-06.html (July 2004). 12. Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 42. 13. Ibid., 98. 14. Human Rights Watch/Physicians for Human Rights, Landmines: A Deadly Legacy, (New York: Human Rights Watch/Physicians for Human Rights, 1993), 9. 15. That is to say, the deliberate use of mines against a civilian population. 16. Ibid., 31-32; see also Steve Goose, “Land Mines and the CCW Review Conference,” UNIDIR Newsletter 28 (1994): 13-16. 17. Human Rights Watch/Physicians for Human Rights, 9. 18. McGrath, 23. 19. Chris Smith, The Military Utility of Landmines …? (London: Centre for Defence Studies), 1996, 18. 20. Clausewitz, Karl von, On War, edited by A. Rapoport (London: Pelican, 1976), 202. 21. Associated Press, “Landmines Block Recovery,” (Tuzla, Bosnia: Associated Press, October 1997); S. Komarow, “Proposal: Pay Bosnians to Help Clear Landmines,” USA Today, 6 October 1997, 10A. 22. Robert G. Gard, “The Military Utility of Anti-Personnel Mines,” in Maxwell A. Cameron et al., To Walk Without Fear: The Global Movement to Ban Landmines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 144-145.

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________________________________________________________ 23. Asia Watch report quoted in Paul Davies, War of the Mines (London: Pluto Press, 1994), n.p. 24. Cambodian People’s Armed Forces. 25. Hazardous Areas Life-Support Organisation, a U.K. based NGO. 26. Graeme Goldsworthy, Landmines: The Eternal Sentinels, Masters Thesis (Bradford, U.K.: University of Bradford, 1996). 27. Ibid. 28. It is of note that area denial by air delivered CM technology is many times faster than the traditional hand or mechanical methods of sowing minefields. 29. The key difference between landmines and CMs, is that CMs are designed to explode on impact and are not therefore intended to be victim operated. 30. Eddie Banks, Anti-Personnel Landmines: Recognising and Disarming (London: Brassey’s, 1997), 123. That is to say, shooting at it with a rifle from a safe distance of at least 300 metres. 31. Where casualties are less that 1% of forces engaged.

Select Bibliography Banks, Eddie. Anti-Personnel Landmines: Recognising and Disarming. London: Brassey’s, 1997. Chomsky, Noam. The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo. London: Pluto Press, 1999. Clausewitz, Karl von. On War, edited by A. Rapoport. London: Pelican, 1976. Curley, Melissa, Frank Faulkner and Lloyd Pettiford. “Does the Security Debate Have to be Presented Polemically? Landmines and the Case for a Micro-Security Approach.” Journal of Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement, 8.3 (Autumn 1999): 1-21. Davies, Paul. War of the Mines: Cambodia, Landmines and the Impoverishment of a Nation. London: Pluto Press, 1994. Fromm, Erich. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997. Gard, Robert G. “The Military Utility of Anti-Personnel Mines.” In Maxwell A. Cameron et al., eds. To Walk Without Fear: The Global Movement to Ban Landmines, 136-158. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Goldsworthy, Graeme. Landmines: The Eternal Sentinels. Masters Thesis. Bradford, U.K.: University of Bradford, 1996. Goose, Steve. “Land Mines and the CCW Review Conference.” UNIDIR Newsletter 28 (1994): 13-16.

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____________________________________________________________ Gregorovitch, Andrew. World War II in Ukraine: Stalin’s Scorched Earth Policy. www.infoukes.com/history/ww2/page-06.html (July 2004). Human Rights Watch/Physicians for Human Rights. Landmines: A Deadly Legacy. New York: Human Rights Watch/Physicians for Human Rights, 1993. McGrath, Rae. Landmines: Legacy of Conflict. Oxford: Oxfam Publications, 1994. Pilger, John. Distant Voices. London: Pan Books 1992. Rieff, David. Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. London: Vintage, 1995. U.S. Department of State. Hidden Killers: The Global Landmine Crisis. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of State, 1994. Smith, Chris.The Military Utility of Landmines …? London: Centre for Defence Studies, 1996. Weine, Stevan M. When History is a Nightmare: Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina. London: Rutgers University Press, 1999.

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A Social Psychology of Defiance: From Discontent to Action Mark Burgess, Neil Ferguson, and Ian Hollywood Abstract Individual acts of defiance may prove futile in alleviating unacceptable conditions unless accompanied by meaningful social change. Perhaps, then, it should not be surprising that social protest has become an increasingly popular tool for registering individual and collective discontent with authority. There are a variety of potential modes of protest, ranging from isolated, peaceful, demonstrations to sustained participation in armed campaigns. Those who engage in the latter, armed, collective action, are typically perceived more negatively than those who engage in the former, peaceful, collective action. What accounts for people with similar beliefs and similar backgrounds making such different decisions regarding their specific mode of collective protest? We conducted a series of in-depth, semi-structured, interviews with individuals who had engaged in action with the specific intent of altering existing institutional structures in Northern Ireland. Interviewees represented all sections of the ethno-political landscape and some had previously been enlisted in paramilitary organisations. We describe the decision processes involved in initiating defiant activities, chart identity shifts during the transformation from individual discontent to collective action, and highlight the self-perceived similarities and differences between those who “cross the Rubicon” (in one participant’s words) to violent activity and those who maintained nonviolent participation. Key Words: defiance, social psychology, terrorism. 1.

Introduction Some of the most engaging social psychology research has addressed our propensity to comply with authority figures and with role expectations. For example, Stanley Milgram’s renowned laboratory studies of obedience to authority, in which an experimenter induced participants to deliver an electric shock to an incompetent peer, are among the most famous of our discipline.1 Similarly, the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which Philip Zimbardo assigned individuals to adopt the role of either guards or of inmates, is as recognisable as Milgram’s earlier work, and has bolstered the social psychological view that situational factors often prove to be stronger determinants of a person’s actions than will their disposition.2 Several decades after these groundbreaking studies, researchers have continued to emphasise that compliance is relatively easy to induce.

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____________________________________________________________ In contrast to the runaway success of the social psychology of compliance, the social psychology of defiance has only recently left the station. A small number of researchers have noted the numbers of participants who withdrew their consent to be involved in experiments, but none of those researchers’ studies had been designed to investigate issues relevant to defying authority. There is, however, a growing body of laboratory research addressing deviance. In these studies, the analytic focus is shifted somewhat to address the impact of another person’s defiance on members of a group. The effect of the deviance is gauged from naïve participants’ judgements of a researcher’s confederate who has been instructed to deviate from the accepted norms of the group to which that confederate had been assigned. Hence, these methodological strategies have not added to our understanding of the personal or situational forces that contribute to an individual’s defiance. This area of research requires greater development. By determining to challenge the social order, and by adopting alternative actions to those of the majority of compliant individuals, those who defy mark themselves as highly interesting and important people to study. Other social psychology researchers have interviewed, and surveyed, those who have engaged in public demonstrations and have enhanced our knowledge of how personal and social identity alters as a consequence of these demonstrators’ participation. In fact, social movement research has made important advances in explicating the dynamics of participation in structurally legitimate forms of protest, for example, peaceful marches and public demonstrations against unpopular legislation. Although these protests may become violent as a result of inter-crowd conflict, the majority of participants generally do not set out with violent intent. There is little research, however, that addresses the dynamics of participation in protest movements that seek to change structures through direct violent confrontation with the dominant powers. 2.

The Search for Evil Dispositions Those who do seek to change structures through direct violent confrontation are commonly labelled as “terrorists” by the media, a reporting technique that renders it easy to see such people as having an evil disposition – a view that allows recipients of the media message to dismiss a deeper analysis of potential factors that may precipitate membership in such a movement. Given that acts of terrorism can be deeply disturbing and destructive, it is understandable that we may be led to see these events as evil acts carried out by evil individuals. Traditionally, terrorism researchers interested in creating diagnostic profiles have proposed that terrorists suffer from one of three personality disorders, or suffer from a combination of each.3 The first of these,

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____________________________________________________________ antisocial personality disorder (APD), is often believed to be common among terrorist foot soldiers. APD is characterised by a disregard for life, by excessively aggressive behaviour, and by the need to dominate others and replace the status quo with the antisocial individual’s own power structures. Terrorists, and in particular their leaders, are also often perceived to be prone to narcissistic personality disorders, displaying a disregard and lack of empathy for others. These individuals also view others as simpleminded and can have an abundance of confidence and charisma that elicits admiration and adulation in their followers. Finally, terrorists are also commonly profiled as having paranoid personality disorder, showing a mistrust of others and a fear of being dominated by them.4 When these individuals feel vulnerable they strike out at those they believe are seeking to persecute them. Although these commonly held conceptions of terrorists have dominated the academic field and fuelled public perceptions for the last 40 years, the research upon which they are based is rather weak. Research that supports the dispositional account is based largely on archival reviews of secondary sources and open source materials (for example, newspaper articles, government documents). In contrast, research that suggests terrorists are normal rather than abnormal is more robust and based largely on primary sources (for example, face-to-face interviews). Silke illustrated the mismatch between methodological quality and the efficacy of researchers’ conclusions by comparing two psychological studies of Andreas Baader, an infamous terrorist in the Red Army Faction.5 In 1977, Cooper claimed that Baader was a sociopath who displayed psychopathological characteristics.6 However, only two years later, Rasch countered that Baader’s personality did not reveal an underlying psychopathology.7 How did these two psychologists come to such contrasting conclusions? Silke showed that Cooper had not interviewed Baader, and had, in fact, based his clinical diagnosis on a review of stories in newspapers and magazines. On the other hand, Rasch had met Baader and had psychologically assessed him during extensive interviews in Stannhiem prison. According to Silke, this specific example of research on Baader illustrates a wider phenomenon; namely, researchers who conclude that terrorists are abnormal tend to have the least amount of contact with terrorists. In contrast, researchers who view terrorists as operating within the bounds of psychological normality tend to have had direct contact with terrorists. The discrepancy in investigative methods reveals a need to conduct greater amounts of primary research. To emphasise this further, over 80% of terrorism research is based on secondary sources. Only 13% of research is based on extensive face-to-face interviews, and only 1% of the research employing face-to-face interviews is driven by theory.

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____________________________________________________________ If terrorists, or violent activists do not have evil dispositions, an important question emerges. Specifically, how do normal and psychologically healthy individuals become engaged in actions that cause such suffering? 3.

The Importance of Social Factors Both Zimbardo and Darley help to explain the continued persistence of viewing terrorists as evil and abnormal.8 Each of these social psychologists has indicated that viewing evildoers as pathological allows us to maintain a belief in the normality of the majority of individuals. They explained that adopting such beliefs has beneficial psychological consequences in reaffirming the status quo. In essence, people are able to consider their society to be just and ordered if extreme acts of violence are believed to be the result of unjust and disordered individuals. If, however, acts of violence are precipitated by unjust social circumstances, we have a more difficult problem. First, this suggests that just and normal individuals can be led to engage in unusually extreme behaviours. Second, this account also suggests that social circumstances need to be altered in order for just and normal conditions to be reestablished. If normal individuals can be led to rebel, should authorities worry about the number of people attempting to alter their circumstances? Not necessarily. Even when the absolute number of potential activists is large, relatively few members of underprivileged groups become involved in action against the powers they consider to be responsible for their poor circumstances. This phenomenon is just as true for peaceful forms of protest as it is for violent forms. What might account for this apparent apathy? Thoreau, considered by many to be the philosophical father of modern disobedience, noted that the majority of people within any disadvantaged group hope for their circumstances to change, but pursue no action designed to instigate change.9 Such passivity is born from a belief that one’s actions (the “remedy” according to Thoreau) will give rise to greater evil than is presently endemic to the unjust system. In fact, Thoreau believed that defiance is essential to remedy social circumstances and that the existence of social evil itself precipitates acts of defiance that necessarily instigate yet further evil. This runs counter to the common belief that those who are normal cannot also be evil, and that a deep psychopathology must be responsible for a particular individual’s atrocious acts. The social psychological perspective, on the other hand, is consistent with Thoreau’s thinking in that it posits that a person’s immediate social circumstances will have a major impact on that individual’s normative behaviours. More recently, Mos has also

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____________________________________________________________ underscored the importance of seeing evil acts as being inextricably tied to the conflict between the individual and the existing political structures.10 To that end, we may justifiably expect people to consider evil, and even the impetus for their own violent acts, as originating externally. That is to say, the people who defy authority do not have an evil disposition, but feel compelled to take a stand against unjust circumstances. It would be inaccurate to suggest that social psychologists focus their attention solely on social factors in their pursuit of understanding troubling social phenomena. Indeed, they have shown a keen interest in determining whether an individual’s disposition could conceivably influence a participant’s non-compliance in obedience studies. However, research has revealed minimal, if any, differences between compliant and defiant participants. Current social psychological perspectives caution that there is difficulty in understanding terrorism and militant protest from an intra-individual perspective. This makes sense if we recognise that a rebellion requires a wide range of actors. It would be unreasonable to believe that a group of entirely disparate individuals would have similar pathologies and, even more remarkably, come together to act in unison at the same time for the same goal. This fact has contributed to many researchers shifting their focus from individual actors to group level processes. In his landmark text The Rebel, Camus preceded current psychological analyses when he claimed that individuals in revolt are able to initiate and persevere with potentially dangerous and self-defeating behaviours because they feel their predicament is not merely specific to them.11 Rather, the rebel believes the predicament is an unjust situation that affects others similarly and, therefore, the rebel believes that their actions must also resonate with those others. The importance of what may be termed a shared or “collective identity” underpins some of the strongest contemporary social psychological theories that address an individual’s motives to participate in social movements. For example, laboratory research has suggested that an individual’s strength of collective identity may be an important factor in distinguishing between those who join a group of protestors and those who do not. Volunteers in experiments were more likely to be more committed to the group to which they had been assigned if they had been induced to identify strongly with their in-group as compared to fellow participants who had been induced to identify with their in-group to a much lesser extent.12 While this was also true of farmers demonstrating against outside intervention, other recent research into real protests (involving the German Gay Movement), found no relationship between the strength of a person’s initial identity with their ingroup (gay men) and the likelihood that an individual would participate in the organisation responsible for furthering gay rights.13 However, over

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____________________________________________________________ time, greater collective identity was also apparent among this group of activists. 4.

Defiance in Northern Ireland: A Case Study The bias towards methods that employ archival reviews of secondary documentation has done little to counter the commonly held view that all violent activists are terrorists. Northern Ireland offers researchers a real-world laboratory to study peaceful and violent protest. The population strongly identifies with their Catholic or Protestant communities, and these communities have been engaged in both peaceful protest and ethno-political violence since the late 1960s. We have interviewed forty politicians, members of security forces, victims of violence, community workers, church leaders, members of paramilitary groups, and civil rights demonstrators in Northern Ireland. Darley recently pointed out that such narrative methods draw attention to psychological processes that previously have not been considered in experimental accounts of phenomena such as harming another individual.14 Of special relevance to this study, our sample comprised members of Civil Rights organisations, who have campaigned for equal rights for the Catholic minority (n=5); individual Peace Activists (n = 3); members or ex-members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), an armed Republican paramilitary group who have violently combated the British State and the Protestant majority (n=4); and members or ex-members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), an armed Loyalist paramilitary group who have used violence against the Catholic minority (n=4). All participants lived in either Belfast or Derry, strongly identified with their respective community, and had engaged in some form of resistance. Klandermans indicated that the development of an activist orientation progresses as a result of a variety of complex socialisation experiences.15 Indeed, many in our sample pointed to consistent familial or community experiences that increased their awareness of the importance of becoming an active participant in a resistance movement. For example, for one young man, the rapid rise of public meetings attended by many of his peers and addressed by determined, charismatic, leaders formed a pivotal point in his determination to “stand up and be counted”: The idols among our community shot up because they stood for something that the working class people couldn’t verbalise. As soon as your parents, and the priest at the altar, and your teacher are saying “These men are good men. They are fighting a just thing here,” it filters down quickly that these people are important

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____________________________________________________________ and whatever they say must be right. So, all of a sudden, you are bordering on supporting something that is against the government.16 For this particular individual, standing up and being counted meant walking peacefully shoulder to shoulder with other members of his community as they demonstrated against the impositions of external forces. Despite possessing demographic characteristics commonly assumed to be associated with paramilitary activity – being a young male, identifying strongly with his community, and having the opportunity to join an organised resistance movement – he did not engage in a sustained movement of violence.17 So, what might account for those individuals who take a very different type of stand, namely, picking up a gun and reacting violently against those same external forces? A. Critical Incidents Influence Initiation of Activism In real life, individuals often pause to consider their options before determining a course of action. In contrast, Milgram’s participants did not have the opportunity to pause to reflect upon the consequences of their actions. They were induced to increase the voltage of an electric shock in small increments and were kept occupied throughout their participation specifically to ensure that they had little opportunity to reflect upon whether they should continue harming their fellow research participant. Laboratory participants also differ from people in real situations of conflict in that they can be confident that their research involvement has a definite (and relatively proximate) end point. Moreover, they also are aware that they are participants in research, regardless of how well the researchers create an engaging experimental realism. Our interviewees did not have these comforting assurances. Their involvement, should they have chosen to engage in acts of resistance, had no definite end point. Defiant activity could have stretched into an individual’s old age, or could have resulted in the premature termination of their life. Any defiant actions they chose to adopt would not be slotted into an isolated period, but would form an integral, and sometimes all-consuming, part of their everyday life. So what might precipitate the decision to embark on a campaign of resistance? When asked to reflect upon their decisions to contribute to an armed conflict, our interviewees could commonly point to a single critical incident as providing the fuel for the transition from peaceful resistance to violent resistance. In the words of a former Loyalist paramilitary: It [membership in paramilitary groups] was an explosion waiting to happen and it happened when I was 14, and

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____________________________________________________________ by the time I was 19 I had made a conscious decision to join the UVF. Not before that.18 This interviewee had heard that a young man killed by one of twenty-two bomb explosions on “Bloody Friday” in July 1972 shared the same name and age as himself. The effect this incident had on him was dramatic: And I thought, “That’s my fence sitting days over,” and I joined the UVF. And there’s so many stories like that where you talk to Republicans and Loyalists and you find out there was a moment. There was a moment when they crossed the Rubicon.19 Though an unplanned and unpredictable occurrence, a critical incident, such as the Bloody Friday bombings, increases a person’s chances of engaging in collective disobedience by impacting an individual in two distinct ways. First, an individual’s sense of collective identity is heightened as ethnocentrism increases as a reaction to the increased threat facing his or her community. Second, the critical incident precipitates a period of self-reflection that helps the potential rebel to determine a boundary demarking acceptable and unacceptable expectations, treatment, and/or conditions. In addition to determining a limit to the way in which they are treated, the individual determines to act in a manner that asserts their discontent. Once enacted, the rebel’s actions do more than articulate their limit of acceptable treatment. By resisting, the rebel also asserts that his rights and agency are to be preserved, and the infringement of those rights should cease. In support of the above participant’s claim that such critical “moments” underlie a variety of people’s decisions to turn to violence right across the ethno-political spectrum, a paramilitary member of an opposing group (IRA) pinpointed the specific instance when he made the decision to abandon peaceful methods and instead become committed to an armed conflict. Upon hearing of the shooting of a teenage boy (by the British Army), he ran to see if he could help. Instead, he cradled the boy while the teenager took his last breaths. Our interviewee withdrew to the isolation of an abandoned building and reflected upon his options: So, quite honestly, within, within maybe an hour I’d been sat there on my own on me hunkers, and I said, “Right, that’s it. Ahh, the gloves are off as far as I’m concerned.” So, I went in and I seen other people and to cut a very, very, long story short, I got stuck into the Brits every time I got a chance.20

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____________________________________________________________ Even accounting for the strength of these events, it would be surprising if a single critical incident were enough to precipitate membership in a paramilitary organisation. A full understanding of participation in collective protest should involve an analysis of the complete social context in which that protest takes place. In keeping with previous findings regarding demographics, participants in our study who were involved in the peaceful civil rights protests explained that deciding to join an armed campaign would also depend upon an individual’s own personal history (our interviewees mentioned an interaction of such factors as, age, career aspirations, and access to education), and they also highlighted the importance of the socio-political history of the community. Drawing on Bloody Sunday, the day in January 1972 when British paratroopers killed thirteen men in Derry (an additional man died later as a result of his injuries) as an infamous example of a critical incident in the social history of a community, a central organiser of the civil rights marches explained: Bloody Sunday was a very important issue, because young fellas joined the IRA. If I had been seventeen, I would have joined the IRA because young fellas that age just want to get a crack back.21 Getting a “crack back,” or seeking revenge for wrongs committed against a community, is commonly associated with joining paramilitary groups. For this individual though, his age, family, and socioeconomic circumstances had influenced his decision of how to respond to unarmed members of his community being shot and killed, and he decided that, for him, peaceful resistance was still the most effective type of defiance against a societal structure he also perceived as unstable and illegitimate. It may be tempting to assume that those who have experienced the loss of a loved one, or a member of their own family, are especially likely to respond to opposing factions in a violent manner. However, our respondents suggested that family bereavement does not operate in quite such a simple, deterministic, manner. Talking of his reactions to the loss of his son, killed in an IRA bomb blast, one man stated: I’m a victim who has never sought to create more victims. They [paramilitaries] are a mixed bag like the rest of society, and there’s nothing exceptional about them. Nevertheless, they’ve crossed that line that I would never dream of crossing, a line where I could calmly approach you with a gun and shoot you in the

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____________________________________________________________ head, or maim you and walk away. I mean, that to me, is horrifying.22 It is difficult to imagine a more “critical” incident than losing one’s son in such a manner. This person indicates that violence would involve crossing a line, but his response was not to endorse violent activities or, in Thoreau’s terms, merely to hope for change and actually do nothing. His response was to initiate peaceful enterprises intended to reduce the “social evil” that leads to violent interchanges. In keeping with Darby’s work, his interpretation of those responsible for his son’s death also reveals his knowledge of paramilitaries not sharing the same personality characteristics.23 In general, and in our sample, these people are similar to the “normal” population from which they are drawn. B. Sustaining Violent and Peaceful Activism People clearly have different views of what forms of protest are likely to be successful and will also have personal views of those who adopt alternative tactics to their own. Those at the sharp end of defiant activities recognise that their attempts to change social structures may benefit those who did not become activists.24 How do those individuals who stick their head above the parapet view their fellow in-group members who have chosen not to engage in similar activities? It is possible that such “inactive” individuals would be seen as “free-loaders” who are undeserving of the benefits achieved through other people’s efforts. However, our sample did not view their less active counterparts in this fashion. A member of a paramilitary movement explained: Without those people, we couldn’t have existed, and there was a large amount of them. They couldn’t go over the edge in as much as lift a gun and shoot it at a fellow human being…[but] without them, as Mao Tse Tung said, “Without the water, the fish will die.” We had the support of the people.25 This conception of support, expressed also by other paramilitary and peaceful civil rights activists, is in keeping with the tenets of resource mobilisation theory, which indicate that initiating, and sustaining, collective movements requires activities such as financial support, organisational contributions, and ideological reinforcement that may come from members not considered pivotally involved in the defiant actions.26 In Northern Ireland, as in other conflict zones, the paramilitaries are tolerated and often supported by the wider community that share their beliefs and background.27 A brother of a man killed by the British Army

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____________________________________________________________ expressed his desire to help those who were engaged in defiant activities, but added that he personally would not become involved in violence: You would have done a wee bit in your own way without putting yourself in danger, and you felt that you had to help through that whole period of time. I would not carry a gun. I’ve never had a gun in my hand in my life. I’ve experienced the pain of losing someone and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else…I wouldn’t set up anybody to be shot or take part in bombing raids, no way.28 There is also a possibility that those who had not engaged in violent activities would view all members of paramilitary groups with disdain. Research informs us that members of an in-group may view those who adopt deviant methods as “black sheep,” a psychological distancing technique that allows the majority of the in-group to maintain a sense of individual and collective pride.29 Coupled with the fact that peaceful methods of resistance have different philosophical roots than those underpinning the necessity of force, we might expect those who did not join paramilitary groups to denigrate those who took up arms. However, often this was not the case. Those who had continued their resistance in a peaceful manner expressed an appreciation of the motives, intentions, and commitment of their paramilitary counterparts, even if they disagreed with the methods used to achieve their aims. One of our participants reflected that resisting the temptation for paramilitary activity and continuing on a path of peaceful demonstration was likely the more effective route to take as an expression of his discontent. He believed that the government could not deal with his commitment to defy them in the same way as they had done in criminalising and incarcerating paramilitaries. The relative strength of a person’s Catholic/Republican or Protestant/Loyalist identity did not predict participation in an organised peaceful or violent movement. Generally, though, participating in organised collective protest had an important concomitant effect on a person’s collective identity as the experience of acting on behalf of an aggrieved group elevates one’s sense of collective ties and also increases one’s sense of political efficacy in that the individual feels capable of challenging previously accepted authority dictates.30 This was the case for our interviewees, whether they were engaged in violent or peaceful protests. A civil rights campaigner indicated that hindsight had shown him that the participation had reinforced in him a decision “to coldly and determinedly go on,”31 while a member of a Republican paramilitary group

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____________________________________________________________ indicated her resolution to her cause regardless of the personal circumstances: I felt, as many others at that particular time, at least if you were up and being active and trying to do something, you were doing just that, trying to do something. I was not prepared any longer to sit back in my chair, like my parents had to do, and their parents. Yes, I was prepared to stand up and say, “Ok, you can knock me down, but I’m not going to go away.” I’m going to be there and I’m going to try and do my best to achieve what I set out to achieve.32 This is not to suggest that an individual’s participation in any form of activism was not subject to being challenged. One of our interviewees acted outside of any organisational structures. Appalled at the level of violence and the volume of deaths on all sides, he decided to act alone. Among wider peace activities, he also determined that whoever was to blame for a particular death should be recognised as being responsible for taking that person’s life, regardless of how painful it may be for a community to acknowledge that their own side was culpable for the death of another human being. On one occasion, he was holding a shot soldier’s hand as the soldier lay dying. As he did so, his neighbours spat at, and pushed, both him and the soldier. Experiencing the enmity of his community members seriously made him pause to consider the usefulness of his activism. However, the subsequent critical incident ensured the course of his future activity. Arriving home after the bitter experience: I thought, “I’ve got to get out of here, I’m in the wrong place.” And I felt so much hurt. It was the first time that I actually cried. I said, “Is it me?” Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe it’s me that’s got it all wrong here. And so I cried. I was sitting and thinking whether to move on and go away, and this knock came at the back door and I thought, “Is this going to be a banging match?” It was the next-door neighbour who had come to apologise for what he had done when I was sitting on the ground. That changed my life.33 With renewed resolve, our interviewee instigated small community groups where anybody could work together without conflict. Engaging in peace building activities in highly segregated areas against a backdrop of sustained inter-communal violence can be a dangerous undertaking. Peace

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____________________________________________________________ activists working to build positive community relations in Northern Ireland face hostility and suspicion from within their own community and distrust or even hatred from the “other” community.34 Activists in crosscommunity organisations have been assassinated because of their peace building endeavours, so by taking his stance the interviewee was at significant personal risk. When our respondent started his personal quest he was certain that he looked “like a madman.” Now, looking back over the last thirty years, he sees the fruits of his labours: It doesn’t matter if I say it to anybody else because nobody sees it this way, but to me, I brought two sides together. I’m not sure what they are or who they are, but they’re people and I’ve brought them together. That’s the personal satisfaction that I’ve got, you know, I’ve brought two sides together.35 Personal satisfaction at one’s achievements is not synonymous with becoming an activist primarily for personal reasons. None of our sample indicated personal benefits as a motive for their participation in violent organisations or in peaceful demonstrations. Although they would have benefited from any change, their explanations for their activities always stressed collective identity in that they were phrased in terms of what “we” as a group would gain. Previous research has illustrated that the desire for fraternalistic over egoistic goals is a primary motivation behind the initiation of militant social action.36 On the other hand, these same people were well aware of the personal costs associated with their actions, yet they remained determined to proceed even if that meant their job being threatened (in the case of peaceful demonstrators) or their life being threatened (in the case of paramilitary combatants). Camus described such resolve as stemming from the act of defiance itself. The person’s experience of resistance strengthens the sense that the individual is an independent agent capable of taking an active, questioning stance, even in extreme situations. This attitude was nicely illustrated by one of our participants who said his understanding of death had changed significantly as a result of his prolonged activity within one of the paramilitary groups: Military power gives you a certain amount of awareness of where you are in your life…if you take your life in your hands, if you go out on an operation to attack an army patrol. Well, an army patrol’s at least as well armed, if not better armed, than you are. So, in the law of averages, on a 50-50 basis, you may not be coming back from it, you know? So, you realise your life is

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____________________________________________________________ forfeit. If you survive that day, you mightn’t survive the next day or the day after that. So you have a realisation of life and death more than most people, because you actually live it.37 As well as elevating an individual’s sense of collective efficacy, the defiant act marks a shift in personal identity in that the individual’s sense of self becomes synonymous with their acts of resistance. This sense of self is developed to such an extent that defending it becomes of paramount importance, even when their actions may threaten their existence. 5.

Concluding Overview Participants’ accounts of becoming engaged in either violent or non-violent resistance illustrate the power of situational factors, rather than the force of psychopathology. Drawing from decades of social psychology research, we know that social situations can be created that will induce people to act with increasing violence. That research, though, focuses on individuals who are assigned to be in a particular social organisation (for example, Milgram’s participants were assigned to undertake the tasks of an increasingly punitive “teacher”). Our interviews revealed an important aspect that is often overlooked. Specifically, our interviewees were not participants in paramilitary groups or civil rights groups prior to taking a decision to becoming involved (that is, they were not assigned a role, they sought a role). In the real world, we can see that hierarchically dominant researchers do not randomly assign individuals to engage in violent paramilitary activity, to engage in peaceful civil rights protest, or to instigate change on their own. Our interviews indicated that social circumstances could be such that they dramatically become a critical moment leading an individual to engage in a period of purposeful reflection. That reflection takes into account a person’s own future activity and also involves considering potential negative consequences (such as imprisonment, ostracism, family reprisals, and death). The existence of a critical moment does not diminish the importance of social factors, but emphasises that a confluence of social forces can force an individual to consider their options for future behaviour. People who are not enrolled in State military roles are not “adapted” gradually, and do not tend to join paramilitary organisations as a career choice. In that sense, our interviewees’ notion of “crossing the Rubicon” and “going over the edge” is accurate. A single decision leads to a boundary being crossed. Even if potential paramilitaries were actively recruited by existing members, critical incidents would likely aid the success of those recruitment attempts.

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____________________________________________________________ Another important distinguishing feature of our interviewees (as compared with those enrolled in laboratory research) is that they assumed and expressed responsibility for their actions and did not attribute their behaviour to higher authorities within their group or organisation. It is true that they attribute the initiation of their actions to their inhumane treatment by the “other” group, but once their new course of action is set in motion they take responsibility for their actions themselves, and developed a sense of personal and political efficacy that they did not previously have. Some of our interviewees made choices that contravened their normal moral framework. We are left with the distinct sense that normal (that is, not pathological) people acted as causal agents in that they knowingly determining to cross a Rubicon that would involve an entirely different set of behaviours than were previously enacted. External circumstances may have precipitated a period of reflection that resulted in the decision being made, but it was a mindful decision and not a mindless response to social conditions. A. Normal People And The Continuation of Abnormal Conditions For some, the Bloody Sunday shootings provided the impetus for joining a Republican paramilitary group. For others, the Bloody Friday bombings provided the impetus for joining an opposing, Loyalist, paramilitary group. Each paramilitary group, and the Army, effectively, ensures recruitment levels remain high for armed organisations by providing the opposition with “critical incidents” that will collide with people’s personal and social histories in such a manner that they too will be motivated to engage in armed combat, fuelling the conflict and creating a destructive spiral. Many of our interviewees drew comparisons between the conflict they had experienced in Northern Ireland and the conflict that was brewing between coalition forces and combatants in the Middle East. One man, with personal experience of violent paramilitary conflict, said: The more you put down a so-called terrorist, the more he gathers steam. Look at the United States and Bin Laden and then look at Bloody Sunday. You’d think they [governments] would be starting to realise that somebody would be better to talk to these people. I don’t think there’s one example you can point to that worked [in terms of reacting to terrorists through military means]. The might of the British Empire [unsuccessfully] tackled a couple hundred here in Northern Ireland, a wee minority group. The examples

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____________________________________________________________ are here before them. If you were a businessman, would you continue with a strategy that doesn’t work?38 To the extent that each group considers actions aimed at their own members to precipitate violence, and in keeping with Thoreau’s and Mos’s contention, the source of evil truly appears to those who join paramilitary groups as an external, socially occurring, entity as opposed to “evil” being a dispositional quality that resides within the individual.39 This is interesting and important information for those concerned with contemporary conflicts: if the conditions are ripe for enhancing an individual’s collective identity, circumstances that focus an individual on external conflict can politicise that collective identity in a manner that can become manifest as armed defiance. In addition, even those who do not take up arms often expressed an appreciation for the motives and actions for those who did. Effectively, these circumstances suggest that a broad base exists for both peaceful and violent protest. Taken as a whole, our findings suggest that those interested in conflict resolution should carefully assess the risks of State armed intervention. Once external intervention precipitates violent responses from the disadvantaged community, peaceful demonstrators can no long safely take to the streets, and individual peace activists become endangered from a variety of sources. Yet, these individuals may still identify with the very groups that make their peaceful demonstrations impossible. Contemporary policy makers would do well to learn from, rather than repeat, the harsh lessons of history.

Notes 1. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Routledge, 1974). 2. Craig Haney et al, “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973): 6997. 3. Andrew Silke, “Cheshire-Cat Logic: The Recurring Theme of Terrorist Abnormality in Psychological Research,” Psychology, Crime and Law 4 (1998): 51-69. 4. See Raymond R Corrado, “A Critique of the Mental Disorder Perspective of Political Terrorism,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 4 (1981): 293-309 and Raymond R Pearlstein, The Mind of the Political Terrorist. (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1991). 5. Andrew Silke, “The Devil You Know: Continuing Problems with Research on Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 13 (2001): 1-14.

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____________________________________________________________ 6. H. H. A. Cooper, “What is a Terrorist: A Psychological Perspective,” Legal Medical Quarterly 1 (1977): 16-32. 7. Wilfred Rasch, “Psychological Dimensions of Political Terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 2 (1979): 79-85. 8. Philip G. Zimbardo, “A Situationist Perspective on the Psychology of Evil: Understanding How Good People Are Transformed Into Perpetrators,” in The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, ed. Arthur G. Miller (New York: Guilford Press, 2004), 21-50. John M. Darley, “Social Organization for the Production of Evil,” Psychological Inquiry 3 (1992): 199-218. 9. Henry D. Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1993), 1-18. 10. Leenerdt Mos, “On Evil: Human Nature and Political Ideology,” in Theoretical Psychology: Critical Contributions, eds. Nick Stephenson et al., (Ontario: Captus Press, 2003), 90-99. 11. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Random House, 1956), 13-26. 12. Naomi Ellemers et al, “Sticking Together or Falling Apart: Ingroup Identification as a Psychological Determinant of Group Commitment Versus Individual Mobility,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72 (1997): 617-626. 13. Stefan Sturmer and Bernd Simon, “The Role of Collective Identification in Social Movement Participation: A Panel Study in the Context of the German Gay Movement,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30 (2004): 263-277. 14. John M. Darley, “Methods for the Study of Evil-Doing Actions,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 3 (1999): 269-275. 15. Bert Klandermans, The Social Psychology of Protest (Oxford: Blackwells, 1997). 16. We report excerpts from interviews that were conducted between November, 2002, and September, 2003. Individuals will be identified only by capital letters in order to ensure anonymity. This first excerpt is from Participant A, November, 2002. 17. Andrew Silke, “Becoming a Terrorist,” In Terrorists, Victims and Society: Psychological Perspectives on Terrorism and its Consequences, ed. Andrew Silke (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2003). 18. Interview excerpt, Participant B, March 2003. 19. Ibid. 20. Interview excerpt, Participant C, November 2002. 21. Interview excerpt, Participant D, July 2003. 22. Interview excerpt, Participant E, February 2003.

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____________________________________________________________ 23. John Darby, Scorpions in a Bottle: Conflicting Cultures in Northern Ireland (London: Minority Rights, 1997). 24. Bert Klandermans, “Mobilization and Participation: Social Psychological Expansions of Resource Mobilization Theory,” American Sociological Review 49 (1984): 583-600. 25. Interview excerpt, Participant C, November, 2003. 26. Craig Jenkins, “Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983): 527-553. 27. Silke, 2003, 32. 28. Interview excerpt, Participant F, July 2003. 29. Scott Eidelman and Monica Biernat, “Derogating Black Sheep: Individual or Group Protection?” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 39 (2003): 602-609. 30. Herbert Kelman and Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 31. Interview excerpt, Participant D, July 2003. 32. Interview excerpt, Participant G, July 2003. 33. Interview excerpt, Participant H, July 2003. 34. Derick Wilson, Innovation in Reconciliation, (London: Charitable Trust Administrators Group, 1986). 35. Interview excerpt, Participant H, July, 2003. 36. Iain Walker and Leon Mann, “Unemployment, Relative Deprivation and Social Protest,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 13 (1987): 275-283. 37. Interview excerpt, Participant I, March 2003. 38. Interview excerpt, Participant J, November 2002. 39. Thoreau, 1 and Mos, 90.

Select Bibliography Camus, Albert. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. New York: Random House, 1956. Corrado M. Raymond. “A Critique of the Mental Disorder Perspective of Political Terrorism.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 4 (1981): 293-309. Cooper, H. H. C. A. “What is a Terrorist: A Psychological Perspective.” Legal Medical Quarterly 1 (1977): 16-32. Darby, John. Scorpions in a Bottle: Conflicting Cultures in Northern Ireland. London: Minority Rights, 1997. Darley, M. John. “Social Organization for the Production of Evil.” Psychological Inquiry 3 (1992): 199-218. ——. “Methods for the Study of Evil-Doing Actions.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 3 (1999): 269-275.

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____________________________________________________________ Eidelman, Scott and Monica Biernat, “Derogating Black Sheep: Individual or Group Protection?” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 39 (2003): 602-609. Ellemers Naomi, Russell Spears and Bertjan Doosje. “Sticking Together or Falling Apart: Ingroup Identification as a Psychological Determinant of Group Commitment Versus Individual Mobility.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72 (1997): 617626. Haney Craig, Curtis Banks and Philip Zimbardo. “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison.” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973): 69-97. Jenkins, Craig. “Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements.” Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983): 527-553. Kelman, Herbert and Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Klandermans, Bert. “Mobilization and Participation: Social Psychological Expansions of Resource Mobilization Theory.” American Sociological Review 49 (1984): 583-600. ——. The Social Psychology of Protest. Oxford: Blackwells, 1997. Milgram Stanley. Obedience to Authority. New York: Routledge, 1974. Mos, Leenerdt. “On Evil: Human Nature and Political Ideology.” In Theoretical Psychology: Critical Contributions, edited by Nick Stephenson et al., 90-99. Ontario: Captus Press, 2003. Pearlstein P. Raymond. The Mind of the Political Terrorist. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1991. Rasch, Wilfred. “Psychological Dimensions of Political Terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 2 (1979): 79-85 Silke Andrew. “Cheshire-Cat Logic: The Recurring Theme of Terrorist Abnormality in Psychological Research.” Psychology, Crime and Law 4 (1998): 51-69. ——. “The Devil You Know: Continuing Problems with Research on Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 13 (2001): 1-14. ——.“Becoming a Terrorist,” In Terrorists, Victims and Society: Psychological Perspectives on Terrorism and its Consequences, edited by Andrew Silke, 25-39. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. Sturmer, Stefan and Bernd Simon, “The Role of Collective Identification in Social Movement Participation: A Panel Study in the Context

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____________________________________________________________ of the German Gay Movement.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30 (2004): 263-277. Thoreau, D. Henry. Civil Disobedience and Other Essays. New York: Dover, 1993. Walker, Iain and Leon Mann. “Unemployment, Relative Deprivation and Social Protest.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 13 (1987): 275-283. Wilson, Derick. Innovation in Reconciliation. London: Charitable Trust Administrators Group, 1986. Zimbardo G. Philip. “A Situationist Perspective on the Psychology of Evil: Understanding How Good People Are Transformed Into Perpetrators.” In The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, edited by Arthur G. Miller, 21-50. New York: Guilford Press, 2004.

Dichotomous Thinking and Culture of Destruction: Revisiting Youth Activism in China during the May Fourth Period Haijing Dai Abstract The importance of student activism in China during the May Fourth period (1915-1919) cannot be stressed too much in Chinese history, as it marked a turning point for the country and established the social norms and the logic of thinking for a Socialist China. The New Culture and the May Fourth Movements are often officially viewed as patriotic campaigns, which succeeded in promoting ideas of science and democracy. Yet, the May Fourth dream of a strong and democratic country was never fulfilled in the hegemonic politics of modern China. This study revisits the so-called success of the movements and their role as the prelude to the Communist China, and examines whether seeds of evilness were already sowed in the good will of students in the May Fourth period. Students’ efforts to rescue China during the May Fourth period failed to avoid the simplicity and arbitrariness of binary thinking and the culture of destruction. Their pursuit of democracy eventually evolved into the cultural and political hegemony of Communism in China. Lessons should be learnt from this transformation of good will into evil outcome. Key Words: May Fourth period, youth activism, dichotomous thinking, culture of destruction, democracy, hegemony. 1.

Youth in China, 1915-1919 As one of the oldest nations in the world, China cherished the notion that she is the realm closest to the beneficent influence radiating from Heaven for thousands of years. For the rulers of the Empire and the Chinese literati, China’s geographical centrality and its corollary, China’s moral and cultural superiority over the rest of the world, were self-evident. This beautiful ancient dream was completely smashed when the Western “barbarians,” who did not live under a Confucian monarchy, invaded and colonised the land of China in the mid-nineteenth century. Though the revolution in 1911 ended Chinese emperorship and set up a democratic country, it did not change the fate of the nation as the slave to European masters and the victim of the world market. Where is the future of China? It became the number-one question of the time and young students, particularly returning students from overseas, quickly responded with the New Culture Movement and the later May Fourth Movement. Students believed that the failures of modern China could be attributed to the rotten and evil traditional moralities and cultures,

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____________________________________________________________ especially Confucianism. Being convinced that the old culture must first be abandoned, in order to rescue the nation, youth started the New Culture Movement, which called into question the very basis of Chinese society. The young students who wished to be rid once and for all of the evils they denounced hurled themselves against the Confucian citadel, crying “Overthrow Confucius and Sons” (Da dao kong jia dian), the main slogan of the campaign. Parts of the New Culture Movement could be viewed as “a cultural renewal and revolution preceding the May Fourth Demonstration” and “Chinese Renaissance of intellectual reawakening.”1 But more importantly, “the focus on culture that characterised the New Culture Movement at its height was arrived at through and fundamentally informed by a serious engagement with politics.” Promoting the ideas of democracy and science, students wished to rebuild the political systems of China and change her into a new Western-like country. They succeeded in overturning the nation’s traditional values and cultures, as well as the existing Oriental-style political and philosophical structures in the New Culture Movement. No matter how attractive their dream of Westernization was, the youth of the May Fourth period were doomed to live in the shadow of the colonialist control of the European countries, and to struggle against the imperialism of their Western “teachers.” Following the Paris Peace Conference after WWI, students were stunned and outraged to discover that the victors gave Japan control of Shangdong province rather than returning it to China. On the morning of May 4, 1919, students in Beijing began a telegram campaign to appeal to institutions and organisations to protest the decision of the Paris Peace Conference granting Japanese control over the Chinese regions. Thousands of college students in Beijing took part in the demonstration, echoed by their peers in Shanghai and Nanjing, even in larger numbers. The government ordered out the troops and viciously suppressed the protest in Beijing, beating and arresting hundreds of students. Prompted by the student strike and thoroughly outraged, the workers and merchants of Shanghai instituted their own strikes, forcing the Chinese government to a. free the arrested and imprisoned students; b. reject the pro-Japanese provisions outlined in the Treaty of Versailles; and c. fire the three main government officials who supported the dominance of Japan in China.2 Frightened by the union of students, workers and business people, the government finally accepted all their three requests and the May Fourth Movement reached its peak in Shanghai. The victories of youth in the patriotic movements marked a brand new era in Chinese history, as they united the general urban public in an effort to create a new China with a modern and reinvigorated Chinese

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___________________________________________________________ culture, and paved the paths for the later spread of Marxism and Communism. For modern historians in China, the usual comments on youth participation during the May Fourth period are – “the antiimperialism and anti-Feudalism movements established the new progressive social justice for the country, with the themes of democracy and science.” However, in the 70 years following the May Fourth period, millions of Chinese were killed in the eight-year anti-Japanese war and the five-year civil war; huge numbers of innocent citizens and intellectuals were tortured, imprisoned, and killed in anti-capitalism movements, antirightness campaigns, and the Cultural Revolution, in the Communist China; finally in the People’s Movement in 1989, citizens and college students died in unknown numbers for their once-again struggle for democracy. During an interview, a government official who negotiated with students in the People’s Movement and who was a demonstrator in the May Fourth Movement made the striking remarks that “I went to talk to the students in Tiananmen Square and discovered that what they wanted was exactly the same as what we asked for in 1919. I then started to wonder if our dreams in the May Fourth time had ever been fulfilled in China.”3 History itself has brought us to reflect whether seeds of tragedies were already sown in the student activism of the May Fourth period, the starting point of Chinese modernity. The “anti-” style of modern China has first drawn the attention of researchers to the binaries in the May Fourth logic. 2. Dichotomous Thinking A. East vs. West Faced with the collapse of the old Eastern empire, leaders of the student movements, who usually had the background of studying abroad, quickly turned to the Western world for help. In the official history of China, the New Culture Movement started in September 1915, when Chen Duxiu, shortly after his return from Japan, founded the journal New Youth (Xin Qing Nian) in Shanghai. Chen was the perfect type of Westernized radical, and he enthusiastically promoted his ideas of learning technologies and ideas from European countries in the journal. Chen firmly believed that the old Chinese cultures had suppressed the creativity of human beings, especially that of young people. He combined an attack on tradition with an exaltation of youth and viewed the liberation of youth as a prerequisite to social and political change on a larger scale.4 In the opening of the lead article in the journal’s first issue, entitled, not surprisingly, “A Call to Youth,” he wrote: When Chinese want to praise someone, they say, “even though he is young, he acts like a man of mature years.”

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____________________________________________________________ What do Englishmen and Americans say when they want to give one another moral support? “Stay young in heart, no matter what your age.” This is one characteristic difference between Western and Oriental ways of thought.5 Then, Chen waxed lyrical: Youth is like the dawning of spring, the sunrise, new grass and fruit trees in blossom, a newly sharpened blade. It is the most precious time of life. The function of youth in society is the same as that of new cells in the human body: in the metabolic process, the old and rotten is constantly replaced by the new and vital.6 He went on to encourage youth to be “independent, not submissive; progressive, not conservative; outspoken, not reserved; cosmopolitan, not parochial; practical, not formalist; and scientific thinking, not imaginative,” and emphasised the need of youthful self-consciousness and struggle for the birth of a “young and powerful nation.” This article asserted the youthful orientation of the New Culture Movement and forecasted the iconoclastic feature of all the following events. With their mighty social passions, young people in China, for the first time in history, decided to turn upside down the Oriental Confucian morality, which preached respect for the aged and for tradition; submission to codes and rituals; and restraint and obedience. They sought to impose young men’s values on their society, though this new value system unavoidably came together with total Westernisation. At first, Chen put out New Youth by himself, but soon many of the most brilliant avant-garde young intellectuals at the time (for example, Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Liu Bannong, and Shen Yinmo) joined its editorial committee. Published at a time when strict laws severely curtailed freedom of the press, New Youth often was forced to suspend publication – sometimes because of the authorities, sometimes because of lack of funds, but many college students took its every editorial pronouncement as an article of faith. Signs of a pro-Western frenzy were everywhere to be seen among youth. The unmitigated scorn of students for their own culture often led to an unthinking enthusiasm for all aspects of Western civilisation. These feelings of national inferiority and idolatry for a foreign culture seem hard to reconcile with the spirit of the May Fourth Movement, which was a nationalist reaction against imperialism and the annexation of national territory. Though the double roles of the West as both a teacher and a repressor did confuse the workers and merchants in

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___________________________________________________________ the demonstration, they were in no way contradictory for the students. They claimed that they were opposed to Chinese culture, not the Chinese nation. Indeed, their pursuit for Western civilisation was out of their love for the Eastern nation. Anti-Western nationalism and cultural proWesternism were complementary for youth, and they insisted that the old evil Oriental moralities must be eliminated so as to give way to the new fresh Western culture. B. Old vs. New The binaries of the East and the West, and of matured adults and youth, soon evolved into the more general dichotomy of old and new. Young people attempted to interpret and rebuild every aspect of Chinese life using this contradiction, with a focus on literature. In January 1917, Hu Shi, a 26-year-old academic at Peking University who had just completed his thesis for Columbia University, proposed in his article for New Youth that all Chinese who made their living as writers should use the “healthy” spoken language (bai hua) instead of the “stale” literacy language (wen yan). This was the essence of the Literary Revolution during the New Culture Movement. Since the literacy language was mainly used by traditional elitist intellectuals or in bureaucracy while the spoken language could be understood among ordinary people, Hu Shi in fact was pursuing a social goal: that of making works of literature accessible to all, in the Literacy Revolution. Starting from 1917, progressive writers of New Youth published several wellknown modern novels in the spoken language. They set their literacy ideals as uprooting the aristocratic literature – that are pedantic, unintelligible, and obscurantist, and establishing a new literature, new genres and new styles – that are simple, clear, and meaningful. By 1920, most writers had adopted the spoken language, and the Literacy Revolution succeeded in completely changing Chinese literature. The Literacy Revolution sharpened the conflicts between the traditional conservatives and the New Youth group. As the Communist historians would often state, time and people chose the latter over the former. It was true that the New Youth group, consisting of students and young faculty members in college, won the support of their peers and established the themes of the New Culture Movement: “overthrowing the literacy language and using the spoken language; overthrowing the old literature and building the new literature; overthrowing the old culture and building the new culture.”7

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____________________________________________________________ 3.

Is Eclecticism Possible? Could the old and the new be treated as different styles of cultures and be kept simultaneously? Some less radical youth (for example, Liang Shuming) tried to make this alternative voice, and Cai Yuanpei, an adult leader of student movements, stood on this side. One of the important innovations in the New Culture Movement was Cai Yuanpei’s tenure as chancellor of Peking University in 1916 and his reform of the school – the symbol of Chinese academia. Compared with other activists in the movement, Cai was more a man of two cultures,8 with strong interest in both Chinese traditions and Western civilisation. In his early thirties, Cai developed a close relationship with students at Peking University. He defended academic freedom against government pressure, and allowed all schools of thought a voice. He recruited a group of young, progressive, but first-rate faculty members, including Chen Duxiu as dean of the Faculty of Letters, Lu Xun as a professor of Chinese literature, Hu Shi as a professor of history of Chinese philosophy, and Li Dazhao, who soon became one of China’s first Marxists, as the university head librarian. Meanwhile, Cai Yuanpei still held positions for elder traditional intellectuals like Gu Hongming, as well as for members of some anarchist groups. The university then became a forum for debates between the conservatives and the modern New Youth group. One famous scene in the university at the time was of Li Dazhao talking about Marxism in one classroom while Gu Hongming was verifying why men should have several wives in the classroom next door. Many young students such as Mao Zedong, who later became important figures in Chinese history, entered Peking University during this time and got trained in the liberal atmosphere. They formed several societies and discussion groups to design the blueprints for a new strong China. The May Fourth period was regarded as the “golden time” for Peking University even many years later, and for his accomplishment as the chancellor, Cai was remembered as the Father of the Chinese Renaissance. Since members of the New Youth group were appointed as faculty members of Peking University, the journal was moved from Shanghai to Beijing in 1916, which further strengthened the position of Beijing, or Peking University, as the center of student activism during the May Fourth period. In response to the Literacy Revolution and many other radical activities of the New Youth group (including the efforts to communise China), the arguments between the traditional literati and the young intellectuals escalated in Peking University. As Meisner described,9 the complicated relationship among Chinese intellectuals in the May Fourth period was at first in “a tangled web of obscurity” and China was at a crossroads for many possibilities. However, the young people soon disentangled the complexity and made the decision for themselves, as well

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___________________________________________________________ as for the future of the country. They united around the New Youth group and pulled their peers into the union through various societies and events. Criticisms against the traditional scholars and their young defendants were spread all over the country. The campus of Peking University then became a war field between the West and the East, the old and the new, and the radical youth quickly established their dominance. Cai’s experiment of eclecticism ended up with a failure and, disappointed by the government policy and the radicalism of his peers, he left Peking University in the 1920s. 4.

Culture of Destruction and Hatred The failure of eclecticism marked that dichotomous logic had successfully taken root in modern China. In this way of thinking, the distinction between the East and the West, or between old and new, is not merely difference, but a choice between evil and good, or between hatred and love. If one supports democracy, science, and the new culture, one must struggle against and destroy literature in the traditional style, the Confucianism moralities, and the Oriental cultural system. The old/traditional equals the evil and the love for the new equals the hatred for the old. Such simplified radical logic blinded the eyes of youth so that they could not see many valuable assets in Chinese traditions, and the loss was discovered only almost a century later. The New Culture Movement, from the very beginning, was aimed at the political turnover of the whole old system, but its legitimacy, ironically, was established by the conservative Chinese traditional culture, which gave high status to intellectuals and accepted the long-standing link between education and political power. After being ruined in the May Fourth period, the respect for and the high social status of knowledge and intellectuals never revived in modern Chinese society. The Literacy Revolution, on one hand, eliminated the elegant literati tradition of Chinese literature, which had a splendid history. Besides this great loss of the language of Chinese, more importantly, it caused Westernized writers to alienate their potential allies, the writers and audience of the old-style fictions, with the hierarchical distinction between good and evil, high and low. Just as only a few people could understand the old literature, it was even harder for the masses to appreciate the new literature promoting the queer Western notions. As Qu Qiubai pointed out in 1932, “for the masses, the New Culture Movement of the May Fourth period seemed to be a total waste.”10 Without the socio-moral as well as financial support from a substantial audience, the May Fourth youth writers, in the search for a social significance for their literature, came under the influence of the rising Chinese Communist Party in 1920s. But they were to discover later on, politics and literature had different agendas;

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____________________________________________________________ thus they found themselves in constant conflict with the Party in order to recover their “literacy freedom,” which they destroyed themselves in the New Culture Movement. Denying the values of all the existing traditions, youth in the May Fourth period often expressed their hatred of the status quo, their determination to struggle against the evil world and the emphasis on the uncompromising opposition between good and evil. This militant attitude toward the current society inspired their intention to “destroy forever.” “Overturn” (tui fan) became one of the most popular words at the time and the Chinese term of revolution, ge ming, which was created by the young for their movements, simply means “killing the life (of the evil)” literarily. Young people’s wills to destroy the old political and cultural systems of China were articulated in a notable article of January 1919 in New Youth by Chen Duxiu. In his introduction of Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science, he wrote: Conservatives have accused us of being out to destroy Confucianism, the sacred rites, the national essence, womanly chastity, traditional morality, art and religion, ancient literature and old-style politics. We admit that all these accusations are well founded, but we do not plead guilty. If we have committed all these crimes, it is solely because of our support for two gentlemen, Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science. As supporters of Democracy, we are obliged to attack Confucianism, rituals, womanly chastity, traditional morality, and oldstyle politics. As advocates of Science, we cannot help but oppose traditional art and traditional religion…11 The binary logic and the intense objection to the reality, marked by the radical juxtaposition of a bright future and a dark and evil present, were embedded in the statement. In contrast to the vaguely defined democracy and science that youth wanted to build, their determination to attack and destroy always stood out in the May Fourth articles. Empowered by the ideal democracy and science, young people at the time enthusiastically believed the future of the ancient nation would be in their hands, if they kept assaulting the old values. And in order to achieve such noble goals, use of violence against the old and the evil was justified. Because of the influence of the militant attitude towards the status quo, the young students quickly abandoned a peaceful approach to reform which had been proved to

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___________________________________________________________ be useless by the revolution in 1911, and considered more seriously the necessity of bloodshed12 As a result, it was not too surprising to see students angrily burning down the home of a Chinese official identified as a Japanese sympathiser, and viciously fighting with the police in the May Fourth Movement. Violence, stemming from the culture of anger and destruction, was excluded from the traditional moralities of literati in the old China, but became a tool of Chinese students, as well as all Chinese people, for class struggle in the modern time. Being still more influential, the nature of this preference to overturning and revolution may have prepared the young radicals to appreciate the content of the Marxist notion of class struggle: a notion that included a decisive confrontation between the revolutionary forces and the existing system. Since Marxism or Communism contains the binary logic and the hostility to the present, students’ hatred of and anger toward the status quo served as a sort of intellectual-emotional background that later facilitated their turn to Bolshevism. Even today, some critics are still stating: “The Chinese live in a culture of hatred and anger, in great lack of love and generosity…When they support something, they must go to hate and overturn the opposite.”13 It is, of course, unfair to regard the youth radicalism in the May Fourth period as the only cause to today’s Chinese culture, but meditating the “not-correct” components of the movements has become necessary. 5.

From Democracy to Hegemony With a common desire of destruction, youth activism during the May Fourth period united all the “new intellectuals” around such vague or general concepts as democracy, science, humanity, and so on. Success had been won swiftly, and it was inevitable that differences should arise. After the October Revolution in Russia, Marxism was introduced into China in 1919, with Li Dazhao, one of the active members of the New Youth group, as a main promoter. Li’s article “My opinions of Marxism,” was published in New Youth as the first detailed description of Marxist theories in China. Shortly afterwards, in 1918, Li and Chen Duxiu, the two more progressive leaders of student movements, turned into Marxists and founded a new review, Weekly Critic (Meizhou Pinglun), which was more politically oriented than New Youth. The following year, Hu Shi vehemently attacked what he called “ism,” by which he meant systems of thought with universal claims or appeal, notably Socialism or Communism. He contrasted the “ism” (zhu yi) with “real problems” (wen ti). He, in his critical article, urged putting aside ideological disputes and attacking concrete problems one by one. His remarks could not be

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____________________________________________________________ reconciled with the increasingly Marxian views of Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, and in the fall of 1920 the original New Youth group broke up. The liberals Hu Shi and Lu Xun quit the editorial committee of New Youth, and the magazine then became a Communist publication. Starting from the dispute of “ism” and “problem,” more and more students selected Marxism in this new binary and started to attack liberals like Hu Shi as “half-revolutionists” and “conservatives.” When the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921, most of its leaders and members were student activists in the May Fourth Movement, including Chen Duxiu, Li Daozhao, Mao Zedong, and so on. Hu Shi, on the other hand, left Mainland China and died in Taiwan in 1962. He had the reputation of “anti-revolution” for a long time in Communist China, and people almost forgot that he actually was a crucial founder of the modern China. Hu was the winner of the battles against the old, but he lost his entire honor in the dichotomy of Socialism and liberalism. The appreciation of Socialism and the adoption of the Bolshevik model pushed the youth activism during the May Fourth period into another stage: the erection of a barrier between Communism and other kinds of social thoughts through the Communist debate with other doctrines on the left. From anti-Oriental culture, anti-tradition, antieclecticism, to anti-non Marxism, young students completely changed the fate of China with their dichotomous logic and their intensive anger of status quo. The suppressing traditional authorities were largely destroyed as they wished, however, on the other hand, their pursuit for democracy turned into the hegemony of Communism as well. Weber once said, democracy could easily go against the creeds of itself, as long as it “replaces the arbitrary disposition of hierarchically superordinate ‘master’ by the equally arbitrary disposition of the governed and the party chiefs dominating them.”14 Youth activism in the May Fourth period failed to avoid the simplicity and arbitrariness of binary thinking and the culture of destruction; thus it was doomed to lead to another politically, culturally, and socially hegemonic time of China. 6.

Lessons for Youth Participation in Democracy: Conclusions and Discussions Many good wills of the youth in the May Fourth period, such as democracy and science, were not fulfilled in China in the subsequent 70 years. Parts of the failures could be attributed to their over-simplified dichotomous thinking, their intensive desire of destruction, and their militant hatred of the existing structures. Even today, making themselves in a dichotomy against social conventions is a prevalent strategy of youth to organise and issue campaigns. The dangers lying in this binary logic could be well demonstrated in the New Culture and the May Fourth

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___________________________________________________________ Movements in China and history has reminded us that we should be cautious of such dichotomous thinking. A simple universal scale for being “good” or “bad,” “successful” or “failed,” which still exists in the mainstream thoughts in China today, is not suitable to evaluate long-term effects of youth participation in civic campaigns on social justice. Love and generosity, on the other hand, should absolutely be emphasised in the Chinese everyday thinking patterns. As the saying goes, history is often our best teacher. All we can hope today is that errors in the past would not be repeated in future.

Notes 1. Lucient Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949, translated by Muriel Bell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971), 23. 2. Mark Boren, Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject, (New York: Routledge, 2001), 76. 3. The interview was included in the underground documentary Tiananmen, which secretly circulated among students in Peking University. The author had the chance to watch it in her undergraduate years at the university. 4. Terry Weston, “The Formation and Positioning of the New Culture Community, 1913-1917,” Modern China 24.3 (July 1998): 255284, 273. 5. Ibid., 264. 6. Ibid. 7. Andy Chan, Chinese Marxism (New York: Continuum, 2003), 34. 8. Bianco, 1971, 135. 9. Margaret Meisner, Li Ta-Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 123. 10. Qiubai Qu, “The Questions of Mass Literature,” Wenxue Yuebao, 1, reprinted in Wen Xue Yundong Shiliao Xuan (Beijing: Peking University Press, 1932), 2:391-399. 11. Tse-tsung Chow, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 233. 12. Henry Ip, “The Origins of Chinese Communism: A New Interpretation,” Modern China 20.1 (February 1994): 34-63, 45. 13. Shun Lin, “Chinese People Should Change the Patterns of http://mitbbs.com/cgi-bin/BBScon?Japan/M.1069831295.A Thinking,” (2003).

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____________________________________________________________ 14. Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by Gerth and Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 196-244, 204.

Select Bibliography Bianco, Lucient. Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949. Translated by Muriel Bell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971. Boren, Mark. Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject. New York: Routledge, 2001. Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Chan, Andy. Chinese Marxism. New York: Continuum, 2003. Chinese News Center. “The May Fourth Movement.” http://www.china.org.cn/chinese/zhuanti (November 2003). Chow, Tse-tsung. The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960. Dingerson, Lynn and Shelly Hay. The Co-motion Guide to Youth-Led Social Change. Washington, DC: Alliance for Justice, 1998. Dirlik, Alan. “The New Culture Movement Revisited: Anarchism and the Idea of Social Revolution in New Culture Thinking.” Modern China 11.3 (October 1985): 251-300. Dirlik, Alan. The Origins of Chinese Communism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Editorial Committee of the History of Peking University. History of Peking University. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1998 Editorial Committee for College Textbooks. History of Modern and Contemporary China. Beijing: Higher Education Press, 2001. Feng, Lei. “Democracy and Elitism: The May Fourth Ideal of Literature.” Modern China 22.2 (May 1996): 170-196. Hart, Ray. The Right to Play and Children’s Participation. Birmingham: Play-Train, n.d. HoSang, Dong. Youth and Community Organising Today. New York: Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organising, 2003. Ip, Henry. “Liang Shuming and the Idea of Democracy in Modern China.” Modern China 17.4 (December 1991): 469-508. ——. “The Origins of Chinese Communism: A New Interpretation.” Modern China 20.1 (February 1994): 34-63. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. New York: Verso, 1985. Lin, Shun. “Chinese People Should Change the Patterns of Thinking.” http://mitbbs.com/cgi-bin/BBScon?Japan/M.1069831295.A (November 2003).

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___________________________________________________________ Meisner, Margaret. Li Ta-Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism. New York: Atheneum, 1973. Qu, Qiubai. “The Questions of Mass Literature.” Wenxue Yuebao, 1. Reprinted in Wen Xue Yundong Shiliao Xuan. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1932, 2:391-399. Silverman, Meredith. “Children’s Rights and Social Work.” In Children’s Rights Handbook, edited by K Hefner, 6-10. Ann Arbor: Youth Liberation, 1979. Wasserstrom, Jeffrey. Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Weber, Max. “Bureaucracy.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by Gerth and Mills, 196-244. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946. Weston, Terry. “The Formation and Positioning of the New Culture Community, 1913-1917.” Modern China, 24.3 (July 1998): 255284.

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Part II Laws, Prisons, and Damaged People

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Speaking the Language of Evil Samuel H. Pillsbury Abstract This essay combines a discussion of public discourse about evil with contentions about the nature of evil in crime and punishment. With respect to public discourse, the essay argues that for strategic and substantive reasons liberals should learn to use the language of evil. Although subject to a variety of serious abuses, talk about evil is needed for powerful moral argument. It is also important to recognise the reality of evil in the world. With respect to crime, the essay contends that our concept of violent wrongdoing should expand beyond the most deliberate forms of wrongdoing to include instances of moral indifference. These are cases where the harm doer displays basic lack of concern for the fundamental interests of the persons harmed. Examples are given both in homicide and rape. The discussion of evil in punishment focuses on harsh mandatory sentences in United States, notably the Three Strikes law in California. The essay argues that this law’s insistence that life sentences be imposed without consideration of the individual offender or the particulars of the offense, but only the offender’s criminal record, mandates a form of moral indifference and so leads to cruel punishment. Key Words: cruelty, evil, humility, indifference, liberal, meaning, murder, punishment, rape, three strikes. 1.

Introduction The rhetoric of evil has been a hallmark of U.S. President George W. Bush’s leadership. Again and again, he has characterised the struggle against terrorism as a war of good against evil: “We’re taking action against evil people.... This is clearly a case of good versus evil, and make no mistake about it – good will prevail”1; and “Time and again, our country has shown the strength of its character by responding to acts of evil with acts of good.”2 Liberals frequently cringe at this language.3 They say they hear in these words an appeal to religious rather than secular values that is inappropriate in a nation where the Constitution separates church and state. They say they hear in this rhetoric a simplistic appeal to visceral emotion, an “us versus them” demagoguery that substitutes for a thoughtful understanding of complex conflicts. I share this critique – in part. The president’s frequent declarations that certain individuals, groups, and even nations are fundamentally good or evil represent a popular, but egregious, abuse of what I will call the language of evil. We can and should speak of evil acts, but I do not believe that a person can ever be declared fundamentally evil; all individuals have propensities for both good and evil.

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____________________________________________________________ Yet in some ways I prefer Mr. Bush’s moral discourse to that of many liberal minded academics and professionals. For I agree with the president that the struggle between good and evil is central to our lives and should be part of our public discourse. Indeed, I think it one of the central shortcomings of modern liberal thought that it is so little concerned with evil. In many educated circles, the word is either avoided, or limited to such egregious wrongs that it becomes irrelevant to our daily lives. The language of evil is without doubt a dangerous tongue. Time and again it has been used to obscure and even justify the worst of human deeds. Yet we miss a critical dimension of our individual and collective lives if we do not recognise the evil we do and that is done to us. And it is particularly important that those who are well educated, articulate, concerned with the human condition, and open to many perspectives, develop a facility with this ancient tongue. In this essay I promote the language of evil for reasons both strategic and substantive. The liberal minded need to speak about evil in order to speak forcefully about moral issues in the public realm. Discourse about evil is also important because it recognises a critical dimension of wrongdoing that otherwise may be lost. My argument also concerns our conception of evil. I argue for broadening our understanding of evil in both individual and collective wrongdoing. Culturally and legally we associate evil with the most morally aware and most obviously hostile forms of harm doing. We take sadism as our paradigm example. But when we look more closely at serious wrongdoing, as in murder or rape, we see that evildoers rarely fit this profile. Those who rape or assault often appear oblivious to the real consequences of their actions. We see that serious wrongs are often characterised less by hostility to victims, than by extreme indifference to the welfare of others. Building on these insights, I argue that evil should include violations of the obligation to look out for harms to others’ fundamental interests, what I call moral indifference. Next we turn from individual to collective wrongdoing. In particular, we examine the danger that lawful punishment may be cruel. Here we consider the relationship between democracy and evil, and the possibilities of popular evil. The discussion focuses on a harsh sentencing law in the American state of California, a law popularly known as Three Strikes. I argue that this mandatory sentencing law, which imposes life terms without consideration of the individual or the particulars of the offense of conviction, mandates a form of moral indifference and makes cruel punishment virtually inevitable. The essay opens, though, with a brief account of my own intellectual journey with respect to evil. I do so because the topic is inevitably personal. No amount of data, no logical proof will resolve

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___________________________________________________________ questions of good or evil; these questions concern how each of us should live. This means that to evaluate arguments about good and evil it helps – sometimes a great deal – to know where the speaker is coming from. 2.

Speaking Personally Most people turn away. They flee from evil’s presence. They wish it away immediately, and as far as possible. But since I was a young man, something here has drawn me closer, some mystery, some sense of a breach between worlds that demands investigation. I find myself equally horrified and intrigued, repulsed and fascinated. I do not turn away, but am compelled to look closer. When I was just out of college I worked for several years as a newspaper reporter. My last reporting job was to cover the state courts in Jacksonville Florida. I covered criminal trials primarily. I sat on the hard benches of various courtrooms listening to accounts of terrible wrongs. I found myself haunted by criminal violence. I heard things that seemed to come from another world. I heard of extremes of human conduct and suffering beyond anything I had conceived before. I could never look at the world in which I lived in the same way. These things actually happened; they had a reality beyond anything that was shown on television or that I could convey in my own reporting. The cases raised questions about the nature of evil that have been with me ever since. The immediate result of this experience though, was a decision to become a trial lawyer. I wanted to get up in court myself and engage in the dramas of criminal trials. So I went to law school. Then, after clerking for a judge, I worked as a federal prosecutor. I soon realised, though, that I was not the fierce combatant that the American adversarial system requires. I shifted careers once more and entered academics. As an academic, of course, I had to select a subject for scholarly inquiry. It did not happen right away, but over several years I found myself coming back to basic questions about evil that I had confronted as a reporter. This was probably not a good career move. Writing about evil is something that most American law professors consider odd – at best. But as I have worked on these issues, first in homicide, and more recently in sexual assaults, I experienced the same kind of excitement that I imagine scientists feel when they make important discoveries. There was something important here that spoke to all of our lives. The crimes were extreme, but they revealed much of ordinary good and evil. If we could just listen, listen with fresh ears, to both victims and perpetrators, to overtones and undertones in their words, we would learn a great deal about what is and also what should be in our world.

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____________________________________________________________ 3.

Defining Evil What do I mean by evil? My concern here is with human wrongs against other humans. In particular, I am concerned with wrongs that cause such severe physical and psychic harms that they destroy or threaten to destroy meaning for victim and others. Meaning here is simply what makes life worth living; it describes the values big enough to stand up to the test of mortality.4 In intimate relations, we find meaning in love rather than just sex, as in work we seek satisfaction in accomplishment not just money. We may speak of the experience of evil as the experience of dread, that inner chill inspired by awful violence, but also by myriad forms of oppression and exclusion.5 Evil, for purposes of this essay, is chosen conduct that causes serious, unjustified harms to others and thereby inspires deep dread. 4.

Crimes of Violence: Indifference, not Sadism In American culture, and to some extent in American law, evil is often characterised by fully self-conscious wrongdoing. The more considered the wrong, the worse it is presumed to be. Hollywood depictions of villains, whether in superhero movies, or that crime drama cliché, the contest between cop and serial killer, the bad guy is a supremely self-aware, often intellectually gifted, sadist. He delights in cruelty for the sake of cruelty. He revels in immorality.6 This notion that the worst wrongdoing involves careful moral calculation goes back a long way in our history. It informs perhaps the oldest American criminal law doctrine: premeditation. Premeditated murder requires that a defendant not only kill purposefully, but do so after having reflected on the decision to kill. He must have considered the consequences and acted regardless.7 We see similar ideas reflected in late twentieth-century scholarship arguing that recklessness is the minimum mens rea required for any criminal conviction. Many criminal scholars have viewed the line between recklessness and negligence – between actual awareness of critical facts and should have been aware – as the Rubicon dividing criminal from civil law. Such scholars view the ease with which courts and legislators have crossed this line as evidence that justice has succumbed to the brute demands of power.8 This view of wrongdoing implies a connection between moral understanding and culpability. Yet when we look at actual evil doing, we get a surprise. Morally speaking, evil is stupid. The evil deeds I encountered in the courtroom were chilling because their perpetrators appeared clueless about the moral significance of their conduct. It was their lack of understanding of what they did to others, and even to themselves, that was most striking. Whether or not

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___________________________________________________________ they reflected on the harm they did (premeditated), whether or not they were actually aware of all that made their actions wrong (acted with purpose, knowledge, or recklessness), they showed only the most superficial comprehension of the evil that they accomplished. This persuaded me that in criminal law we should focus less on the defendant’s reasoning process and more on the actual reasons for the defendant’s conduct. What matters most is what the chosen conduct means to the community. With respect to the worst kinds of murders, I have argued that these should require proof of both a purpose to kill and a particularly bad motive for the killing, such as killing to terrorise, for profit, for political purposes, out of racial animus, or to escape prosecution for other crimes. Often these kinds of murders involve premeditation, but not always.9 Motive analysis should also inform the doctrine of provocation, which reduces murder to manslaughter. Here mitigation should depend on whether the offender had a good reason for extreme anger at the victim, such that the killing represents a less serious challenge to the moral community.10 A clear example might be a killing in retaliation for recent and repeated spousal battery or for child abuse. With respect to reckless or negligent homicides, I have argued that guilt should depend on moral indifference – whether the defendant acted with disregard for the physical well being of others. We make this determination by judging how the defendant handled warnings of danger to others. Liability can be based on a conscious disregard for danger, or in some cases on failure to see the danger. The failure to perceive is culpable when we can blame it on the defendant’s greater concern with selfish matters; when it demonstrates moral indifference: disregard for the basic welfare of others.11 Like some other criminal law scholars, I have argued in favor of indifference analysis with respect to a number of criminal offenses.12 I think this analysis in fact undergirds our current treatment of crimes as disparate as drunk driving and rape. We can blame the drunk driver not just because he chose to become drunk and then drove, but because his whole course of conduct, from first drink to last act of driving, demonstrates disregard for basic human value. The defendant’s desire to escape reality pushes aside concerns for harmful consequences to self or others. The urge for mental oblivion explains the casual brutality, the indifference, with which substance abusers so often treat family and friends. What should come first in a life actually comes last. The same analysis helps with rape. Must the defendant have realised that his partner did not consent to the sexual act to be guilty of this offense? In the United States, negligence with respect to nonconsent suffices for conviction.13 This seems basically right, but I think we would

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____________________________________________________________ do better to speak of the defendant’s moral indifference rather than negligence, because the wrong involves more than the lack of diligence that negligence suggests. In order to determine whether the defendant displayed moral indifference toward a partner’s sexual desires, we need to determine why the defendant failed to heed signs of nonconsent. Was it because his partner gave truly ambiguous signals about sexual desire or because the defendant’s desires blinded him to any protest? Some rapists realise and are even excited by the nonconsent of their partners. In such cases, even the highest level of mens rea for nonconsent may be proven. Other rapists just do not care about a partner’s desires. A man may force sex upon a woman not because he wants to coerce her, but because he believes himself entitled to sex. The perpetrator puts his own needs ahead of listening to objections from his partner.14 He displays indifference toward his partner’s sexual autonomy. Indifference analysis probably does not change the outcome of many criminal cases. The American criminal law already recognises liability in many situations based on negligence or even strict liability, where actual awareness of harm doing is not proven. The approach does challenge some traditional assumptions about criminal law and the role of government in Western democracies, however. There is a long-standing tradition in Anglo-American law that crime requires conscious harm doing. This derives from a larger principle, that in a liberal society government has no power to force anyone to think or do good, only to refrain from deliberate infringements of others’ basic interests. These are the principles that moral indifference seems to challenge by its insistence on an affirmative obligation to look out for others’ interests. The view that criminal law should encompass only conscious wrongdoing I think fails to recognise the essentially social nature of human beings and the extent to which our actions necessarily affect others. When persons choose to interact with others in ways that clearly will cause harm, they must try to avoid those harms. Avoiding those harms must be a personal priority. This means that a sincere “I didn’t mean to” should not automatically excuse. As much as we in the West celebrate individual freedom, our lives have meaning only in relationship to others. As a result, criminal law, which helps define the community, defends not just individual interests, but relationships in the community. It necessarily enforces some obligations to look out for others. The crime of rape illustrates both of these aspects of the criminal law: its defense of a larger community and the relational nature of wrongdoing. Rape not only violates the victim’s sexual autonomy, but also threatens the security of intimate relations of all persons in the community.

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___________________________________________________________ Even if we focus exclusively on the experience of the actual victim, we quickly see that the wrong involves others. Victims tell us and we instinctively know that rape is fundamentally a crime of exclusion. The assailant perverts an act that should join people together into an assault that profoundly estranges. This occurs even in modern societies that formally embrace the victim. The person assaulted no longer feels safe with others and so cannot make the intimate connections needed for love, or even friendship. She feels that she no longer belongs. This experience of exclusion is critical to the evil of the crime. And it is critical even if the perpetrator remains dumb to this effect. We can blame the perpetrator for engaging in conduct that disregards the basic welfare of his partner.15 Given how inextricably intertwined our existences are, given how much that we do, and do not, affects what others can and cannot, we need to move beyond our traditionally limited view of crime, and evil. We should not restrict evil to purely aggressive, morally self-aware wrongdoing. Evil should encompass violations of moral regard, the obligation to look out for others so as to avoid causing them serious harm. 5.

Cruelty in Punishment: Popular Evil Moral regard should also inform our understanding of evil deeds that may be done collectively. It should inform analysis even of lawful acts. My particular concern here is the problem of excessive punishment, of determining when a lawful penalty might be deemed cruel. In the United States this is a question of both morality and constitutional law. Criminal punishment in the United States has changed profoundly over the last 30 years, resulting in an enormous increase in prisoners, well beyond any rise in the general population or crime rate. The increased use of mandatory minimum penalties, especially for drug offenses, adult penalties for youth offenders, and long sentences for repeat offenders exemplify recent trends in penal philosophy and practice.16 These changes have followed a public debate – of sorts – about the crime problem and its solution. I use the word ‘debate’ advisedly, for public discourse on crime in America has been largely dysfunctional for many years, with opponents speaking in almost entirely different terms.17 Those who advocate increased punishment have relied heavily on the language of evil. Politicians of both American parties have framed the issue as Criminals versus the Public; in other words, Evil versus Good. Meanwhile those who have resisted this trend have relied almost exclusively on the language of social science. Critics of harsh punishment – often people with some professional or scholarly expertise in criminal justice – have emphasised the need for efficient deterrence and proportionality between offense of conviction and punishment. Liberal critics especially have decried the

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____________________________________________________________ emphasis on punishment as a solution to crime, advocating instead a variety of social programs to address its root causes. At least in the United States, at least for the last 30 years, the efficacy of this strategy is clear. It does not work. Indeed, it has been a rhetorical and political disaster. The proponents of harsh punishment have barely paused to acknowledge objections as they have marched down the road to greater penalties. Speaking for myself, I do not wish to suggest that all recent increases in punishment are unwarranted. In fact, at least with respect to violent crime, my punishment preferences are probably closer to the American mainstream than to the European. Nor should we exaggerate the importance of rhetorical strategy. Obviously the main forces for penal change over the last 30 years in the United States lie deep in cultural, economic and social structures, not in how liberals chose to talk about it.18 My argument concerns democracy. There has been no serious debate in the United States about penal severity, and part of the reason for this is a failure by critics to speak, and speak well, the language of evil. The challenge, as I see it, is twofold: to speak powerfully about the evils of crime and to speak powerfully about the evils of excessive punishment. Neither will suffice by itself. Liberals no less than conservatives tend to use the language of evil selectively, employing it for enemies and not friends. Wrongs by the state, the wealthy, and the powerful are condemned in the strongest moral terms while wrongs of the poor and oppressed are described as the tragic products of oppressive social conditions. Yet if we – for I include myself in this group – cannot bring ourselves to condemn evil deeds by persons with whom we might otherwise sympathise, we lose credibility in condemning evil deeds by those we generally dislike. As for speaking about the evils of punishment, American liberals often do so by claiming that punishment serves as a tool of race and class discrimination. In this critique, politicians and the media often appear the real villains because for selfish reasons they mislead the public about the dangers of crime and the efficacy of punishment. But even assuming the truth of this critique, it avoids the more important, and more frightening, question: What if an informed public supports not just harsh, but cruel punishments? How do we recognise and how do we deal with popular evil? An initial obstacle to this inquiry is what we might call the myth of public virtue. This is the concept, central to so much of American culture, that the public is always right, whether at the mall or the voting booth. The democratic assumption seems to be that over the long run, the public is both wise and well intentioned. President Bush clearly believes

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___________________________________________________________ this, frequently expressing his faith that because the American people make decisions democratically, and have good intentions, the nation is virtuous. In the field of punishment, the supposed link between virtue and democracy goes back to the Enlightenment. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a variety of Continental, British, and then American writers argued that the penal methods of monarchies inevitably tended toward cruelty because of the tyrannical nature of their governments. In a republic though, punishment decisions would be informed by the enlightened reason and compassion of ordinary citizens, making penal cruelty obsolete. So it was that one of the first pieces of business for the new state governments in America was to replace the old corporal punishments of English law with penalties that addressed the wrongdoer’s mind. So it was that one of my nation’s first great contributions to the Western civilisation was the replacement of the whipping post with the penitentiary. Bodily punishments were displaced by long-term incarceration, sometimes in solitary confinement.19 A standard tourist attraction for visitors to the new nation was its prisons. Among the more famous visitors to early American penitentiaries were Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens.20 Nor has the nation relinquished its leadership role in the field in succeeding years. Among our latest contributions is the construction of socalled supermaxes, new penal facilities in which guards can control inmates almost entirely by remote control and in which the isolation of the prisoner is greater than any seen since – well – the first American penitentiaries.21 But who today would see the prison as a beacon of hope, a symbol of enlightenment, or a harbinger of moral progress? Can anyone doubt that these institutions are at best necessary evils, and at worst add to the world’s already ample supply of evil? Looking beyond criminal punishment for a moment, does anyone really doubt that evil can be popular? After all, torture, slavery, racial segregation, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide have had broad appeal in many nations in the not-too-distant past. Democratic decision-making may serve to limit certain kinds of evil doing, but its protection is only partial. Popularity is no guarantee of morality. The important question is: How do we identify popular evil? What are its trademarks? In the area of punishment, these questions point us toward the justifications of punishment, to punishment theory. Unfortunately, neither scholars nor courts, legislators or the public agree on the basic principles of punishment, let alone their proper application. Want to watch sparks fly

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____________________________________________________________ among intellectuals? Ask a utilitarian, a retributivist, and an expressivist to debate the question of just punishment. For these reasons, among others, punishment theory cannot provide the sole foundation for judgments about evil in punishment. Instead, I suggest we examine the good faith of the punisher. To what extent does the sentencer make a serious effort to consider the value of the prisoner in passing sentence? This question brings us face-to-face with an apparent anomaly in moral assessment. By definition, the punisher intentionally inflicts suffering upon the punished, and not necessarily for his or her good.22 Given this, how can we require that the punisher care about the person punished? But just as caring parents may punish their children, a judge, a jury, or another decision maker may impose serious punishment even while recognising the worth of the punished. The question is whether the punisher believes the punishment justified even after valuing the good in the punished, or whether the punisher disregards that value to make the decision easier. The first step toward evil doing, we know, is to dehumanise the subject, to convert a person into an animal or thing. We know that this move commonly comes from a perception that the subject is Other. This move is common when the subject belongs to a different race, ethnicity, or class than the actor. The move is especially powerful if significant numbers of the group are guilty of wrongdoing, even if these represent but a small percentage of the group. The result of this process is that the subject becomes unworthy of sympathy. This leaves the actor free to inflict pain without guilt. Often, righteous anger gives the actor a powerful sense of justification for pain infliction. Building on these insights, cruelty in the form of excessive punishment is likely to occur when the punisher is encouraged, or even required, to make a decision without considering the value of the person convicted of crime. But what does it mean to consider the value of an offender as part of sentencing? I think it means, at minimum, that before imposing severe punishment – death or a life sentence certainly – the sentencer should conduct an individualised inquiry into both offense and offender. The sentencer should: (1) examine the particulars of the offense and the offender’s involvement in it, rather than simply rely on the category of offense; and (2) should consider the good that the offender has done and in the future might do, if given the opportunity. These obligations throw a harsh light on many mandatory sentencing laws. Perhaps the most notorious of U. S. mandatory sentencing laws is a California statute and state constitutional provision popularly known as Three Strikes. This law has a number of different features; I will focus on its most controversial: the requirement that a defendant who has two prior

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___________________________________________________________ convictions for certain kinds of felonies must receive at least 25 years to life in prison for any third felony conviction. The Three Strikes law was enacted by the Legislature and then was approved by voters in a referendum, by a wide margin.23 Critics have argued that its passage is a striking example of dysfunctional democracy, because general public anxieties over social disorder and crime, and a single very high-profile offense by a repeat violent offender – the kidnapping and murder of a girl from her suburban home – led to the passage of a law whose scope went far beyond the public’s immediate concern with violent crime.24 This may be so. The fact remains that the law was popular when enacted and still enjoys significant support. A wellfunded effort to reform its harshest features was defeated at the polls in November 2004.25 At the heart of Three Strikes is the mandatory nature of its operation. If the prosecutor establishes that the offender had two previous qualifying convictions and committed a third felony – of any kind – the law requires that the court impose at least a 25 years to life penalty. Under current rules, an offender who receives the minimum Three Strikes sentence is not be eligible for parole for 21 years; actual release on parole would depend on the governor and his parole board. A prisoner could well remain in prison for the rest of his natural life. The Three Strikes casts a broad net for repeat felons. The previous convictions may have occurred at any time in the offender’s life, including as a juvenile. They may have occurred in the same criminal case. The first and second felonies must appear on a list of be so-called serious offenses, which is comprised of serious crimes of violence, significant drug offenses, and also the offense of residential burglary. The so called third strike, the offense for which the life sentence must be imposed, however, may be for any kind of felony, even an ordinary theft. Openly distrustful of the judiciary, the proponents of Three Strikes insisted that sentencing judges not be permitted to consider the individual circumstances of the offense for which a Third Strike defendant was convicted. Indeed, no decision maker was supposed to look at anything but the offender’s criminal record. Because the subjects of the law were unnamed, and because they were identifiable only by their criminal records, who these people actually were, the particulars of their lives or their offenses, became legally – and apparently morally – irrelevant.26 Who can care about a person known only as a repeat felony offender? How much easier to rage at such a person. No wonder the law was – and is – popular. The Three Strikes law in practice has not been quite as draconian as its proponents intended, in part because of an appellate decision that gives trial courts very limited ability to restrict its application, and more

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____________________________________________________________ importantly because some prosecutors have chosen to use the law selectively.27 For example, in San Francisco prosecutors will not seek the 25 years to life sentence except where the new offense involves violence. Meanwhile in other parts of the state, prosecutors regularly seek life sentences for nonviolent property offenses.28 Since its passage, many critics have argued that Three Strikes sentences violate the United States Constitution’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual” punishment. Last year the United States Supreme Court finally took up this issue, deciding by a 5-4 margin that the law was in fact constitutional.29 The defendant in the case, Gary Ewing, had four previous felony convictions, including three burglaries, when he committed the theft that was his third strike. His criminal scheme was particularly ill conceived. He stole three golf clubs worth a total of $1,197 from a sporting goods shop by concealing them in his pants. This gave him an obvious limp that attracted attention that led to his arrest. The appellate decisions of California are full of cases similar to Ewing’s. In general they involve men in their thirties or forties who have an extensive criminal history comprised primarily of nonviolent property and drug offenses, but with some crimes of violence intermixed. (Ewing had one prior felony involving violence – a burglary with a knife.) Most such offenders also have a long history of substance abuse. Finally, most demonstrate a remarkable propensity for getting caught.30 As has been true of previous cases in which the Supreme Court has ruled on the constitutionality of long prison sentences, the justices were divided on several basic questions. Two justices voted to uphold the sentence on the grounds that the “cruel and unusual” punishment clause was directed only at method of punishment, not quantity. Three additional justices – making up the five justice majority – voted to affirm on the ground that the people of California rationally could have believed that severe punishment of offenders such as Ewing was justified by their persistent criminality and therefore his sentence was not grossly disproportionate to the crime punished. The four dissenters concluded, based on extensive analysis of punishments for similar and other offenses in California and other jurisdictions, that Ewing’s penalty was constitutionally disproportionate.31 As in previous cases, the justices struggled to set out objective criteria for cruel and unusual punishment. The justices clearly were not interested in discussing cruelty as a moral concept; certainly they displayed no interest in whether democratically approved punishment decisions might be evil. Avoiding these sorts of explicitly moral questions makes institutional sense for the Court. Politicians (especially American politicians) may wear their personal moral values on their sleeves, but

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___________________________________________________________ courts should render judgments on a more objective basis. Yet the U.S. Constitution explicitly condemns cruelty in punishment suggesting that plain moral talk may be required in some criminal cases.32 And I think there was a way that the Court could have addressed the cruelty question yet maintained a clearly judicial stance. The Court should have asked if under this law California sentencers respect the basic obligation of moral regard or whether the law encourages moral indifference. In Three Strikes we have a rule that affects persons seen as Other. The punished are predominantly racial and ethnic minorities, the undereducated and the impoverished. By definition all are persons who have committed significant – though quite variable – criminal wrongs in their lives. Taken together, these conditions minimize the chance of moral regard for the sentenced. But Three Strikes does not merely permit or encourage moral disregard; it actually demands that the sentencer ignore all aspects of the person and offence except to determine the legal categorisation of present and past offences. In other words, at time of sentencing, Three Strikes makes moral indifference the law. This was the intent of proponents. They explicitly rejected the moral principle for which I have argued here – that all persons have an irreducible moral value that must be respected at all times, even when imposing criminal punishment. Proponents contend that repeated choices to offend, even in non-violent fashion, grant the public the right to swift and categorical condemnation without regard to details of offender or offence.33 I do not believe that Three Strikes is wholly irrational. Even if a poor use of penal resources, it has real deterrent force. How could it not? Similarly, while the law’s passage may reveal a large gap between public concern and legal solution, the same can be said of many other laws. The central problem with Three Strikes is that it requires moral disregard by sentencers. It guarantees that at least some sentences will be excessive. In the Three Strikes law, the people of the Golden State revealed their mean streak. They provided a contemporary demonstration of an old truth. Given moral cover, cruelty can be quite popular. 6.

Speaking the Language of Evil Finally, I want to return to my initial theme about the need for the liberal minded to speak the language of evil. Some might contend that the recent history of punishment in the United States counts as a strong argument against a discourse of evil. “Tough-on-crime” rhetoric, with its frequent resort to demonising language, typifies the simplistic, arrogant, and discriminatory moralizing of people who think in terms of good and evil. Similarly, some may point to President Bush and his supporters who use the language of evil in particularly dangerous and divisive ways on the international stage. But

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____________________________________________________________ even if I agreed with the premises of these arguments, I would reject the conclusion. This is a language we must speak. I have already suggested strategic reasons why we should not give up perhaps the most powerful moral word in our language. But there is another reason as well. Evil is real. And it must be acknowledged to be fought. Some deeds must be declared evil to grasp their wrong. Consider what liberals generally view as the great wrong of modern times: violence and discrimination on account of race, religion, or ethnicity. Are we satisfied with condemning racist, bigoted conduct as unhealthy, as inefficient, as irrational, or as undemocratic? Each of these terms carries a normative charge. Each may be true. But none conveys the challenge to meaning; none expresses the deep wrong to moral community that such discrimination entails. Knowing this, liberals have developed their own moral dialect in which racism and bigotry stand for evil. Yet not all evil involves discrimination. Speaking the language of evil will not be easy for many. Those who believe in the essential goodness of humanity will be reluctant to acknowledge that all persons have a dark side. Those who consider the scientific method our essential test for truth will be hard-pressed to acknowledge the importance of meaning, an inherently metaphysical concept. Similarly, judgments about meaning necessarily draw on personal experience, and this will disturb those who demand objective criteria for public decisions. My argument for speaking the language of evil comes with an important caution. If we do choose to use this tongue, we should speak it differently than most current users. We should speak with humility. We should speak with humility, because while we might imagine the judge of evil declaiming in the very voice of God, and while the language of evil seems to demand the imperative rather than the indicative voice, we must take as a founding principle that we are no better than they. The propensity to evil is as much a part of the human condition as the propensity to good, as foundational as birth or death. Labeling others’ conduct as evil implies no moral superiority on our part. This we must repeat to ourselves over and again. Sadness must always mix with the anger inherent in condemning evil, sadness that humanity is so flawed. 7.

Conclusion Every nation and every people is shaped by its particular experience of evil. That certainly has been true of my country, the United States of America. The attacks of September 11, 2001 proved the point again.

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___________________________________________________________ There is a particular image of the attacks that sticks with me. Television reports on the events of that day have often shown the nation’s air traffic control grid following the attacks. Prior to the attack the map of the U.S. is nearly covered with dots of light indicating civilian flights in progress; over the course of a few hours, the lights dramatically diminish. Finally the entire nation appears dark. It’s a chilling sight, but it sticks with me not so much because it reminds me the day’s horror but because it evokes the deep quiet that followed. In the days and weeks afterward we stopped our ceaseless striving, our endless selling and buying, and paid attention to each other. We talked, went to church and temple. Helped out where we could. Thought about what really mattered in our lives. Considered what we would have said in our final phone call. Evil can be a great teacher, though its lessons are bitter. This brings me finally to the reader of these words. The likely audience for this essay is comprised of academics and other students of serious wrongdoing. People like myself. But what do people like you or I have to offer the world on matters this momentous? We have little power beyond our ideas. No one waits on our orders, at least not without a credit card in hand. We cannot convert ideas into action ourselves. Still ideas are powerful; indeed, in the long run they are among the most powerful forces in human history. Which is why it matters what we say. We should speak the language of evil, and we should speak it well.

Notes 1. Remarks by President George W. Bush at a Town Hall Meeting with Citizens of Ontario, Ontario Convention Center, Ontario, California, 5 January 2002; http://whitehouse.gov/infocus/ramadan/islam.html, visited 7 February 2005. 2. Radio Address by the President to the Nation, 31 August 2002; http://whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/20020831.html, visited 7 February 2005. For an extended treatment of President Bush’s rhetoric of evil and general ethics, see Peter Singer, The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush (New York: Dutton, 2004). 3. A single example: “I don’t think that the word ‘evil’ is a regular part of my vocabulary. There is something about the word, when we apply it to another human being - and more especially to a group of human beings - that makes me uncomfortable. It is too absolute. It seems to cut off any possibility of redemption, of dialogue, or even coexistence. It is the moral equivalent of declaring war.” United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, from his address at a 2 May 2004 Trinity Institute

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____________________________________________________________ conference on “Naming Evil: An Interfaith Dialogue,” quoted in Christian Century (June 1, 2004), 7. 4. Robert Nozick, The Examined Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989); Samuel Pillsbury, “The Meaning of Deserved Punishment,” Indiana Law Journal 67 (1992): 719-752. 5. C. F. Alford, What Evil Means to Us (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 3, 10-15, 35-59. 6. A good example is Hannibal Lecter, the character played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 movie The Silence of the Lambs (MGM/UA). 7. Samuel Pillsbury, Judging Evil: Rethinking the Laws of Murder and Manslaughter (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 100-06. 8. See sources cited in Samuel Pillsbury, “Crimes of Indifference,” Rutgers Law Review 49 (1996): 105-218, 108. 9. Pillsbury, 1998, 98-124. 10. Pillsbury, 1998, 125-60. 11. Pillsbury, 1998, 161-88; Pillsbury, 1996. 12. Pillsbury, 1998, 161-88; Pillsbury, 1996. For examples of similar, but certainly not identical views, see Alexander, 2000; Jeremy Horder, “Gross Negligence and Criminal Culpability,” University of Toronto Law Journal 47 (1997): 495-521; Kenneth Simons, “Culpability and Retributive Theory: The Problem of Criminal Negligence,” Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 5 (1994): 365-398; Simon Gardner, “Reckless and Inconsiderate Rape,” The Criminal Law Review (1991): 172-179; R. A. Duff, Intention, Agency, and Criminal Liability (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 149-157. 13. David P. Bryden, “Redefining Rape,” Buffalo Criminal Law Review 3 (2000): 317-512, 324-26. 14. Samuel Pillsbury, “Crimes Against the Heart: Recognizing the Wrongs of Forced Sex,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 35 (2002b): 845-959. 15. Ibid. 16. See Jerome Skolnick, “What Not to Do About Crime – The American Society of Criminology 1994 Presidential Address,” Criminology 33 (1995): 1-15. 17. See Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Skolnick, 1995; Samuel Pillsbury, “Why Are We Ignored: The Peculiar Place of Experts in the Current Debate About Crime and Justice,” Criminal Law Bulletin 31 (1995): 305-336.

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___________________________________________________________ 18. See David Garland, “The Culture of High Crime Societies,” British Journal of Criminology (2000): 347-375; David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990). 19. See Adam Jay Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (New Haven: Yale, 1992); O. F. Lewis, The Development of American Prisons and Prison Customs, 1776-1845 (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1967); Samuel Pillsbury, “Understanding Penal Reform,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 80 (1989): 726-780, 729-40. 20. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (New York: Penguin, 1985), 144-59; Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press), 1964. 21. Leena Kurki and Norval Morris, “The Purposes, Practices, and Problems of Supermax Prisons,” Crime and Justice 28 (2001): 385424; Craig Haney and Mona Lynch, “Regulating Prisons of the Future: A Psychological Analysis of Supermax and Solitary Confinement,” NYU Review of Law and Social Change 23 (1997): 477-570. 22. Markus Dirk Dubber, “The Pain of Punishment,” Buffalo Law Review 44 (1996): 545-611. 23. See Franklin E. Zimring, et al., Punishment and Democracy: Three Strikes and You’re Out in California (New York: Oxford, 2001); Joe Domanick, Cruel Justice: Three Strikes and the Politics of Crime in America’s Golden State, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004); Samuel Pillsbury, “A Problem in Emotive Due Process: California’s Three Strikes Law,” Buffalo Criminal Law Review 6 (2002a): 483-524. See also Calif. Penal Code sections 667; 1170.12. 24. See Michael Vitiello, “Three Strikes: Can We Return to Rationality,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 87 (1997): 395481, 410-22; Pillsbury, 2002a, 515-16. 25. See Joe Mathews, “How Prospects for Prop 66 Fell So Far, So Fast.” Los Angeles Times, 7 November 2004, at B1. 26. See Pillsbury, 2002a. 27. See Domanick, 2004; Joshua E. Bowers, “‘The Integrity of the Game is Everything’: The problem of Geographic Disparity in Three Strikes,” New York University Law Review 76 (2001): 1164-1201. 28. See Samara Marion, “Justice by Geography? A Study of San Diego County’s Three Strikes Sentencing Pracitces from July-December 1996,” Stanford Law and Policy Review 11 (1999): 29-44. 29. Ewing v. California, 538 U.S. 11 (2004). The Court decided a companion case, also involving the constitutionality of California’s Three

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____________________________________________________________ Strikes law on grounds limited to the availability of habeas corpus relief. Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63 (2003). 30. See Domanick, 2004, 149-66, 174-87; Bowers, 2001, 1170; Pillsbury, 2002a, 489-90; Marion, 1999. 31. Ewing v. California, 538 U.S. 11, 14-31, 31-32, 32-53 (2004). 32. The Eight Amendment to the United States Constitution reads as follows: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted.” 33. See Mike Reynolds and Bill Jones, with Dan Evans, Three Strikes and You’re Out! …A Promise to Kimber (Fresno, California: Quill Driver Books, 1996).

Select Bibliography Alford, C. F. What Evil Means to Us. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997. Beaumont, Gustave de, and Alexis de Tocqueville. On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France. Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. Beckett, Katherine. Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bowers, Joshua E. “‘The Integrity of the Game is Everything’: The Problem of Geographic Disparity in Three Strikes.” New York University Law Review 76 (2001): 1164-1201. Bryden, David P. “Redefining Rape.” Buffalo Criminal Law Review 3. (2000): 317-512. Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. New York: Penguin, 1985. Domanick, Joe. Cruel Justice: Three Strikes and the Politics of Crime in America’s Golden State. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. Dubber, Markus Dirk. “The Pain of Punishment.” Buffalo Law Review 44 (1996): 545-611. Duff, R. A. Intention, Agency, and Criminal Liability. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1990. Gardner, Simon. “Reckless and Inconsiderate Rape.” Criminal Law Review (1991): 172-179. Garland, David. “The Culture of High Crime Societies.” British Journal of Criminology 40 (2000): 347-375. . Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990.

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___________________________________________________________ Haney, Craig, and Mona Lynch. “Regulating Prisons of the Future: A Psychological Analysis of Supermax and Solitary Confinement.” N.Y.U. Review of. Law and Social Change 23 (1997): 477-570. Hirsch, Adam Jay. The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America. New Haven: Yale, 1992. Horder, Jeremy. “Gross Negligence and Criminal Culpability.” University of Toronto Law Journal 47 (1997): 495-521. Kurki, Leena, and Norval Morris. “The Purposes, Practices, and Problems of Supermax Prisons.” Crime and Justice 28: 385-424. Lewis, O. F. The Development of American Prisons and Prison Customs, 1776-1845. Montclair, New Jersey: Patterson Smith, 1967. Marion, Samara. “Justice by Geography? A Study of San Diego County’s Three Strikes Sentencing Practices from July-December 1996.” Stanford Law and Policy Review 11 (1999): 29-44. Nozick, Robert. The Examined Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. Pillsbury, Samuel H. “A Problem in Emotive Due Process: California’s Three Strikes Law.” Buffalo Criminal Law Review 6 (2002a): 483-524. . “Crimes Against the Heart: Recognizing the Wrongs of Forced Sex.” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 35 (2002b): 845-959. . Judging Evil: Rethinking the Laws of Murder and Manslaughter. New York: New York University Press, 1998. . “Crimes of Indifference,” Rutgers Law Review 49 (1996): 105-218. . “Why Are We Ignored? The Peculiar Place of Experts in the Current Debate About Crime and Justice.” Criminal Law Bulletin 31 (1995): 305-336. . “The Meaning of Deserved Punishment.” Indiana Law Journal 67 (1992): 719-752. . “Understanding Penal Reform: The Dynamic of Change.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 80 (1989): 726-780. Reynolds, Mike, and Bill Jones, with Dan Evans. Three Strikes and You’re Out! A Promise to Kimber. Fresno, California: Quill Driver Books, 1996. Singer, Peter. The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush. New York: Dutton, 2004. Simons, Kenneth. “Culpability and Retributive Theory: The Problem of Criminal Negligence.” Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 5 (1994): 365-398. Skolnick, Jerome. “What Not to Do About Crime - The American Society of Criminology 1994 Presidential Address.” Criminology 33 (1995): 1-15.

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____________________________________________________________ Vitiello, Michael. “Three Strikes: Can We Return to Rationality?” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 87 (1997): 395-481. Zimring, Franklin E., Gordon Hawkins and SamKamin. Punishment and Democracy: Three Strikes and You’re Out in California. New York: Oxford, 2001.

The Unbearable Brutality of Being: Casual Cruelty in Prison and What This Tells Us About Who We Really Are Diana Medlicott Abstract Casual cruelty is increasingly part of popular culture, and emblematic of our normative being in the world. Within the prison, it is routinely practiced on prisoners, often on the most vulnerable, and it is a normative part of prison officer culture, sometimes serving a protective psychological function in a difficult working environment. In populist culture, such cruelty is often excused and explained by the principle of “deservedness,” through which prisoners are viewed as having brought their own fate upon themselves. Insofar as this casual cruelty mirrors our being in the world, it represents only part of our human nature. Restorative justice is a different way of dealing with offenders and it mirrors the more positive attributes of our humanity, espousing values such as trust, respect for others, and responsibility. It is these qualities that we must cultivate if we are to transcend the limitations of culture and context. Key Words: cruelty, emblematic, cultural, vulnerable, prisoners, deservedness, officers, restorative justice, humanity. 1.

Casual Cruelty The title of this chapter is in homage to the Czech writer Milan Kundera, who begins his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being with a discussion of Nietzsche’s myth of eternal return. As Kundera says, a life without weight, which disappears once and for all, appears like a shadow, and means nothing. It seems to me that this is a simile easily applied to lives that are passed in prison, both by prisoners and by staff, because they are largely unknown to us and therefore seem unsubstantial and transitory. And yet the totality of lives passed in captivity all over the world recurs eternally: this is a heavy facet of human existence, for which we pardon ourselves, and which we cynically permit to persist. In this lies the unbearable brutality of our being. And so, in this chapter, I offer the casual cruelty of prison as akin to, and emblematic of, our casual being in the world. I then go on to suggest that whilst prison tells us much about who we really are, it does not tell us about who we could be, and I outline an alternative to the casual cruelty of prison, which offers a different vision of ourselves. I begin with three entries from my research diary:

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____________________________________________________________ a. A prisoner who attempted hanging is cut down and revived. He has involuntarily urinated, and upon regaining consciousness, he is first of all aware of six officers standing around pointing at his trousers and laughing. b. A young nineteen-year-old prisoner is brought back into prison after resuscitation in an outside hospital. A senior officer addresses him: “Not dead yet David? You know what they say, dead on Monday, forgotten by Tuesday, buried by Friday.” c. After a failed attempt at hanging, a severely depressed prisoner receives a visit in his cell. The officer kindly shows him the proper way to make an effective noose, and says as he’s leaving “That’s a tip, for next time.” These examples from my research notebook concern the severely suicidal in prison, since suicide and self-harm in prison has been my main research area. Other researchers record similar incidents in their own research areas: hence, Joe Sim researching medical power in prison has recorded the routine practice of casual cruelty on the part of prison doctors. My terrain here is casual cruelty, as it is specifically practiced on vulnerable prisoners. The prisoners I am considering in this chapter are not the swaggering macho bad boys of Hollywood movies, nor the psychopathic murderers so beloved by the media. Their crimes are not planned: they are usually incompetent, minor but often hopelessly persistent, and frequently associated with the need to fund drug or alcohol addiction. The lives of such prisoners have a predictable collection of markers of economic, social, and psychological deprivation: a violent and abusive family background, time in various state institutional care-homes, or with series of foster parents, where the abuse has often continued, truancy or exclusion from education, illiteracy, inability to trust, lack of love, and an almost total absence of emotional nurture. Their previous attempts at suicide range from hanging, to jumping from high places, jumping in front of trains, smoke inhalation, drugs overdoses, selfstrangulation, and starvation. The vignettes I have related do not involve brutal beatings, sustained attacks, or premeditated violence, although there is a history of this phenomenon also in prisons. What I am concerned with here happens within the everyday currency of relationships, in which the relatively powerful treat the helplessly powerless with an unstudied, almost careless,

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____________________________________________________________ often humorous indifference to their feelings. This is an economy of cruelty: it is practiced in passing, not hidden from view, and witnessed without protest by others who happen to be there. Because my research makes central the experiences and subjectivity of prisoners, I am aware at first hand of the effects of this treatment. In the already vulnerable, it causes additional suffering in the deepest recesses of the self. It erases the self as an autonomous subject who, whatever the capacity and habit of that self to do wrong things, still wishes to be dealt with humanely and fairly. In answer to my question “How would you like things to be different in prison?” a prisoner, who had been stripped of his clothing and put into an unheated and unfurnished cell for the night, following a suicide attempt, replied, “You know, just to be treated as human, like.” Let us map the terrain through which this kind of casual cruelty can be contextualised and understood. One lens through which to view this phenomenon is provided by Nietzsche.3 He had a clear idea of the futility of punishment, and he went on to examine and identify the primordial emotional impulses that lie behind punishment, and spoke of the entitlement to punishment, a clear forerunner of the ideology of deservedness. He discussed the primordial emotional impulses that lie behind punishment – the will to power, the pleasure, the desire. He speaks of a time when people were unashamed of their cruelty. For the Greeks, the most pleasure they could offer to their gods consisted of the joys of cruelty. It was enjoyable to watch others suffer, or to cause others to suffer. Nietzsche allowed that modern mankind is more domesticated, and yet until quite recently cruelty was “an ingredient of all joys….[T]here is no feast or celebration without cruelty.”4 He suggests that pleasure in cruelty has undergone a translation in order to fit with modern sensibilities: Perhaps it is even legitimate to allow the possibility that pleasure in cruelty is not really extinct today; only, given our greater delicacy, that pleasure has had to undergo a certain sublimation and subtilization, to be translated into imaginative and psychological terms in order to pass muster before even the tenderest hypocritical conscience.5 The casual cruelties I have mentioned do indeed speak of the endemic normality of cruelty. They are redolent of sublimation, and they are subtle, imaginative, and psychological ways of inflicting pain. Unfortunately, for many of us, they chime with our ideas about

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____________________________________________________________ deservedness. Prisoners deserve no better, so the argument goes, because they brought their fate upon themselves. So degrading are populist attitudes toward punishment that these psychological forms of cruelty often pass muster with us. They sit, with only the mildest discomfort, with our tender, hypocritical, liberal, humanist, democratic conscience. The adversarial nature of modern criminal justice, combined with a superficial mass media approach, promotes a culture in which we believe passionately in winners and losers, good and evil, crime and punishment, and other simplistic dichotomies. These dichotomies skate over the complexity of crime, and the requirement for a range of complex responses in order to prevent re-offending and the creation of further victims. Let us look a little closer at prison officer culture, where casual cruelty is practiced, on our behalf, on those deemed eligible for punishment. 2.

Prison Officer Culture In his research on prison officer culture, based on interviews with prison officers in an overcrowded Victorian prison in North West England, David Scott found culture to be rooted in the principle of “less eligibility.”6 In the eyes of officers, prisoners were less eligible for kindness than so-called normal people. They were described as “selfish, pathetic, childlike, untrustworthy, ill-disciplined, irresponsible, bad bastards, overtly demanding, inadequate, dangerous, layabouts, toe-rags, needy, druggies, contagious, scum, manipulators, wasters, users.” When not addressing them by name or nickname, officers addressed them as “dickheads,” “cunts,” “bollocks.” and “wankers.” When prisoners addressed staff, it had to be “Boss,” “Officer,” “Mr.,” or “Sir.” This nomenclature is significant: it emphasises lesser eligibility and a dehumanised construction of the prisoner. At the same time, it emphasises respect and gratification for the superiority of officers. The closer the officers were, in their daily work, to prisoners, the more pronounced was this doctrine. In these and other ways, prisoners are traditionally essentialised as other: they are lesser, and this rationalisation means that there is no obligation to recognise their human rights. Their status as inferior beings is deeply engrained in the psyche and belief system of prison officers, whose identity is predicated upon an assumed superiority. That this rationalisation of the other is undertaken so energetically is of course significant, because on the whole in the U.K., prisoners and officers come from the same streets – the same social and economic strata of society, often sharing the same values, particularly in relation to race, gender, politics, and football. This sameness and similarity, which must be translated into difference, is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s discussion of

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____________________________________________________________ Roman law, when creditors could exact a pleasurable indignity from the body of the debtor, and the pleasure is all the greater in relation to the lowliness of the creditor’s own station in life. “For once he is given a chance to bask in the glorious feeling of treating another human being as lower than himself.”7 Let us not however misunderstand this apparent moral indifference in some prison officers, which allows them to practice and witness casual cruelty on a daily basis: it is actually part of a strategy for psychological survival, a human response to a situation that does not offer many opportunities to be humane. The prison officer role is one that is grounded in negativity, and in either creating, maintaining, or facilitating human pain, isolation, and protracted misery. There is great cost in this: prison officers struggle to maintain a macho image of toughness, physicality, and endurance. They cannot do it, and constantly point out to anyone who will listen how exhausted, stressed, demoralised,and burnt out they are. In Scott’s research, they talked obsessively about risk, and their perception that prisoners present a serious risk to staff, both in terms of potential violence and in transmitting HIV and contagious diseases. Added to this, they evinced high levels of mistrust and suspicion, and felt betrayed and unsupported by management, the Home Office, and the wider public. Small wonder then that, as an occupational group, prison officers have unprecedented levels of sickness and early retirement through stress. In order to understand their struggle and what Scott terms their “faltering machismo,”8 we need to look at their necessary engagement with the business of punishment. The idea of the prison is to punish: to punish is to cause intended harm. The modern prison does this in a rational, economic, and efficient way, within a bureaucracy. Humanitarian goals are extinguished by the inexorable and irreversible growth of rational bureaucratic administration. The performance indicators, the mission statements, the endless production of rules, regulations, quotas, risk assessments, – all of these exemplify “the steady and correct functioning of the increasingly bureaucratic organisation of private capitalism.”9 All of these bureaucratic goals give prison staff a non-humanist set of goals: they must fulfil managerialist targets that have essentially had the humanity drained out of them. The watchword of a successful bureaucracy is this: Order, without personal attachment. But prison is a failed bureaucracy, because the necessary studied neutrality and the passionless objectivity can never extinguish the passion and energy surrounding punishment. Prisons seethe with irrational and emotional stress. They may achieve order without personal attachment, but not without personal engagement, much of it hostile, complex and riven with ambiguity. Durkheim emphasised the spontaneous passion, stemming

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____________________________________________________________ from collective moral outrage, which fuels punishment, and drives the energy of the state.10 In prison, this moral outrage has constantly to be whipped up and harnessed. Officers must constantly avert their faces from the contexts of these broken lives they are managing: they must work hard at seeing prisoners as rational actors, who chose crime and by default chose prison. They cannot afford comprehension of context, because then they would no longer be able to essentialise prisoners as Other. 3.

Cruelty as a Cultural Value Prison officer culture does not operate in a vacuum. In wider society, we are witnessing the return to respectability of cruelty as a cultural value, as evidenced by gratuitously cruel game shows built around humiliation and pain, and increased levels of private cruelty in domestic settings. As a cultural value, cruelty has become respectable again in criminal justice: life-trashing prison sentences and the death penalty are vote-winners with the American electorate, whose appetite for expressive cruelty seemingly knows no bounds.11 In Maricopa County, Arizona, for example, the Sheriff has enjoyed wild popularity as a result of his programmes within the county jail system, designed to maximise humiliation, and to make that humiliation public.12 His most interesting innovation, from the perspective of cultural imagery, is to have introduced Jail Cam in 2000. Internal surveillance cameras were converted into projectors of everything going on in the jail onto the World Wide Web. Quickly, popularity threatened to overwhelm the technical capacity, with an average traffic flow of 2 to 3 million hits a day. It seems the public just love to sit down and watch prisoners being humiliated. Penal tactics such as public humiliation, boot camps, chain gangs and harsh treatment are familiar to us from history, and their re-emergence is perhaps less depressing than our twenty-first-century appetite for them. For were we not supposed to have grown out of such things? Durkheim identified the historical shift from extreme and painful punishment to the greater use of imprisonment as part of the great social evolution to a more organic, sophisticated and less severe society.13 Norbert Elias talked about the trickle-down effect of civilising values, and produced a strong thesis about moving the body and its intimate workings behind the scenes of society.14 These historical shifts of Durkheim and Elias are contradicted by the current climate of cruelty, and the public spectacle of humiliation as entertainment, which is an important reversal in the patterns we have hitherto discerned in modernisation and penality

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____________________________________________________________ 4.

Transcending Culture and Context Perhaps casual cruelty really is as visceral, natural and pleasing to the human condition as Nietzsche claims. And perhaps we do cloak it in the hypocritical veneer of virtue. But this is not the whole story: as I have indicated, cruelty is heavily dependent upon context. So can we transcend the populist preoccupation with punishment? Can we deal with the type of offender considered in this chapter in other ways, so that casual cruelty is not facilitated? I believe that we can, and that other way is through restorative justice. Restorative justice is an old traditional response to crime which is simultaneously very modern, in that it is being developed successfully in Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., and many other countries.15 It is a process whereby all the parties with a stake in a particular conflict or offence get together in order to resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the conflict or offence. Offenders acknowledge the impact of what they have done, and they commit themselves to reparation. Victims have their harm or loss recognised and acknowledged, and what they say is included in a formulated plan whereby the offender makes amends for the harm done. Rather than having the principle of intended harm at its core, restorative justice has the principle of healing at its core.16 This form of justice recognises that harm has been done, and it demands that the offender accepts responsibility for that harm. Having done so, the task remains to arrive at some form of reparation, or restorative solution. The goal of this is to restore the balance of what was harmed in the commission of the act. By victimising another, the offender destroyed the notional harmony of the community. So the dispute is brought to the community, and it is the representatives of the community who try, in the name of all of us, to restore the balance of harmony. This approach works hard at healing the emotional harm caused by the commission of crime, and it draws on a network of organisations providing dialogue, negotiation, and problem-solving. The aim is a greater sense of community safety and social harmony. All over the world, this approach is producing lower levels of recidivism, and thus fewer victims. It is producing more observed change in offenders’ lives and greater satisfaction on the part of victims. Restorative justice is not adversarial in the sense of aiming to produce winners and losers. It is not retributive in the sense of looking back at the crime and wanting to avenge it. It is problem-solving, forward looking, and utilitarian. It emphasises the role that ALL members of the community can play through more active involvement in the justice process. Anyone can get involved: volunteers are the mainstay of many

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____________________________________________________________ locally grown mediation networks, or youth justice panels, or victim support schemes. It says to the offender, “You, too, are a member of the community, but you have violated our deepest principles. How are you going to repair that?” When the offender has done the reparation work, then restorative justice insists on that offender being re-integrated back into the community. The community forgives: this is in deep contrast to offenders that emerge from prison and remain stigmatised and monstered, often unable to get work or housing. Whatever shape restorative justice takes, it must be underpinned by a formal framework, and a set of standards that are adhered to. There must be remedies when it goes wrong, and follow-through on decisions that are made, whether these occur in victim offender mediation and dialogue, family group conferencing, circle sentencing, reparative probation community boards, or any of the other restorative justice interventions now in use in Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S., and elsewhere.17 The underpinnings of last resort remain legal, and the bottom line is that if participants do not comply with requirements, they will end up in court. But the primary underpinnings are about responsibility, consent, co-operation and good faith. In restorative justice, parties participate voluntarily because of their commitment to formulating a plan and a way forward that promotes healing and forgiveness. 5.

Conclusion The image of the prison officer in a brutal culture is a paradigm for all of us, situated in a world where torture, genocide, war, and poverty are endemic. So let us not cast the casually cruel prison officer as other. He is us. This, after all, is an image of our lightness of being, an image of who we really are. In the absence of attention, education, consistent care and support, the burden of dealing with human perversity and wickedness is too heavy for us, and we turn away into the complacency of the self and the lightness of being. We do not want to have to judge ourselves harshly for not being able to pick up the heaviest of burdens. And so we continue to work hard at the rational calculus: we remind ourselves that those suffering are others, and they chose their fate. This calculus means, as Kundera puts it, that everything is pardoned in advance and so everything is cynically permitted, including the ubiquity of casual cruelty. But this is not who we have to be. We have the moral capacity to recognise the ethical burdens, in whatever walk of life we find ourselves, and if we are helped and supported we can shoulder this burden and deal humanely with others. What we have, in the way of arrangements to deal with the mad, the sad, and the bad, may pass muster with our tender and hypocritical consciences. But these arrangements and the punitive populism surrounding them prevent us from recognising the utter futility

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____________________________________________________________ of punishment. So we fail to confront who we really are, and this prevents us from working on reciprocal relationships of respect and responsibility with those who are so much more like us than we can bear to allow. It is indeed unbearable to look on our fallen, suffering self, unless we can cast him as other. In restorative justice, those reciprocal relationships of respect and responsibility are given a framework and allowed to blossom. We can recognise the other as ourselves, and work together towards restoring relationships of trust, consent and mutuality. Every time that happens, the chances of becoming a victim have been reduced for someone somewhere, casual cruelty has been defeated, and the moral glue that binds us all together has been imperceptibly thickened.

Notes . Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (London: Faber & Faber 1984), 3-5. . Joe Sim, “Whose Side Are We Not On? Researching Medical Power in Prison,” in Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful: Scrutinizing States and Corporations, edited by Steve Tombs and Dave Whyte (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 70-95. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals (New York: Anchor Books, 1956). 4. Ibid., 215. 5. Ibid., 200. 6. David Scott, Ghosts Beyond Our Realm: Less Eligibility, Human Rights, and Prison Officer Discourse, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Preston: University of Central Lancashire, 2003). 7. Nietzsche, 212. 8. See Scott. 9. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 988. 10. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1901). 11. Jonathan Simon, “‘Entitlement to Cruelty’: The End of Welfare and the Punitive Mentality in the United States,” in Crime, Risk, and Justice, eds. K. Stenson and R. R. Sullivan, (Cullompton: Willan, 2001). 12. See Mona Lynch, “Punishing Images: Jail Cam and the Changing Penal Enterprise,” Punishment and Society 6 (July 2004): 255270. 13. See Durkheim.

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____________________________________________________________ 14. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 15. See Harry Mika and Kieran McEvoy, eds., International Perspectives on Restorative justice: Conference Report (Belfast: Queen’s University: Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 2001). 16. For the underpinning philosophical principals, see John Braithwaite and Philip Pettit, Not Just Deserts: A Republican Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). 17. See, for example, Gordon Bazemore and Curt T. Griffiths, “Conferences, Circules, Boards, and Mediations: The ‘New Wave’ of Community Justice Decision-Making” in Federal Probation 61.2 (1997): 25-37.

Select Bibliography Bazemore, Gordon, and Curt T. Griffiths, Curt T. “Conferences, Circles, Boards, and Mediations: The ‘New Wave’ of Community Justice Decision-Making.” Federal Probation 61.2 (1997): 25-37. Braithwaite, John, and Philip Pettit. Not Just Deserts: A Republican Theory of Justice. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990. Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labour in Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1901. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939. Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. London: Faber & Faber, 1984. Lynch, Mona. “Punishing Images: Jail Cam and the Changing Penal Enterprise.” Punishment and Society 6 (July 2004): 255-270. Mika, Harry, and Kieran McEvoy, eds. International Perspectives on Restorative Justice: Conference Report. Belfast: Queen’s University: Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 2001. Nietzsche Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals. New York: Anchor Books, 1956. Scott, David. Ghosts Beyond our Realm: Less Eligibility, Human Rights and Prison Officer Discourse. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis. Preston, UK: University of Central Lancashire, 2003. Sim, Joe. “Whose Side Are We Not On? Researching Medical Power in Prisons.” Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful: Scrutinizing States and Corporations, edited by Steve Tombs and Dave Whyte. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Simon, Jonathan. “‘Entitlement to Cruelty’: The End of Welfare and the Punitive Mentality in the United States.” In Crime, Risk, and Justice, edited by Kevin Stenson and Robert R. Sullivan. Willan: Cullompton, 2001.

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____________________________________________________________ Weber Max. Economy and Society. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978.

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Damage: A Logic of Evil Wayne Cristaudo Abstract This paper is a phenomenological inquiry into “damage,” a term that has become widely used to describe a condition of the soul that often resorts to evil in order to “liberate itself.” Drawing primarily upon Josephine Hart’s Damage, a novel, which was also made into a film by Louis Malle, and the biography of Gary Gilmore and his family by his brother, Mikal Gilmore, A Shot in the Heart, I investigate the “logic” of evil that comes from damage. In both works we see how the damaged person creates a theatre of evil, in part to release the evil that has afflicted them, and, in part, to demonstrate, or wake people up to the evil-in-the world. The logic of damage involves a strategy of negative redemption. That is it mimics, yet inverts, the pattern of sacrifice at the heart of the redemptive mythos: it recognises the truth of sacrifice as essential to life’s reproduction, and it deploys sacrifice as a mode of healing, yet it is unable to accept or offer the consolation of surrender that is at the heart of genuine martyrdom and redemption. As I do this I draw attention to the fact that the “expressivist” representation of this “logic” as used in popular music, film, novels and biographies and diaries has been widely felt and known to be true, yet its truth has by and large been missed by the more reflexive representations deployed by philosophers and social theorists. Key Words: damage, demonic, evil, Gary Gilmore, Josephine Hart, love, martyrdom, philosophy, popular culture, redemption. Gary Gilmore to his brother, Mikal: “You see, I want some good to come from all this.”1 The narrator of Damage: “For those of you who doubt it – this is a love story.”2 1.

Introduction This paper explores the pattern of damage and damnation (the Old French dam, damme and Latin damnum, both meaning loss, supply the common root), and their peculiar logic of evil. It is a logic whose key “moments” are: untimely loss of innocence, unbearable suffering, a heightened sensitivity to the presence of evil, and, in some cases, a determination to release oneself from that state by finding a sacrificial victim, just as they have been a sacrificed to evil. This strategy of redemption through the use of evil I call negative redemption. To help illustrate this logic I have taken two works that achieved widespread popularity in the early part of the nineteen nineties, one is a

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____________________________________________________________ novel, Damage, by Josephine Hart; the other, Shot in the Heart, is a family biography by Mikal Gilmore, the rock journalist and brother of the murderer Gary Gilmore, who had been executed by a firing squad in 1977 after demanding that the state of Utah apply the death-penalty that had been handed down to him. I could, however, have taken any number of works ranging across genres, particularly from the last twenty to thirty years. For while the logic of damage has long been thoroughly explored in plays and novels (Hamlet, Lear, The Brothers Karamazov spring readily to mind as studies of damage), not only has the use of the word now become part of the un-reflexive parlance of the every-day, but representations of the logic of damage are now standard fare in music, theatre, novels, film, and television series.3 Philosophy, on the other hand, has tended to miss this logic. The most influential philosophers of modernity have generally reduced or ignored evil altogether. Spinoza insisted that evil was simply the name we give to what pains us and if we understood reality (rather than got lost in our imagination) we would know it didn’t exist; Kant made of evil a maxim of the will, thereby, in effect, agreeing that there was no such substance as evil; Nietzsche made evil into a relative concept expressing the mere fear and resentment of the enslaved; Heidegger has no place whatsoever for it; and most post-modernist social theorists (Baudrillard’s The Transparency of Evil a salutary exception) tend to follow Marx, who follows Rousseau, in ignoring evil altogether by making it an offshoot of defective social and economic arrangements. With some arresting exceptions (Bataille and Klossowski), it took the horrors of Auschwitz (the culmination of a very long process of evils) to wake philosophers up to seriously re-engage with evil.4 In sum, modern philosophy has, in the main, largely conspired to reduce evil to an idea whose substance is nothing. Concomitantly, when it does deal with evil it treats it as an ethical or moral problem, a problem to be solved by discovering the right rules or social arrangements.5 Popular culture, on the other hand, regularly engages deeply with and instructs us about evil as an existing force, and not primarily as a moral or ethical “idea.” In other words it tends to treat evil as real. In our age, the experience of having been damaged is widely felt, and thus there is no doubt for those who feel it, that it is real, that it is evil, and that it has a logic. Shot in the Heart and Damage both provide excellent explorations of the logic of damage. In Hart’s case the very title of the book suggests as much. And while Gilmore’s study does not deploy the word “damage” in the title, the word circulates with such frequency and at such critical moments throughout the book that a fairly accurate summary of the book would be: it is a study of familial and generational damage.

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____________________________________________________________ The pivotal point of the book is when Mikal halts the flow of the narrative and contemplates a school photograph of Gary: When I look at this photograph, I see a damaged boy. Or more accurately, I see the face of a broken angel as it looks away from the easy certainty that everyone else is looking toward and contemplates taking on the devil’s face for a lifetime fit.6 On the surface, Damage and Shot in the Heart would seem to be about two very different things. Hart’s novel tells a story of sexual obsession (which is what Louis Malle’s film concentrates on to the exclusion of the most important passages of dialogue in the book) between the unnamed narrator and his son’s (Martyn’s) lover and fiancée (Anna Barton). Shot in the Heart, on the other hand, is the history of how the violence of a family shapes the boy who is pushed from one violent institution (his family) to another (reform school then prison) until he, seemingly senselessly, kills two young men. He then becomes an international celebrity by forcing the state’s hand with his execution. Different surface narratives notwithstanding, Damage and Shot are both essentially about the re-creation or restaging of traumatic events in order to find release and redemption from the hell in which Anna and Gary have both been cast. The sexual obsession of Damage is only a part of a deeper longing. For Martyn’s father, it is a means of breaking out of a life of sleep-walking and “exploding” into life; something in him longs for the pain, destruction, and evil that will wake him up. For Anna, sex is a force she deploys to help her restage the event that has so deeply traumatised her. She has been damaged by the suicide of her incestuous brother, and her life is ruled by the need to pass on the damage, to find a sacrifice that will receive her pain and thus release her from the hell of her existence. She is not physically violent, but she carefully discerns the fault lines in the family she enters in order to brutally reveal the truth of the untruth binding the family members. Just as her trauma sprung from within a family where the calm surface concealed far more turbulent energies, she enters into another family to uncoil the tumultuous energies that are just waiting to be tapped by someone who can “see” the evil behind the veneer of goodness and comfort. The novel’s horrifying denouement – the death of her fiancé when he discovers Anna and his father fucking – is the genuine climax that she has been craving. In Gary Gilmore’s case, the senseless and brutal killing of two young men is a re-enactment of the senseless violence to which he was subject as a young boy. The rage he had stored up at his father and the systemic control mechanisms of reform schools and prisons was released

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____________________________________________________________ on two men as innocent as he once was. Gary’s raw aggression is as common amongst men who are damaged as Anna’s more contrived and cunning deployment of sex is among women who have been victims of incest. But what made Gary’s story such a significant one was his expansion of the stage upon which his re-enactment took place: from a small town affair, no more newsworthy than the thousands of other senselessly violent murders that take place each year, into a world-wide media event in which he would orchestrate his own murder and reactivate the killing machine of the state of Utah. 2.

Getting Damaged To be damaged is to experience the world as an infliction. It is to experience the cosmos in the exact opposite to Dante’s wondrous formulation “the love that moves the sun and other stars.” Receiving the rays of such love requires an openness to undeformed love (as opposed to self-deformed love) and being patient with the divine sequence of life’s gifts. Being damaged is to have been deprived of the right type of love at the right time. Hence there is no single way to become damaged. Being out of control, being deluded about one’s actions, being stupid, selfish, or all manners of inattentiveness, in addition to wanting to inflict harm, are all ways of doing damage. In Hart’s novel, the damage suffered by Anna comes from her brother’s suicide, due to her turning away from their incestuous relationship and her showing interest in another boy. Aston, the brother, may have wanted to punish Anna, though his primary motivation seems to have been to end his own agony. What he would not have foreseen is that the trauma induced in Anna would create in her the need to re-enact the incestuous pattern and destroy an entire family just as her family had been destroyed. By enticing father and son into a transgressive relationship, she has staged an impending catastrophe where the ones not knowing (Martyn, his mother, and sister) must be traumatised on the discovery of the truth created by her and the father. In Anna we see a soul whose damage has created a desolate self forever haunted by an impossible and ultimately deadly desire. Generally it is not uncommon for the victim of incest to split the self into a “too good to be true” (which is how both Martyn and his father see Anna) and an evil destructive shadow (which is exactly how the narrator’s wife, Ingrid, experiences her).7 Anna, in the most controlled and monstrous manner, is calmly and compulsively seeking for a sacrifice to release herself from the agony that Aston has passed onto her. The evil in this novel is bound up with every member of the field. Anna’s evil is intentional, but never solitary; it is always dependent upon the reaction of others. The father’s evil is due to reckless indifference and selfishness of the most vital and insatiable kind. But just as essential to the evil are the

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____________________________________________________________ innocent sacrifices, including Anna, as a young girl, and possibly even Aston. In a tragic sense, all of the innocent are either guilty of unawareness or (in Ingrid’s case) inaction. But, as inane and inappropriate as it would be to take this in terms of moral or judicial responsibility, the fact is that innocence feeds evil through its very existence and attractiveness. Innocence is the constant reminder of life before the fall: the fall into life as well as the fall of a life. To those whose experience of life is governed by its disintegrativeness, who are entrapped in the horrendous scatteredness of evil, the fragile unity of innocence is an unsurpassable temptation, a wondrous promise of a lost world. Without innocence there could no more be evil than there could be evil if creative and redemptive love did not exist. Evil is, inter alia, the thwarting of the hope of direct transition from innocence to redemptive love. It is always the end of innocence – innocence is a state too pure for the world’s possibilities. Evil is supra-individual. It can only exist where there is association and it makes as much sense to talk of a spirit of evil to describe a complex of associations as it does to talk about a spirit of a class, a group, a marriage, a friendship, a band, and so on. Evil is a vital substance that occupies a field; the paradox is that it is inseparable from the field. It is not reducible just to the one doing its final overt acts; again, the unintended acts which help form evil. The metaphor of hell fire is apposite for how evil works when it takes control of a territory; it is a conflagration devouring all in its way. Evil’s course is not immediately stopped by the sheer presence of goodness (however, an act of goodness, like an act of evil, lives beyond the time of its immediate expression.)8 It is the absence of the swirling cumulative nature of “lesser or unnoticeable evils” that was so conspicuous in the first full length telling of the Gilmore story, The Executioner’s Song, by one of America’s most popular novelists, Norman Mailer.9 The book came in a little under 1100 pages, and for all its detail didn’t begin to answer the question of why Gary killed Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell and then demanded the reactivation of the death penalty. It didn’t do this because Mailer addressed the question of who Gilmore was without any accurate information about the family in which Gary had been de-formed. Gary’s brother Mikal, on the other hand, knew where the murders of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell began. He understood the supra-individual quality of evil. The murders began before Gary’s birth and were prepared for in his childhood. Mikal knows that everyone in that household was damaged, and the damage didn’t start with Gary’s mother, Bessie, or his father, Frank Senior. On Bessie’s side there is her grandfather, Alma, who “would pull off the wooden leg” to beat his wife and children so severely that at times they had to be hospitalised; her father Will, who also beat his

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____________________________________________________________ family, on one occasion tying his son George to a tree and beating him unconscious. As for George, after he returned home from having been one of the soldiers who liberated the Nazi concentration camps, he would entice his young nieces and their friends into a room where he forced them to look at his photo-collection of emaciated survivors of the camps, of piles of corpses, and the pornographic pictures he had picked up in Paris. On the other side of the family, Frank Senior’s childhood was based on abandonment and lies, a pattern he reproduced in his adult life by continually adopting false identities and collecting and abandoning wives and children. In Mikal’s description of the Gilmore family, we are not witnessing a family that is vastly different from countless other families. But it is precisely through the details of the story that when are able to realise just how common and widespread the generation of evil is. The violence in such families is so fundamental to its perpetuity that only the most extreme deeds expose how badly de-formed the association is. The moralist and jurist in us want someone to take responsibility. And while the need to break out of the pattern is indisputable, the issue of responsibility is, Sartre notwithstanding, a judicial or moral category, not an existential one. That is, it is not derived from the reality of the situation but from a hope for change. The tragedy of evil is that no one is, but many always are, responsible. That is why Dostoevsky provides the formulation “We are all responsible from everybody” in The Brothers Karamazov as a means to try to overcome the damage that he sees that has befallen the Russian soul of his generation. Of course, the jurist in us responds: “This is too much!” It is far easier to blame the perpetrator or, failing that, the parents. The category error we all make time and time again is that we thoughtlessly confuse role and reality, name and outward characteristics. Alma, Will, and Frank Senior were no more able to be real “adults” or real parents, that is able to love and equip their children for life’s trials, than they could fly to the moon on broomsticks. What is true of them is true of the countless other “parents” who brutalise, sexually abuse, and abandon their children. It is so easy to say, “People like this shouldn’t have children.” But they do and they will. Unlike Alma and others, Mikal and his brother Frank acquired the wisdom not to have children, because they knew they were too damaged. Their wisdom was purchased with Gary’s murders. In sum, just as it takes many lifetimes (not discounting the odd miracle) to make even moderately good parents and children, it took many lifetimes to make Gary’s parents and hence to make Gary. This hard truth of the slowness of life-forming processes is one that the ancients and tribal peoples took very seriously. But we moderns do not wish to entertain such a possibility, lest it interfere with the accelerated modern rhythms of social and economic reproduction and our moral, judicial, and political faith in

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____________________________________________________________ individual sovereignty. However, it is this hard truth of the time required to nurture life that plays such a deep part in Mikal’s book. And it leads him at one point to write: “I need to interrupt here for a moment. An important thing just happened: The murderer in our story was born.” He then meditates upon the question: what separates this blue-eyed baby from the chilling blue-eyed killer on death row? His final answer is a “history of destruction.” Shot, as I have stressed, is not a moral treatise, and, if we are forced to use a philosophical description, it is much more a phenomenological depiction of the evils that culminate in Gary’s murders. Such a treatment by-passes the metaphysical and ultimately uselessly abstract question: “Was he pre-determined to commit murder?” At the same time it forces us to consider the much more concrete and hence much more important questions: “What damage was awaiting Gary as soon as he was born into the world?” and “What were Gary’s responses to the cruelty and violence that were inflicted on him at such a young age?” The question of Gary’s own will is really meaningless if we fail to address who Gary was and how he was formed.10 Perhaps nothing so powerfully anticipates the damage awaiting Gary than the story Mikal tells of the naming of Gary. Some few thinkers, including Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig, have attended to the importance of naming. It is one of our most ancient creative acts. It simultaneously injects a sense of destiny already deemed into the bearer of the new name, while leaving open space for the name to take on its own significance, to make its destiny afresh in the world. We are called and re-called by our names. In Gary’s case, his very name was hateful to his father, reminding him of Grady, the man who had stolen a former wife from him. In fact, Gary was the name chosen by his mother, but before he had received that name, Frank Senior had named him Faye Robert: Faye being the name of his mother, whom he hated; Robert the name of his other son, whom he not only, rightly, suspected of having an affair with Bessie, but also, wrongly, suspected was the true father of the boy. Days later, Faye Robert had been renamed Doyle by the woman manager of the Hotel Doyle, the hotel where the family had checked in. And whilst still a baby, as if to treat the name as a laughing stock, Frank Senior then thrust the surname of Laffo upon him, as he took off from Bessie and bounced bad cheques. This left Frank Senior in jail and Gary abandoned in an orphanage. After detailing this horrible story, Mikal ruefully reflects: There’s a horribly ironic twist that comes from all this name switching: What it means is, Gary Gilmore was never born; he would only die. (Years later, in fact, the federal penitentiary system would refuse me access to

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____________________________________________________________ my brother’s file because I could not prove that any such person by his name had ever been born, or had ever had an official name change.)11 Just as the very act of Gary’s naming was so loveless and hopeless, Frank’s own lovelessness would beat the blue-eyed boy into the cruel and twisted shape of a chilling killer. And Frank’s beating of Gary, like Gary’s murders, was his own beating back at the world that had beat him. Of course, there are many other important ingredients, including personal characteristics that assist the transition. The saddest thing in Gary’s case is that in any other environment, some of the qualities that helped turn him into a murderer, under other conditions, could have been virtues, namely outrage at injustice and courage.12 Gary himself had said that the fateful point in his life was as a thirteen year old when he decided to take a short cut through a thicket of brier bushes. What had seemed an easy short cut turned into a huge, tangled and all but impenetrable mass of thorns. Instead of turning around, Gary fought for hours until he made his way, cut and bleeding, through the thick brier patch. That day he learnt, as Mikal notes, “to kill or silence the part of himself that needed to cry out in fear or pain.”13 The image of Gary cutting his way through the thicket of thorns is almost an archetypical depiction of a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood. Under other circumstances something beautiful and strong would have awaited him, instead of his own sad bloody monstrousness. That Gary knew that he was worth more than a beating bag for his father and “correctional” guards, and that he would not passively accept their brutality seemingly speaks of something courageous and strong. And yet, as Mikal had noted, what could and should have been courage and strength were now much darker forces: Gary “finally found the power to ruin his own life and to extinguish any other life that it might take to effect that destruction.”14 From that point on one could easily take as a gloss for Gary’s life the line that Anna Barton offers her lover, by way of a warning: “Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.”15 The story of the final formation of Gary’s wilfulness helps answer the question that is invariably asked when one learns of the childhood abuse suffered by a killer: “But why do so few become murderers, when so many are abused?” A part of the answer is that the killer, who as a child suffered deeply from injustice, often became more defiant and more courageous in the face of injustice, and then more pathologically determined to show the world the injustice s/he has suffered. The self’s need for mimesis and outward expression which is so important in human self-definition and understanding, from tribal ritual to epic to drama through to our entertainment society, is but the soul’s need

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____________________________________________________________ to express and feed off others’ expressions of its loves and hates. The self that has been de-formed, unless re-formed, must express itself in the deformed way it appears in the world. None of the other Gilmore boys was as wilful as Gary, but as Mikal notes, each one was damaged and the world was very lucky that only one of the Gilmore boys turned into a murderer. Frank Junior, like Mikal, wracked by guilt by what Gary had done, was a vagrant shuffling through the loneliest haunts he could find to be spared visibility. Mikal rightly underscores the common condition uniting the murderer and his living-dead brother: That one child killed and the other did not is, obviously, an important matter. But the fact that my brother Frank wasn’t a killer does not mean he did not also suffer a damage worthy of killing. There are all kinds of ways to die in this world. Some die without taking others with them. It’s a victory, no doubt, but that doesn’t make it the same as redemption.16 Then there is Mikal’s other brother, Gaylen, who died of knife wounds, inflicted by a husband of one of the many married women he slept with. His sexual preference was with women who were already in committed relationships, if possible with friends of his. Gaylen didn’t damage other families and relationships by killing people. He simply, much more like Anna Barton, risked killing other people’s relationships by combining that most volatile of human cocktails: desire mixed with deceit, leaving room for jealousy to do the rest. As for Mikal himself, his damage has a special twist. Not only was he born into a family of such devastating damage, but he was singled out to be the recipient of his father’s love. Perhaps, this helped him focus his energies and develop his acute descriptive powers. Today we have largely become insensitive to the religious echo of professing and the responsibility before God of one’s undertaking in the word “profession,” though the German Beruf retains perhaps more starkly the religious sense of being called. But if one has any ear for what Mikal is saying, that is, if one takes him as seriously as the pain of the subject requires, Mikal was called to be the witness of his brother and what made him. Shot is his response to that call, the book that his profession had prepared him for, and the declaration he is called to make publicly, if not before God, at least before another of His names, the judge of the world. His book is an attempt at atonement. The price Mikal pays for being a loved member of the family and witness to its evil is daily and nightly horror. One of the important truths

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____________________________________________________________ that Shot addresses is the hauntedness of damage. Mikal’s mother, Bessie, lived in fear of haunted houses and ghosts, and Mikal, who does not want to believe in them, cannot escape them. The fact that Mikal does not want to believe in ghosts and demons is as irrelevant to their presence as Ivan’s disbelief in God is to his nightmarish encounter with the devil in The Brothers Karamazov. The dreams are as much a part of Mikal’s life as hunger or the need to breathe. Devils and ghosts are part and parcel of the field of damage, no less tangible to the damaged than the clear objects of daylight are to the rest of us. They inhabit a different zone of our being, a zone that our reflexive discourses generally explain as unreal. It is a zone which psychiatrists, not altogether successfully, try to dissolve through drugs and therapy. But sanity is not preserved by simply saying, “I am sane.” Nor do ghosts stop haunting or demons stop visiting those who say, “You don’t exist.” It is a difficult thing not to assume that the lines of vision that we are used to in daylight and the demarcation of the shapes of daily-life that we work with are the only lines and shapes. But being damaged opens up other lines of vision, other shapes and meanings than the ones we effortlessly, and more often than not thoughtlessly, take as reality. Such an opening facilitates a deeper grasp of reality, yet it is also dangerous, teetering on the delusional in so far as it tunnels concentration and vision upon the (potentially) evil, whilst blocking out the multiplicity of the countervailing forces of love. That the damned would experience evil in a personified form, while of no surprise to religious adherents throughout the world, is something that those of us whose names for the processes of reality have been cleansed by the rays of the secularised spirit find difficult to swallow. Yet feeling damned and seeing the world in a damned way brings with it its own logic, its own modality of perception and accompanying objectifications. While the devil is not visible in the glare of enlightenment, evil is more problematic.17 The damaged, and those sensitised by evil, see and deal with evil as a substance, as a real force no less real than the wind. Indeed, wind and evil are similar in so far as everybody witnesses their effects. In the case of evil, those sufficiently attuned to the swirl of energies that characterises evil are able to see the evil in the behaviours between people who are carrying out or facilitating evil through their manipulations or thoughtless behaviours before the effects are manifest. Those who have not been personally awakened by evil or who have forgotten and whose attention has lapsed (that is, the overwhelming majority) have a way of seeing that makes daily life more facile (in the best and worst sense). That is, the overwhelming majority have a shallower, but broader visual field. (Perhaps this was not always the case, especially in a more religious age when awareness of one’s own sinful nature was a constant of daily life, though such a sensitivity to evil

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____________________________________________________________ was far from being all good or healthy; evil had other ways of spreading itself). That shallow field means that the majority most of the time do not see evil in formation. In the main, evil is recognised after it is too late. The corollary of this is that the shallowness of most people’s visual field that makes so facile (in the best sense of the word) the reproduction of daily life, is also of great advantage to those who knowingly do evil. 3. Negative Redemption We are all made and makers. The damaged, though, have been made in a certain way. They have been robbed of the world as it looks and, in many ways, is to the innocent and the un-broken; the latter, the majority, are, from under this optic, “nothing special,” and they continually contribute to the evil of the world through their daily inattentions. The damaged know of their own lost-ness. What they are seeking is a way out of the loss, isolation, pain and sense of damnation, that is, release from the agony. To be released from the unbearable agony of the world and to see the intrinsic harmony and unity of life is to be redeemed. It is not my point to argue that there is any redemption beyond this world, but people certainly believe that there is redemption beyond the state of the world or beyond one’s state in the world (it is one thing uniting secularists with faith in politics and people of diverse religious faiths). The motif of “redemption through striving” of Goethe’s Faust captures an important insight into the human condition itself, namely that we must move and that very necessity of movement opens up the possibility of the redemption of our life’s meaning. In this sense in so far as we all move, we all potentially seek redemption, and our daily diet of television shows and films and novels are continually inventing scenarios of redemption to entertain us. Evil and saintliness represent the two extremities of striving. And who can say that the path of the saint is not open to the damaged? Certainly, the belief is widely felt in our culture. Christianity, departing so radically from Greek ethical thinking in this respect, makes as its cornerstone the belief that we are all fallen/sinners/damaged. And sinners can be saved in an instant by surrender to his/her maker. Certainly also, in a secular age we are still nourished by stories of those who have turned around and redeemed their lives by deeds of compassionate service.18 But there is one huge problem with the path of the saint for the damaged. At its most demanding moment, the saint’s path is the martyr’s path, not a hero’s path. The difference, so often blurred in discussion of the martyr and the hero, is of fundamental importance to the point I am making. The martyr must embrace a faith so completely that his or her own death is recognised as the necessary condition of doing God’s work in a world full of evil. At the heart of the redemptive mythos is the same realisation that drives the

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____________________________________________________________ damaged to find a sacrificial victim to release them from the damnation: the realisation that sacrifice is essential to life. But the saint knows that he or she must themselves be the sacrifice. Their life and death become an inspiration, not today, maybe not even tomorrow, to conduct the energies of life into new configurations other than those that have been de-formed and/or destroyed by the implosions and explosions of evil. The martyr dies rather than contributes in any way to evil (just as Mikal is a witness, Frank Jr. is a martyr to the family). The consolation of surrender that is at the heart of genuine martyrdom and redemption is the antithesis to the absolute lack of surrender to, absolute mistrust and absolute defiance of life which characterises damage. Being damaged is to be death’s servant rather than life’s. And the greatest of questions regarding life’s meaning is: which serves which, life death, or death life? Being damaged brings with it the knowledge that one is dead in life and hence the overwhelming sense that death is stronger than life. The price for martyrdom, though, is extreme. Many would say, perhaps not wrongly, that it is mad or fanatical. It renounces all willingness to deploy violence on behalf of all others, including infants and the most vulnerable. All are surrendered; everyone is expected to pay the same price as the martyrs themselves. But it is precisely the defiance of this all-encompassing command that binds together the damaged and the hero. The hero, like the martyr, risks his or her own death for something higher (God, the empire, the state, the city, the family, the beloved, and so on), but he or she is willing to use violence, and hence evil, as part of that fight. The forces of destruction are not activated by the martyr, rather they are absorbed in the faith to open up the way for God’s will to come back into a world too violent and evil for His presence. The martyr’s faith in God’s activity is absolute; the hero has faith in a cause or even God, but he or she also must act and that may require the expenditure of violence: Bonhoeffer was a hero, von Moltke was a martyr.19 The martyr and the damaged are both sacrificial victims. But the damaged have not initially chosen their status. Or to say it slightly differently, the martyr knows that the world is full of evil and does not expect people to act other than they do; there is total surrender, hence no expectation other than God’s love being stronger than anyone’s death. The damaged, though, have been ripped from their state of innocence, their childish expectations dashed. Their sense of injustice is first and foremost a sense of the injustice of their own suffering, understandable given the severity of injury that is sufficiently traumatic to the soul. The hero is a closer relative to the damaged than the martyr is to the damaged for another reason. The hero’s survival skills must be finely honed in order to stay of heroic service. The damaged too, as we have said, make survival of tantamount importance, but, like the hero, the damaged person skirts close to the edge

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____________________________________________________________ of death. Death is an ever-present temptation, a gaping opportunity for redemption and release. Yet survival, that is continuation in the state, is the reality that can be trusted. It is purchased with the belief that there is no façade separating reality and appearance. And there is precious little that the damaged can trust apart from their own capacity to survive. To them the self is the most reliable thing, because being damaged shows that the rest of the world is not trustworthy. Being damaged means folding the self in upon itself as a protective mode against the flow of the too harsh world. Within that fold, one seemingly has control. But no one can have total control – the recognition of which is widespread amongst religions and philosophies which teach the doctrine of surrender of the self to God, Christ, the Soul, Reason, and the Tao among others. The damaged, as far seeing as they are in their sharper attunement to what is and does damage, are, nevertheless, enmeshed in an illusion, namely that they are in control. They may have the patience, will, intelligence, tenacity, and so on to push into regions and set up situations others would not dream of doing or surviving. But they lack control in so far as their behaviours are themselves compulsive. Compulsiveness is by no means a bad thing; the greatest things come by compulsions, but it is the formation of the soul that gives our compulsions their fruit. Damaged souls are souls whose compulsions are also deformed.20 Unless the damaged can heal, the damaged are damned to patterns of striving that reflect and hence reinforce their damage. If all striving is itself a kind of redemption, then the striving that increases the hold of negation over the living, that expands the nought of a self that is at once in control (in freakish control) due to its inward folding (so mysticlike, yet one abysmal step short of the mystic’s total surrender) is striving into the nothing. It is a negative striving that is equally a negative redemption. That is a path that does indeed have redemptive qualities, but it is only achieved by going further into evil, by doing evil and by shattering lives so that others “suffer into truth” (to use Aeschylus’ phrase). Taking our cue from Harold Bloom’s gnostic apothegm that “what can be broken should be broken,” we are all on earth to be broken. The only question is how and when. We call those evil who take it upon themselves to do the breaking, that is, who break with that deeply felt belief that we are on earth to flourish. Only God, or, in our more secular age, nature alone – and not nature working through men and women with careless, selfish, or destructive intent – has the right to introduce the hour and means of breakage. The damaged have usually been broken before their time, and some deep part of them knows this. The paradox of negative redemption is this: nothing better alerts us to the forces that facilitate premature breaking than an act of evil. The devastating

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____________________________________________________________ consequences of evil force people to wake up to the evil they spawn or feed. In Hart’s novel, there is an added dimension, which is the narrator’s hunger to be touched by evil. A man or a woman who is hungry for life but is incapable of feeling has a particular kind of energy. It is as if they bore a mark upon their forehead and it is like a life/death line to the damaged person, a line of energy that promises a transference from one to the other. The vampire is a common way in which this kind of psychic disposition finds a mytho-poetic representation. The vampire is the damaged person who must drain the energy (drink the blood) of the living. The importance of sexual charisma as a seductive strategy is a common way in which the energy transfer begins. The uninitiated, the victim, is drawn to the charismatic power, and inner depth of the damaged soul. Damage, to repeat, gives depth because the psychic wound means that the damaged one is constantly in a state of being in pain, and not just lifelessly moving across the surface of being. What is, in fact, a tortured and terrible state of existence can seem to be awesomely deep, wonderfully interesting. Hart has put her finger on, or rather dug into an important, and little understood, phenomenon: that souls communicate their innermost needs at a level preceding speech, that certain kinds of people are powerfully drawn to each other to learn about life, to be in life, to sacrifice themselves and others. The fact that lives and families are destroyed as a consequence of this kind of psychic attraction is precisely the point. That the “innocent” one doesn’t know it is happening is also frequently an essential part of the experience. This aspect of the experience is also powerfully drawn in the novel. First there is the narrator’s laughable belief that he is in control, as if there will be no serious consequences, as if this kind of action could not irrupt into the surface smashing his, his son’s, and his wife’s reality to bits. That he believes he is in control only goes to show how much he has to learn, how desperately he needs to learn, and that is the real purpose of the sexual obsession. The experience we are talking about here is not primarily about the triumph of erotic love, but about the transmission of knowledge that uses the erotic as a basis for its possibility. Martyn’s father has sex with Anna Barton so that he can gain a wisdom; Anna Barton has sex with Martyn’s father so that she can produce a wisdom and in so doing release herself from a burden. The wisdom is generated by the death of the son, and the truth of what father, wife, and son and daughter really had exploding into existence – what they really had was not a loving constellation, but cold, unfeeling, and numbing, a dwelling incapable of protecting itself from one of the most fundamental forces of life. Sex is a force, but not so much for pleasure as for energistic transference so that truth of a group created reality really reveals itself. Damage is a love story

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____________________________________________________________ because it tells the story of what love and its lack do. Although the erotic is the way in which the love commences, by the novel’s end Martyn’s father carries within himself a kind of love that is way deeper than the erotic. His compulsive love for Anna has been so powerful that it has destroyed everything around him. After that, sex is only a minor, if not altogether irrelevant power. 4.

Conclusion In the stories of the “fictional” Anna Barton and the “real” Gary Gilmore, we can discern how damaged people may do evil to awaken people to the evil of the world, to a world formed by the very evil that has befallen them. Having become the sacrifice of the evil of others, they seek out some other to sacrifice. The world becomes for them a theatre in which they re-enact the damage done to them in order to redeem themselves from hell. But their redemption increases the expanding circles of hell. Evil is not transcended by them; they are, and remain, its perpetrators as well as its victim. Any transcendence that occurs after their actions is by way of the others’ love being stronger, over time, than the realm of death that they have enlarged. The awakening into evil is a brutal and cruel affair; it is no less an awakening because of that. That Martyn’s father wishes to be awoken into life, to be redeemed from his slumber, means that there is an exchange of deadly and dangerous gifts. In Gary’s case, he shows the world the evil of the random violence of rage that he was subject to as a boy by randomly killing in moments of rage two young men. But then he ups the stakes by demanding the killing machine be reactivated, thus, as Mikal notes, forcing the state to be complicit in his own murder. As he writes: He made them (the State of Utah and death penalty advocates) not just his allies, but he also transformed them into his servants: men who would kill at his bidding, to suit his own ideals of ruin and redemption. By insisting on his own execution – and in effect directing the legal machinery that would bring that execution about – Gary seemed to be saying: There’s really nothing you can do to punish me. Because this is precisely what I want, this is my will. You will help me with my final murder.21 He had opened the floodgates for a mass of new killings. What, he asks, does it matter that all these rapists and murderers are going to die? For him, they all deserved to die. He had already died as a young boy because of the behaviour of men who, if not on death row, should have been (from

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____________________________________________________________ his perspective at least). What elevated Gary’s theatrical enactment above the countless other ones, which occur each day and are propelled by the overwhelmingly similar intergenerational patterns and motives, was that with his demand to be executed, things stopped, and people, even around the world, took notice. In his telling of the story, Mikal shows the extent of the evil that had formed Gary and that had expressed itself in his murders. To this extent he goes someway towards redeeming (though not undoing) the evil by educating his readers into the truth about the role that the intergenerational damage played in Gary’s evil. His redemptive act, the writing of the book, occurred years after Gary’s murders and execution. That I write of this now is further testimony to the continuity of the importance of his redemptive striving and the way in which that striving continues across space and time. It does not make Gary’s evil any less evil, any less negative. On the contrary, Mikal specifically states (and Gary agreed) that he thinks Gary would not only have willingly escaped if he could have but he would have murdered Mikal himself and anyone else who stood in his way. Finally, Shot and Damage are recent popular expressions of an understanding of evil that has become widespread in our time. Generally, our contemporary philosophical understanding has not caught up with the logic of evil that is summed up in the notion of damage. By focussing upon the pattern of the particular logic of damage, more specifically upon its theatrical character and its motif of negative redemption, I have sought to engage in the kind of phenomenological exploration that can assist philosophy’s role amongst the reflexive discourses, in general, and, more specifically, its attunement toward the forces of evil. 22

Notes 1. Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart, (London: Penguin, 1994), 485. 2. Josephine Hart, Damage, (London: Arrow, 1991), 216. 3. Indicative of the widespread use of the word was its appearance on the cover of Time Magazine, 10 June 1991: “Does Evil Exist? Is it just the damage of a difficult world? Or something darker?” The writer of this piece, Stan Morrow, was sensitive enough to the word’s common circulation, even though he had failed to appreciate that the term was not primarily used as an alternative to evil but as one of its modes. I should also add here that even in the earlier part of last century one can occasionally come across the word in a way that sounds strikingly contemporary, such as in Gamaliel Bradford’s (1863-1932) Damaged Souls, (London: Constable, n.d.). I am not sure whether J.B. Ballard was correct in a throw-away observation that “the volatile landscape of the mid-60s…made a virtue of psychic damage,” The Kindness of Women,

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____________________________________________________________ (London: Harper Collins, 1991), 151, but by the 1990s a look at the lyrical content of much rock music would confirm that this was definitely the case in large cultural pockets. To name just a handful of the most commercially popular bands and artists: Black Flag (who recorded a song called “Damage”), Nine Inch Nails (one of whose songs is “Somewhat Damaged”), Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Korn, Radio Head, Tool, Slipknot, and Tori Amos. 4. Arendt, Adorno, and Levinas are, of course, three of the more important philosophers who begin to engage more seriously with evil. 5. Recently, for example, Alain Badiou, Evil: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, translated by Peter Hallward (London: Verso: 2002). 6. Shot, 189. Also see 156, 210, 333, 339, in which Mikal emphasises the role that damage plays in the story. 7. See, for example, Sylvia Fraser, My Fathers House: A Memoir of Incest and Healing (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1987). 8. This flies in the face of what we want from justice and ethics, individual responsibility and proportionality. Justice captures the symptom, but not the beginning. In much the same way, a man with Hitler’s or Stalin’s character could only gain political power where the cultural soil allowed such a noxious plant to grow so high. Justice is wise after the event. An international court might succeed in making a spectacle of responsibility and culpability, but it is a backward looking affair clasping at the husks of evil well and truly done and fled. The complicity of associates who feed evil, and without whom evil could not expand, is too hard for justice or law to deal with. Meanwhile, the guilty become the spectacle for the rest of us to gaze upon as they are sacrificed for the restoration of “goodness” and order. By punishing them we are able to find someone whose will has made them also the willing scapegoat, the sacrifice that bears the evils that have facilitated their formation. 9. Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song, (New York: Vintage, 1979). But even had he had information about the Gilmore family, Mailer’s role in the Jack Abbott affair makes one doubt whether he was capable of seeing what Gilmore was a part of and what was making him. While Mailer was researching The Executioner’s Song, Abbott had begun corresponding with Mailer about prison life. On the basis of his literary ability, Mailer campaigned for Abbott’s release, which was secured. Within days of getting out of prison, Abbott stabbed and killed a waiter who wouldn’t let him use a toilet. Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast (New York: Vintage, 1981), the book that briefly made him a literary star, is such a hateful, and hence powerful, yet self-pitying, work that only someone who has no idea of what damage does and what the damaged can do would have not read the intent to kill in the text.

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____________________________________________________________ 10. Shot, 271. 11. Ibid., 122. 12. Ibid., 175-176 where Mikal after saying “the outrage and unfairness of being beat that way became a sticking point in his heart” recounts how Gary would spend his entire life enacting the drama of his father’s punishment challenging guards to beat him harder then challenging them yet again by abusing them. Not insignificantly, Gary’s last words were: “There will always be a father.” 13. Shot, 183. 14. Ibid., 183 15. Damage, 42. 16. Shot, 271-272. 17. Jeffrey Burton Russell’s The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), the culmination of a number of previous books on the devil, is an excellent exploration of why it is foolish to dismiss talk of the devil as delusional, instead of exploring more thoughtfully what such depictions of the devil tell us about the collective wisdom we have gathered about evil. 18. The story of Jimmy Boyle’s transformation from one of England’s most wanted gangsters to youth worker and sculptor (detailed in his Sense of Freedom (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1977)) is a classic story of redemption. 19. Both were opposed to Hitler, but Bonhoeffer supported assassination while von Moltke could not. 20. I am all too aware that this talk of forms is deeply reminiscent of Aristotle and the scholastic doctrine of substantial forms. That doctrine, so evident in the political thought of Aquinas, may give the impression I am endorsing the Aristotelian view of the mean and normalcy and the subsequent hierarchical social patterning derived from it. Here I will simply say that I think the Jewish and Christian emphasis upon the potency and the divinity of love offers an alternative and, potentially at least, a much more proliferate and dynamic vision of expressive form not bound by genus and species as both the Platonic and Aristotelian visions are. 21. Shot, xii, emphasis in original. 22. Without Wendy Baker’s erudition, indefatigable energy, and damn near infuriating demand for clarification, this paper would still be a book review. The paper also benefited greatly from Natasha Skradol’s further infuriating requests for even more rewriting. I would also like to thank Rob Fisher for organizing the Human Wickedness Conference, where this paper was first presented, and Margaret Breen for the final eagle eye edit.

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Select Bibliography Abbott, Jack. In the Belly of the Beast. New York: Vintage, 1981. Badiou, Alain. Evil: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2002. Ballard, J. B. The Kindness of Women. London: Harper Collins, 1991. Boyle, Jimmy. A Sense of Freedom. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1977. Bradford, Gamaliel. Damaged Souls. London: Constable, n.d. Fraser, Sylvia. My Fathers House: A Memoir of Incest and Healing. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1987. Gilmore, Mikal. Shot in the Heart. London: Penguin, 1994. Hart, Josephine. Damage. London: Arrow, 1991. Mailer, Norman. The Executioner’s Song. New York: Vintage, 1979. Morrow, Stan. “Does Evil Exist? Is It Just the Damage of a Difficult World? Or Something Darker?” Time Magazine, 10 June 1991. Russell, Jeffrey Burton. The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

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Part III Evil and the Arts

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Jack Be Evil, Jack Be Quick: Reflections on the Necessary Evils of 24 Ted Turnau Abstract This paper explores the narrative world of the American actionadventure television show 24 to see how it understands evil (especially the evil done by its hero, Jack Bauer). The putatively realistic use of time in 24 actually collapses time, making questions regarding evil difficult to broach because there is no time for reflection. The reason for this collapse of time is that the world of 24 is under constant threat, making the hero’s evil excusable. Further, the hero is coded within the program as simultaneously “one of us” and omni-competent at fighting the bad guys. And Jack’s character bears a striking resemblance to post-9/11 America – wounded, but ready to do what he must to get the job done. Jack is still, by narrative fiat, the good guy, even when he does evil. The paper contains an epilogue in which the author reflects the purpose of such popular cultural analysis: to encourage moral reflection when shows short-circuit such reflection; and to understand how popular culture has taken on a quasireligious function in our secularised cultural environment vis-à-vis our understanding of evil. Key Words: evil, television, popular culture, Ricoeur, narrative, time, September 11, 2001, secularisation. 1.

Introduction Searching for a show to replace the popular X-Files, America’s Fox Network, on October 30, 2001, launched 24, a show about counterterrorist agent Jack Bauer and his quest to save a presidential candidate from assassination. Though it struggled initially in the ratings, it garnered critical praise and several awards, and it survived to draw stronger ratings in its second season and third seasons.1 In its first season, Jack Bauer (played by the ever-intense Kiefer Sutherland) was portrayed as a proficient, inventive, and at times ruthless operative who only wanted to protect his family and do his job. And he did get the job done despite impossible odds (and that is part of the fascination of the show – “How will Jack pull the rabbit out the hat this episode?”). In season two (taped after the September 11 tragedy), the show started to push ethical boundaries and explored a dark side to Jack’s personality (which had already been uncovered toward the end of season 1).2 Jack Bauer was a hero who, at times, had to be evil to get the job done. In this way, the show argues for a hero who must be evil by necessity (an interesting – but certainly not unprecedented – twist to our understanding of “hero” in American popular culture).3

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____________________________________________________________ This paper seeks to explore the character of Jack Bauer and the fictive world he dwells in. The analytical method I will use is a rough and ready appropriation of the Ricoeurean concept of le monde du texte, the world of the text. Paul Ricoeur argues that for any given narrative, our attention should be drawn not to the world behind the text (for example, the world of the author), but to the world projected in front of the text. The text opens a world for the reader to inhabit. In this way the world of the text and the world of the reader intersect. The reader returns from the world of the text reconfigured, with a subtly different perspective, a different sense of time, a different identity.4 I will argue that once we understand the fictive (though seemingly realistic) world of the second season of 24, Jack’s embrace of necessary evil makes sense. Further, the parallels and differences between the world of the text, Jack’s character, and the world of the audience (post-9/11 America) prove illuminating as to why the show is both so effective (as entertainment) and affective (that is, in reconfiguring the audience’s identity). In this way, the world of 24 and the character of Jack Bauer – both devoid of any explicit transcendent ethical or religious framework – provide the viewer a sentimental education in the use of necessary evil, in accepting the unacceptable. First, we will briefly examine the contours of the apparently realistic world of 24. It is not, however, the real world (surprise!), and the differences between the fictive world and the real one provide insights into the character of Jack Bauer. Second, we shall look at the character of Jack Bauer: his abilities, his character traits, and the way his experience parallels that of post-9/11 America. It is this mixture of sympathetic resonance and fictive difference that makes this show so entertaining and morally instructive (though we may differ with the content of that moral education). 2. The Fictive “Real World” of 24 A. The Collapse of Time Like a lot of action-adventure TV serials, 24 relies on a gimmick to hook the audience in. In this case, 24 boasted a gritty authenticity that emerged from its “realistic” handling of time. The voice of Jack reminds us at the beginning of every episode that the events portrayed are happening “in real time.” Every episode represents one hour in a truly intense day. Before every commercial break, a digital clock face at the bottom of the screen reminds you where you are in that episode’s hour (apparently, nothing of consequence happens during the commercials). And at the end of every episode, as the narrative climaxes toward the cliffhanger for that week, you see the digital clock face and hear an exaggerated ticking sound from an unseen second hand (“ka-chunk kachunk!”). The message is fairly straightforward: the good guys are in a

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____________________________________________________________ race against time, and time (which we’re showing you as it is in the real world) is weighing heavy as events hang in the balance. It’s a way of raising suspense and making sure you tune in next week. But on the other (clock) hand, the show works very hard to emphasise the tension induced by time (and time’s running out) in a way that is markedly artificial. In reviews of the show, you hear certain phrases repeatedly: “gripping,” “pulse pounding,” “thrilling,” and so on.5 The show’s production values serve to reinforce the frenetic pace of the show. It follows characters around with hand-held cameras to give the cinematography a more unsettled motion. The editing is quick and clean – no fade-outs or dissolves. In every episode there are at least three or four times where the show employs a split screen (with the digital clock face in the centre of the screen, of course) to show you what is going on in the four or five plot threads that are happening simultaneously. The first time I saw it, I was both thrilled by such a different look, but almost overwhelmed by the amount of information that I was supposed to process. (Fortunately, I was watching taped episodes so that I could back it up after some mumbled dialogue – Kiefer sometimes mumbles – or some plot twist that left me saying, “What in the world just happened?”) The net effect of all of these narrative and technical devices is that time is presented as full to the bursting every second of this day with momentous, decisive events. But it’s just here that the show undermines its own realism. Gritty? Realistic? How can this hyper-kinetic, collapsed, over-laden with moment-by-moment gravitas, slant on time be called real? Even given that “realism” in media is something of a vexed question (do we really want a completely “realistic” portray of eight hours, such as Andy Warhol’s movie Sleep?), the pace of 24 leaves something of the texture of real time behind.6 Real time that we experience in the real world sometimes drags along. Never in 24. Sometimes people take breaks to eat, or sleep, or go to the bathroom. Never in 24. (The only reason you have to go in the bathroom is to make a secret cell-phone call to a covert ops agent who’s working deep undercover, or something like that.) In 24, time has one speed, and that’s Autobahn reckless full-throttle break-neck speed. The artificial, fictive nature of time in the world of 24 becomes clearest when you consider time-periods to complete some off-screen action. Agents drive from downtown Los Angeles to a small airport somewhere in the suburbs . . . in ten minutes. A computer will search the entire county’s license and registration records to find a match on a car . . . in seven minutes. And so on. That is part of the constitution of this fictive world – there simply is no significant time waiting for anything. Things must be kept moving as fast as possible.

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____________________________________________________________ The significance of the shape of time in 24 is that what seems like gritty real-world temporal perspective is actually a fictive device, a mythical world that is biased towards action and away from moral reflection. In the world of 24, there simply is no room for deep ethical deliberation or reflection upon values. So no deep moral framework or guidance (religious or otherwise) has a chance to emerge. Compare that with another recent post-9/11 popular cultural offering which also has an approaching deadline as its theme: Spike Lee’s movie 25th Hour. The film tracks the last twenty-four hours before Montgomery Brogan will be sent to prison for seven years for dealing drugs. In contrast to 24, in the world of Monty Brogan, there is all kinds of time for reflection: on past mistakes, on what is most valuable in life, on whom you can really trust, and so on. Spike Lee even gives Monty an extended soliloquy, that most favoured of all dramatic devices for dealing with moral introspection – and a device rarely seen in movies or television lately. In other words, in the world of 25th Hour, time slows and people have time to think. Not so in 24: he who hesitates (to weigh moral options or to consider his actions) is lost. In this way, 24 renders any sort of transcendent moral framework irrelevant (and so evil cannot carry the same sort of weight it should). Not only does time seem too fast, but also in some ways it seems too “light.” Some events (for example, the evil that Jack does) pass without a trace, and are forgotten next season. You could call this the “Dirty Harry Complex,” where an official entrusted with guarding the law repeatedly violates the law “for the greater good,” but the violations are never remembered from one sequel to the next. Similarly, in the second season of 24, Jack’s actions are without consequence. When Jack psychologically or physically tortures suspects, or when he murders a man in custody, there simply are no consequences. When Jack orders his daughter to kill a man he believes to be dangerous to her, even though the man lies prone and helpless, there are no consequences for her (apparently police don’t do ballistic checks on shootings involving Jack’s daughter). In fact, the only time when there are consequences to characters’ actions is when President Palmer is called by his cabinet to account for his behaviour (including the torture of the head of the NSA).7 But even this episode is not really a moment for ethical reflection upon Palmer’s actions. It is revealed to be part of a conspiracy by administration hawks (who are connected to shady international oil interests) to remove Palmer from office because he opposes starting a war. Palmer eventually regains his office when it is proved that he was right in opposing the war, and his questionable actions in pursuit of such proof are conveniently forgotten. Again, a comparison with 25th Hour is instructive. That film is about nothing but the way the past has repercussions that reach into the present. Monty Brogan’s drug dealing, connections with childhood

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____________________________________________________________ friends, even a dog he decides to save – in short, his history – all become part of the complex context in which he lives, which shapes and constrains him. The past is not so easily forgotten, and it does catch up with him. In some ways, the second season of 24 shares that ethos (for example, Jack bears the wounds of his wife’s death throughout the season). But with regard to the evil actions for which characters are responsible, there is an overall pattern of ethical violations markedly not returning to haunt their perpetrators. How can they? Things move too fast for someone’s history to catch up with them. So one of the consequences of the quickened pace of time in the show is that time itself passes without trace, without consequence. B. A World Under Extreme Threat The reason that everybody is so darn busy in 24 is that the world of 24 is a world in extremis. In season one, Jack struggled to foil an assassination attempt on the democratic presidential candidate. In season two, the stakes are raised: he and his colleagues at CTU (CounterTerrorism Unit) must foil a terrorist plot to detonate a nuclear weapon over downtown Los Angeles. Millions of lives hang in the balance. And the threat is drastic, not simply in terms of numbers, but with regard to Jack personally as well. In season two, Jack has only one surviving family member – his teenage daughter Kim. And, sure enough, nearly every episode ends with Kim in danger. It becomes reminiscent of the Perils of Pauline.8 And in many episodes, Jack himself is in mortal danger. Jack’s public world (the citizens of the United States, and of L.A. county in particular) and Jack’s private world (his daughter, his own person) are in constant jeopardy throughout the show. There are any number of reasons why the world of 24 (Jack’s world) has been shaped like this, a world on the edge of a knife, where failure means humanitarian disaster and personal tragedy. Certainly it raises the suspense and dramatic tension. It keeps viewers tuned in week after week. It keeps the story moving at such a pace so viewers won’t get bored. But what interests me more is how this world in extremis can serve as a substitute for principled moral reflection. It does this in two ways. First, it forces the collapse of time – people are compelled to rush to action because of the extreme circumstances. And that undermines the possibility of moral reflection (as we discussed above). The constant “ka-chunk” of the second hand simply reverberates too loudly. Second, it pre-empts moral reflection on action by installing a facile utilitarian calculus. What’s the torture or murder of one bad guy when weighed against the possibility of personal and humanitarian disaster? Why even raise the question? Evil actions are excused even before they can be interrogated.9

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____________________________________________________________ But it did not necessarily have to be this way. There are plenty of examples in film and television where being under threat actually serves to bring out moral discourse (and especially the nature of evil) more sharply, even in action/adventure-type plots (consider Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects). The writers and producers of 24 decided to use plot pace and imminent danger as tools to suppress questions regarding evil (perhaps to keep the audience from scrutinising Jack Bauer’s evil actions too closely).10 One more observation about this world fictively configured to be constantly under threat: it draws compelling parallels to America’s post9/11 self-perception. America, too, feels itself to be constantly under threat from hostile outside forces. Whether officially or not, the American government and media have succeeded in giving America a “Code Orange” heart. Intentionally or not, the creators of the world of 24 contribute to that image of America. In so doing, the writers give the series a faux-realism, not because it presents the real world, but it presents an image of the world that many Americans hold.11 We’ll see in a moment how those parallels grow even more compelling in the character of Jack Bauer. In sum, the world of 24, by collapsing time through various narrative and cinematic techniques, and by presenting a world under constant threat, serves to undermine the possibility of reflection upon evil. In so doing, it renders any transcendent moral framework irrelevant – what is needed is not a consideration of moral principles, but a reactive pragmatism that will get the job done and save the day.12 Let us now consider the hero Jack Bauer. We will find that he is every inch a creature of this fictive world. 3. The Evil Good-Guy: The Character of Jack Bauer A. Is Jack Evil? Before we get into an analysis of the character of Jack Bauer, the question must be asked, “Is Jack really evil? What sort of evil are we talking about?” After all, Jack does good things (as well as evil things). He loves and strives to protect his family and his country (in fact, these seem to be the only moral imperatives that Jack obeys consistently). So let me assure you: Jack is no Hannibal Lechter.13 He does not sadistically relish the evil he does. But the evil he does is almost worse in its pragmatic, matter-of-factness. A scene from the first episode of season two is, to my mind, paradigmatic of the type of evil I’m talking about – this is the scene that really started me thinking about Jack as evil. The only connection the Counter-Terrorism Unit has to the terrorists is a criminal organisation

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____________________________________________________________ which Jack had previously infiltrated undercover. Jack calls in a witness the FBI has in custody that has agreed to testify against the head of this organisation. Jack asks a question or two, then pulls out a gun and shoots the handcuffed witness in the chest at point-blank range. Jack’s superior is beside himself, but Jack retorts, “You want results, George, but you don’t want to get your hands dirty! Now get me a hacksaw.” Jack then takes the severed head to the leader of the criminal organisation as a display of his loyalty. Note the attitude that typifies Jack’s evil: “You want results, but you don’t want to get your hands dirty.” Jack’s evil is of the type that is somehow considered to be a sort of practical virtue – like “rolling up your sleeves” to fill the wheelbarrow with compost. It stinks, but it’s what’s best for the garden, and somebody’s got to do the dirty, hard work around here. It’s just part of the job, something that has to be done (and the job must be done). It is evil that is pragmatically necessary, unavoidable. Let’s look at some of the fictive contours of his character that make it possible for the audience to continue to see him as the hero, the good-guy who occasionally does evil things (but they’re not that bad, because Jack’s the hero). B. Jack as Normal Superhero The show tries to pull off a pretty neat trick: to show Jack as simultaneously a normal, everyday kind of guy, and someone with extraordinary powers. Season one begins with Jack trying to heal his broken marriage, a marriage he damaged through sleeping with a coworker at CTU. He’s not the best father. At the beginning of season two, he is paralysed with grief, unable to restart his life after the death of his wife. At the beginning of season three, he’s even struggling with a nasty heroin habit that he picked up during his last undercover assignment. He’s a normal, fallible guy with human vulnerabilities and failings. But once he is put under stress and given responsibility to save others, his true, mythic nature emerges. He is absolutely omni-competent. He is a skilled marksman, martial arts fighter, helicopter pilot, computer programmer, interrogator, and so on. Whatever the exigencies of the situation, he will rise to the challenge. Not once in the show did I hear the words “I don’t know how to do that” escape his lips. This omnicompetence makes him trustworthy. He knows how to get the job done, and therefore (and here’s the intuitive leap) the audience can trust that the job Jack has to get done is the right one, and he’ll do it in the most appropriate manner. Because he’s competent, he’s also assumed to have an infallible moral compass. He is the substitute for a transcendent moral framework. But the best asset that Jack possesses (in terms of the hostile, edgy world of 24) is being able to think on his feet, to improvise, to react

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____________________________________________________________ quickly and lethally. In other words, his best character trait undermines the kind of moral reflection needed to recognise evil as evil – it makes such reflection superfluous, ponderous, impractical. Jack hasn’t got that capacity. He’s got something better: lightning quick reflexes, a command of the situation. And so ethical reflection is passed over in preference for technical competence and efficiency. Another aspect of his character that marks him as a superhero is his amazing tenacity and resilience. Jack doesn’t give up. Ever. He just keeps going and going through this 24-hour period of crisis. And he won’t stop until the job is done. Not even death can stop Jack Bauer. He does die in season two, twice actually. Once symbolically – he pilots a plane to take the bomb to the Nevada desert to explode in an unpopulated area, and he must guide the plane to ground zero, sacrificing himself (Christ-like) for the masses. In an amazing twist of fate, Jack’s boss from CTU, who is already dying from radiation-sickness, stows away on the plane and convinces Jack to parachute out early and let him pilot the plane to ground zero. Jack dies and comes back to life (figuratively), and continues to search for the terrorists. The second time Jack dies, it’s literal. Jack is captured by the enemy and tortured to death, only to be “resurrected” via defibrillator. After that, a normal human being would be in an ICU for a week. But not Jack. He’s able to escape his bonds, kill his captors, and return to the hunt for the dangerous men still at large. The only ill effects he suffers for the rest of season two are a couple of mild heart attacks (signified by Kiefer grasping his chest, wheezing, and wincing in pain momentarily). But these, too, pass, and he is able to pursue the villains to their untimely demise.14 Jack outdoes Jesus – he dies and comes back to life twice! And he kicks butt. He’s sort of a Christ action figure, complete with Uzi. If ever there were a man you could trust to get the job done, it is Jack. He’s omni-competent, tenacious, unstoppable, and yet, just a regular guy, like one of us. This interesting combination of the quotidian and the mythical is even reflected in his name: Jack Bauer. Why did the writers choose “Jack Bauer” and not, say, “Haywood Chesterfield III”? The name “Jack Bauer” marks the hero as being middle-class, from German immigrant stock (“Bauer” is German for “farmer,” so perhaps Jack has agrarian class roots). The nickname “Jack,” instead of “John” or “Jonathan,” marks him as being informal, non-aristocratic – that is, one of us, a normal guy. At the same time, “Jack Bauer” (like “Clark Kent”) is short, punchy – a strong name with lots of explosive consonants. (Try saying “Haywood Chesterfield III” with a sense of urgency – it doesn’t work; it’s too long to be taken seriously.) More than that, “Bauer” is about as close as you can come phonetically to the English word “power” (the difference being an initial voiced labial versus an unvoiced labial). It

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____________________________________________________________ suggests the superhero power Jack has without stating it obviously. “Jack Power” would be ridiculous. “Jack Bauer” is understated, yet brims with a hidden potency (like the character himself). For all of these reasons, then, Jack is coded within this world as a trustworthy moral guide – we don’t have to consider his actions too closely. He is at once gifted with amazing resilience and competence, and he is identified with us, a normal, everyday kind of guy – a sort of godman, if you will. He does what we’d do, if we were as able and cool as he is. The evil he does is eminently excusable. C. Jack as Post-9/11 America But perhaps the trump card that allows us to excuse Jack’s evil is that he, like the world of 24, is an image of us (or of U.S.). In Jack Bauer, we find a certain image of post-9/11 America staged for us, and it’s hard not to root for yourself when you see it in another. How does Jack embody a post-9/11 America? First, and perhaps most importantly, he is wounded. Season one ends with the violent death of his wife, Teri Bauer. Jack, like us, has lost something precious, irreplaceable. We find Jack at the beginning of season two estranged from his daughter (because of grief over the loss of her mother). He is devastated, emotionally exhausted, numb. He has retired from CTU and wants nothing more to do with it. Jack feels what Americans felt after the towers fell – he’s been personally wounded. So naturally a situation arises that only Jack can handle, something that calls him out of retirement. The only lead CTU has on the terrorists is a criminal organisation that Jack had contact with as an undercover agent. The situation is urgent, and there isn’t time (remember how time is configured in this world) for anyone else. It’s got to be Jack or no one. And naturally, Jack rises to the challenge, wounded though he be. I would argue that Americans (at least many of them) have a similar view of America’s mission in the world. There is a grave terrorist threat out there, and though we’re wounded, it’s up to the U.S. of A. to handle it. Who else can give the kind of leadership so urgently demanded? Europe? They’re effete and self-conflicted. Africa? It’s too mired in its own problems. Asia? They’re either part of the problem or not interested in helping. Nope. It’s either us, or no one, wounded though we are. And if we do some evil along the way, just remember that we didn’t come looking for this job; it came looking for us. In this way, Jack’s character has a peculiar resonance with a popular American self-perception. And this resonance has the effect of short-circuiting any overriding moral considerations other than protecting one’s own (say, human rights, for example).15 We, like Jack, have a job to do, and we may have to get our hands dirty doing it.

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____________________________________________________________ 4.

Summary and Conclusion In this essay, we’ve considered how different facets of the world of 24 and of the character of Jack Bauer make any transcendent ethical framework irrelevant compared to the pragmatic exigencies of the situation and the mythic presence of the hero. The world of 24 collapses time; it is a world on the edge, and so no moral deliberation can be afforded. The character of Jack Bauer is this curious blend of the normal and the superheroic (without the cape), and his situation strangely parallels our own, so he is commended as a trustworthy hero, despite (or because of?) the evil he does. I have also been arguing that this sort of projecting of a fictive world the viewers can inhabit and a hero with which to identify all have definite effects upon the identity and moral perspective of the audience (what Ricoeur would call the “refiguration” of identity as the world of the text intersects the world of the reader).16 I have argued that the show enrols us in a sort of sentimental education whereby evil is seen as necessary and acceptable.17 But perhaps the connections I’ve been making have been misleading, the paths of influence too direct: Jack does x, so we’ll collectively do x.18 Actually, I believe that the influence is more subtle and indirect because of the institutional setting of the character of Jack Bauer. He works for CTU; he is a government agent. Part of his super-prowess seems to emanate from his position as a government agent (his training, his field experience, and so on). The subtext seems to be, “Don’t try this at home, folks! Jack’s a professional.” Rather than directly influencing the audience to go out and emulate Jack, I would argue that the show would have a pacifying effect upon its audience. Instead of spurring us to action, the show may subtly influence us towards passivity, to accept whatever the government deems is necessary in getting the job done in its post-9/11 “War on Terror,” to let the talented and trustworthy folks like Jack and his friends at CTU take care of it. In accepting evil heroes like Jack, we may be tacitly abnegating our responsibility to morally approve or censure the actions of those who represent and protect us. That sort of moral reflection and moral accountability seems irrelevant given that time moves so fast, the threat looms so large, and people like us (but a whole lot better and cooler) are getting the job done. 5.

Afterword: Context and Applications One question that always dogs essays like these is the dreaded “So what?” What practical good does such a reading of an American television show do? Allow me, therefore, to draw back the curtain on some of the motivations behind the essay above as they apply to our understanding of evil. This paper serves two purposes: first, to underline

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____________________________________________________________ the necessity of critical reflection in the consumption and reception of popular culture; and second, to explore the displacement of religious discourse on evil in a secularised environment. A. Popular Culture, Reflection, and the Visceral First, concerning critical reflection and popular culture . . . One of the dangers attending popular performances like 24 is that the visceral always threatens to trump reflection on evil. This happens in two ways. One is that the show (or movie or video) uses the shock of evil to turn popular entertainment into a sort of amusement park thrill ride. Each particular act of evil then functions as a sort of commentary on the performance as a whole, in essence saying: “Hang on, kids! This is going to be wild! Wheeee!” In other words, the shock-value of these acts consigns the show to a genre where reflection is assumed to be unnecessary. It’s a show to be bathed in, not thought about. The second way the visceral trumps the reflective is in the presence of the hero. The popular hero is generically trustworthy – he is the good guy by definition.19 The evil that he might do along the way is not worthy of reflection compared to the admirable qualities immediately displayed by the hero (bravery, perseverance, physical prowess, and so on). Moral reflection upon evil is rendered unnecessary by fiat, by dint of the personality and skill-set of the hero. The hero becomes a saviour who need not be questioned (more on that later). This paper then acts as a corrective reading (and perhaps as a model for other readings). The type of reading recommended here allows evil to assume a voice, a specific gravity that would allow it to be reflectively weighed and sifted. Such readings always feel like swimming upstream and “spoiling the fun” of this kind of popular entertainment, but I believe it is all the more necessary. Without reflection, an attitude of acceptance and resignation with regard to evil slowly becomes the norm. The influence of such popular discourses of evil flies in under our radar, so to speak. B. The Displacement of Religious Discourse on Evil The second concern driving this paper (though kept much more in the background) is the social scientific debate over secularisation, and specifically as it applies to how we weigh evil in the “secular” West. Religion has been the traditional carrier of moral discourse in the West.20 That is, until relatively recently in human history. Beginning in the eighteenth century, an influential group of cultural and intellectual elites made a sustained effort to discredit religious discourse as an effective carrier of moral or metaphysical truth. That effort, combined with certain changes in key social structures during and after the Industrial Revolution,

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____________________________________________________________ have attenuated traditional religions’ claim to speak Truth (with a capital “T”) on matters of morality, epistemology, or ontology. Sociologists of religion call this coupling of elite discourse and social change “secularisation.” All alike agree that something indeed has happened, that the texture of life is different since the onset of modernity in the West. But what secularisation means and to what extent religion itself is truly impaired is by no means agreed upon.21 This paper is meant to be an indirect contribution to that debate, namely, that even though traditional religion has in some respects lost its social legitimacy as a carrier of moral and metaphysical truth, much of the slack has been picked up by popular cultural discourses. In other words, it seems clear to me as a student of popular culture that secularisation has not meant a decline in religion (as Steven Bruce and the “classical” theorists would have it). Rather, secularisation has produced a religious displacement, a reorganisation of the sacred arena in which discourse about evil is produced. So my comparison of Jack with Jesus wasn’t (only) a bit of cheek – it was meant very seriously. The dynamics of 24, by trumping traditional religious moral reflection with action and heroism themselves take on a religious (or quasi-religious) weight, complete with their own rituals, myths and saviour figure.22 Such entertainments can have that sort of influence (with specific political consequences) without having to be taken seriously as religion. After all, it’s only a television show. But surreptitiously, something sacred is slipped in, something numinous that excuses the evils of torture, murder, or what have you. The sacred in 24 is “family” and “national security.” In other shows, it might be “romantic love” or “success,” or whatever. In this respect, I feel that the discourse of popular culture is the great overlooked wildcard with respect to debates on civil religion, and the fate of religion in general in the “secular” West. As a way of understanding evil, I myself vastly prefer the grounded discourse offered by traditional religions such as Christianity.23 Without such rooted reflection, moral discourse soon becomes weightless, nothing more than strongly felt sentiments – umbrage without ballast (and therefore, more easy to manipulate). But such a shift in perspectives on evil is indeed underway, and has been for some time. To my mind, this means that the kind of reflective reading of popular discourses on evil is all the more timely, all the more exigent. We need to know the lay of the land, the way the terrain of evil is being changed by this popular discourse. Otherwise, friends, you don’t know Jack.

Notes 1. The major awards that 24 won for its first season included two Emmys (for “Outstanding Single-Camera Editing for a Series” and

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____________________________________________________________ “Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series”), a Golden Globe (for “Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series” for Kiefer Sutherland), and two Television Critics Association Awards (for “New Program of the Year” and “Program of the Year”). Information obtained from “Awards for 24,” Internet Movie Database, n.d., (27 February 2004). . 2. In the last episode of season one, Jack mistakenly believes that the evil Serbian warlord Viktor Drezen (played way over-the-top by Dennis Hopper) had killed his daughter. Jack, in an act of pure revenge, fires bullet after bullet into a helpless Viktor Drezen, execution style. 3. Indeed, some have argued that the archetypal American hero characteristically violates the laws of the land and has done so since his inception in the Western through to its more recent incarnations in actionadventure movies, such as Dirty Harry. See John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002). 4. For a summary of Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, see Paul Ricoeur, “Time and Narrative: Threefold Mimesis,” in Time and Narrative, vol. 1, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 5. Some of the online reviews that used these phrases were: Ivana Redwine, “24 - Season Two DVD Review,” What You Need to Know About Home Video/DVD, n.d., (27 February 2004). .; Engineerboy, “24 (****) (TV), 12/17/2002,” CleverDonkey.com, 17 December 2002, (27 February, 2004). ; and Thomas Chau, “24: Season Two DVD Review,” DVD Fanatic, 9 September 2003, (27 February 2004). . 6. Thanks to my friend and colleague Chris Simmons for alerting me to the pitfalls that attend the term “realism” in film and television. 7. NSA stands for National Security Agency. It is charged with protecting the information systems of the U.S. government, but on the show it seems to have a much broader intelligence and political agenda. 8. The Perils of Pauline (1914) is a famous silent film serial that has been remade numerous times. In each episode the heroine escapes certain death from animals, criminals, savages, etc. The familiar image of a young woman tied to railroad tracks, screaming, as the train barrels towards her (and her inevitable escape thanks to a handsome hero) comes from this serial. 9. I am arguing from a Christian perspective that does not accept the maxim that the “ends justify the means,” or “victory at whatever cost.”

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____________________________________________________________ Though the reader may not share my moral perspective, my point (and what I find disturbing in the show) is the fact that the issue of moral perspective is not even raised so that an unprincipled pragmatism can be given its fullest, unchallenged scope. 10. This paragraph owes a lot to Chris Simmons. 11. The question raised by such a staging of American identity is this: Could that fictive image likewise interrupt moral reflection upon the possibility that our collective actions are evil, or does it automatically justify them in the name of protecting that which is closest to us? 12. It must be conceded that there are moments when there is moral deliberation going on, but it’s not being done by Jack. The moral center of the series is represented by President David Palmer (played by the sagacious-looking Dennis Haybert). But even President Palmer’s agonized moral decisions are inevitably brought to a close prematurely by the press of time and overhanging humanitarian disaster. Such extreme circumstances also force Palmer into making some morally questionable choices himself, such as ordering the torture of NSA Director Roger Stanton, whom he believes is involved in a conspiracy concerning the nuclear bomb. 13. Hannibal Lechter is a recurring character in Thomas Harris’ books (each of which have been made into movies). The character became a household name after the release of the movie adaptation of Harris’ book The Silence of the Lambs (1991). 14. Any lasting effects of his temporary death or the heart-attacks are completely forgotten by the beginning of season three. Jack’s good as new, and ready for action. 15. In another plot twist, it is revealed mid-season (after the nuclear bomb has exploded) that the terrorists behind the bomb-plot were financed by wealthy oil tycoons who want to start a war in the Middle East to drive oil prices up. Jack spends the second half of season two trying desperately to procure evidence to clear the Arab nations accused of any involvement in order to avoid a war. One could argue that Jack is, in this case, pursuing a noble, moral goal. But my argument still stands. I am not arguing that Jack’s ends (saving downtown L.A. from a nuclear blast, stopping a war) are evil, only that there is no reflection on the evil that he does to accomplish those ends. 16. See Ricoeur, 1984, 70-86. 17. Ricoeur calls fiction a moral “laboratory of the imaginary.” See Ricoeur, “The Self and Narrative Identity,” in: Oneself as Another, translated by K. Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 164. 18. Lawrence and Jewett call this direct effect of popular culture upon the behavior of its audience the “Werther Effect,” after the copycat

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____________________________________________________________ suicides that swept Europe after the publication of Goethe’s popular novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. See Lawrence and Jewett, 9-12. 19. I am using the masculine hero here as an example. There are examples of this sort of undermining of reflection with female heroines (the film version of the Lara Croft character would be one such example). But typically this visceral role is filled by male characters. The typical heroine is configured very differently in Western popular discourse. 20. I would argue that religion has been the main carrier of moral discourse not only in the West, but the world over. But my focus here is how we evaluate evil in the West. 21. Opinions over how best to understand secularization vary greatly. After the 1980s and 90s, when religion became once again a very public presence in various parts of the world, few of the “classical” secularization theorists remain. But those who do (such as Steven Bruce) are vocal. See Steven Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), and Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Others critique the notion of classic version of secularization as overly simplistic. José Cassanova, for example, believes it is crucial to differentiate between secularization as social structural differentiation (which is indisputable) and secularization as religious decline (which is very disputable). See José Cassanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Others, such as Danièle Hervieu-Léger, see secularization as a sort of social amnesia that breaks the chain of tradition (but religion has a way of repairing those chains in creative ways). See Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, translated by Simon Lee (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). In one case, Peter Berger, a notable theorist for the classical secularization view, reversed himself after the notable resurgences of religion in the 1980s and 1990s. See Peter Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, edited by Peter Berger (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999). For a helpful synopsis on the debate, see David Lyon, “Faith’s Fate,” chapter in Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000). 22. This is also one of the reasons why I prefer receptor-oriented readings of popular texts over sender-oriented readings. In cultural studies, sender-oriented readings tend to focus on how texts (such as TV shows) manipulate passive readers (or viewers). Receptor-oriented hermeneutics (like Ricoeur’s) tend rather to focus on the active appropriation of texts by readers, that is, how readers use texts to make meaning (in this case, meaningful perspectives about evil). I would argue that this activity of

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____________________________________________________________ meaning making (or, more precisely, meaning re-making) lies at the heart of religion. 23. Further, I would argue that moral discourse must assume a personal absolute (that is, the type of God worshipped in Christianity) if it is not to dissolve into relativism or abstraction. But arguing that in detail would, I am afraid, take us too far afield at present.

Select Bibliography Berger, Peter. “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Edited by Peter Berger. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. Bruce, Steven. God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. ——. Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Cassanova, José. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Chau, Thomas. “24: Season Two. DVD Review.” DVD Fanatic. 9 September 2003. (27 February 2004). Engineerboy. 24 (****)(TV), 12/17/2002.” CleverDonkey.com. 17 December 2002. (27 February 2004). Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. Religion as a Chain of Memory, translated by Simon Lee. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Internet Movie Database. “24 Awards.” Internet Movie Database. n.d. (27 February 2004). Lawrence, John Shelton and Robert Jewett. The Myth of the American Superhero. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002. Lyon, David. “Faith’s Fate.” Chap. in Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000. Redwine, Ivana. “24 – Season Two DVD Review.” What You Need to Know About Home Video/DVD. n.d. (27 February 2004). Ricoeur, Paul. “Time and Narrative: Threefold Mimesis.” Chap. in Time and Narrative, vol. 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

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____________________________________________________________ ——. “The Self and Narrative Identity.” Chap. in Oneself as Another. Translated by K. Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Surnow, Joel and Robert Chochran, prods. 24: Season Two. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2003. Seven DVD set.

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The Devil’s Footprints: The Case of Dr. Emmenberger in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Der Verdacht Vera B. Profit Abstract Prior to the 1983 publication of M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie, the diagnosis of evil had never entered the psychiatric lexicon. In an attempt to allow for this designation within the medical sphere, Dr. Peck’s treatise elucidates the characteristics of both individual and group evil. However, in this inquiry, I would like to consider only a single question: How might we recognise evil? No one can deny that the protagonist of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Der Verdacht, Fritz Emmenberger, a mass murderer in a concentration camp, embodies evil. Yet how many of us can presently identify with such radical evil perpetrated decades ago? Nevertheless, all of us are part and parcel of a variety of relationships. Consequently, this essay will focus only on the way Emmenberger relates to those whom he does not intend to kill, to those with whom he surrounds himself. How does he select and subsequently control them? How does he detract from the efficacy of their lives? Does he do so over extended periods of time? Fritz Emmenberger unfortunately affected a vast number of individuals during his lengthy medical career. The ensuing remarks will concern only Dr. Edith Marlok, the dwarf, and the deaf-mute. Key Words: victimisation, individual evil, relationships.1 Prior to the 1983 publication of M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, the diagnosis of evil had never entered the psychiatric lexicon. In an attempt to allow for this designation within the medical sphere,2 Dr. Peck’s treatise attempts to elucidate the characteristics of both individual and group evil. As a result, in the course of his landmark study the then practising psychiatrist offers a host of insightful observations concerning such issues as: victimisation of body and/or spirit, unmitigated narcissism, depersonalisation of others, the unsubordinated use of power, lying, and scapegoating. However, in this inquiry, I would like to consider only a single question: How might we recognise evil? Peck suggests a proven method: “If one wants to seek out evil people, the simplest way to do so is to trace them from their victims.”3 No one can deny that the protagonist of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1951 novel Der Verdacht,4 Fritz Emmenberger, a mass murderer in a concentration camp, embodies evil. Yet how many of us can presently identify with such radical evil perpetrated decades ago? Nevertheless, all of us are part and parcel of a variety of relationships; we affect others and they in turn affect us. Consequently, this essay will focus only on the way

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___________________________________________________________ Emmenberger relates to those whom he does not intend to kill, to those with whom he surrounds himself. How does he select and subsequently control them? Just how does he detract from the efficacy of their lives? And does he do so repeatedly, over extended periods of time? In order to ascertain evil, noting a single act is rarely enough. Scott Peck urges caution in this regard. “[O]ur judgement must be made on the basis of a whole pattern of acts as well as their manner and style.”5 Fritz Emmenberger unfortunately affected a vast number of individuals during his extended medical career. The ensuing remarks will concern only these three: Dr. Edith Marlok, the dwarf, and the deaf-mute.6 German born, a passionate Communist who emigrates to the Soviet Union,7 Edith Marlok is released to Himmler’s police before Hitler’s invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941, and as a consequence of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty of August and September 1939.8 Edith Marlok’s own recounting of her fate speaks eloquently about the ramifications of these agreements on her life: When one morning in the middle of the winter of 1940, amongst countless other tattered figures, I was driven across a pathetic wooden bridge by some Russian soldiers, . . . and when on the other shore the black figures of the SS emerging from the morning mist awaited us, I understood the betrayal, which was taking place, not only in our regard, us God-forsaken poor devils, who were now staggering in the direction of Stutthof, no, but also in regard to the idea of communism itself, which can only make sense, if it is synonymous with the concept of brotherly love and of humanity in general.9 She had been a committed individual. “I was convinced, that one should love this sad thing here (made) of stone and clay, which revolves around the sun, our earth. . . .”10 She held fast to her ideals, even when incarcerated in the Soviet gulag.11 As a result of her adopted country’s final betrayal, she arrives in Stutthof a disillusioned young woman.12 When police inspector Bärlach asks the attractive, intelligent, and welleducated Dr. Marlok how, as a Communist, she managed to survive the ordeal in the concentration camp, her answer not only reveals her state of mind, her paralysing and apathetic despair, but also the price she paid for her life. “‘That’s simple,’ she answered him, indifferent to his gaze, as though nothing could move her any longer, neither a human emotion nor the most wretched of fates: ‘I became Emmenberger’s lover.’”13 She considers the advantage offered her unique and consequently impossible

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___________________________________________________________ to refuse. On one level her assessment is correct, for in Hitler’s eyes Communists were considered archenemies of the Reich, long before Germany’s invasion of Russia.14 Leaving the camp alive is all that matters to her or, she thought, could matter to her. She does not belong to those few who exemplify the belief that in a concentration camp an individual may be divested of everything, but not of this: that last vestige of human freedom, which allows the individual to take a stand vis-à-vis his or her circumstances. And one could do just that!15 Viktor Frankl formulated the observation just cited, and he knew of what he spoke. Frankl, as is well known, was not only a psychoanalyst, but also a concentration camp survivor. Obviously, in order for Edith Marlok to accept Emmenberger’s conditions, she has to relinquish not only her political assumptions, but also her expectations of a loving relationship. In other words, she must abandon her hopes for a meaningful future. In her lament she cites the last words of the inscription above the gates to Dante’s Inferno: “ABANDON EVERY HOPE, ALL YOU WHO ENTER! And I abandoned all hope.”16 Perhaps she does not realise the long-range consequences of her choice. She does not fully realise what Frankl knew to be true. Those concentration camp inmates who had at some point or other surrendered their determination to survive were far more likely to succumb to the detrimental effects of their surroundings than those who had not.17 She is not completely aware that in relinquishing hope, in failing to project herself into a future which matters to her, she would die, not only to those around her, but also to herself. And not only emotionally, but quite possibly physically. Frankl restates his conclusion even more emphatically. “Those who are no longer able to believe in a future, in their future are lost in a camp. Along with the future, they lose their resolve; they give up and deteriorate physically and mentally!”18 But who would condemn her? Frankl himself concedes the point. “No one would dare to pick up a stone in this instance, before asking himself with absolute honesty, whether he would have done differently in a similar situation.”19 Furthermore, the argument’s emphasis does not for the moment lie with Marlok’s response, but rather the terrorising situation with which Emmenberger confronts her. While sparing her life, he demeans and degrades her. While making love to her, he negates her person. And that is the opposite of love; it is in fact evil. Emmenberger’s second victim proves far more vulnerable than the aforementioned physician. Upon his arrival at Zurich’s Sonnenstein,

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___________________________________________________________ Bärlach espies in the window, appropriately enough to the left of the entrance, a dwarf staring down at him. At first he thought he was looking at a monkey, but then he realised to his amazement, that it was a dwarf, like the ones generally encountered in a circus for the amusement of the audience. The small hands and feet were bare and grasped the bars, as a monkey might, while the gigantic head turned towards the police inspector. It was an ancient face, shrivelled up, of a bestial ugliness, with deep furrows and wrinkles, degraded by nature itself, which stared at the old man with large, dark eyes. . . .20 While plotting the demise of Bärlach’s physician and friend, Dr. Samuel Hungertobel, Emmenberger admits to the now officially retired police inspector that the dwarf attracted his attention in the concentration camp near Danzig. “A useful tool, which I brought home with me from Stutthof. Even then it became entangled in my legs, this ludicrous thing, when I operated. . . .”21 The terms designating the dwarf: “tool” and “ludicrous thing” unequivocally exemplify not only the contempt in which the physician holds him, but also the resultant depersonalisation. But rather than kill him, as Heinrich Himmler would have dictated,22 Emmenberger spares his life. Just as in Marlok’s case, however, the Swiss physician exacts a price. “Because the little monkey sensed that he owed me his life, he allowed me to train him to meet my every demand.”23 In this summation, “sense” would be the operative word, for the dwarf never masters intelligible speech.24 Yet he can feel. He senses not only that he owes Emmenberger his existence, but also feels sorrow and anguish. Due to his mammoth size as well as his eloquence, Gulliver – Bärlach’s Jewish friend – and the dwarf constitute polar opposites; nevertheless, these two befriend one another in Stutthof. In a moving passage within the novel’s final pages, Gulliver bears witness to his pitiful friend’s unerring ability to realise his hurt, his degradation, despite his considerable limitations. “Why there you are, . . . my little monster from hell,” the Jew caressed him speaking to him in a melodic voice. “My poor Minotaur, . . . you, who would frequently fall asleep in my arms during the blood red nights of Stutthof, crying and whimpering. . . .”25

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___________________________________________________________ Marlok and the dwarf – these two Emmenberger had diminished, had detrimentally affected, had victimised during the war years. But just as Emmenberger’s mania for murder does not conclude with the war’s end, neither does his desire to inflict pain. Transferring his diabolical practises from Stutthof to Zurich’s Sonnenstein, he continues to victimise these same two, whom he had begun mistreating in the former venue. By Marlok’s own admission cited earlier, while at Stutthof, she becomes Emmenberger’s lover. In early May of 1945,26 the political exigencies and their resultant pressures, initially prompting her decision, no longer apply. At that point, she could have left Emmenberger, but chooses not to do so. What can therefore be deduced about their existing relationship? What does it reveal about him, about her? Marginalised in the first meeting between Hans Bärlach and Fritz Emmenberger, Dr. Marlok utters but three words and thus easily creates the impression of someone rather taciturn.27 She is in fact intelligent, extraordinarily articulate, and reveals much about herself in a subsequent and crucial conversation with the retired police inspector. She not only acknowledges her role as eyewitness to Emmenberger’s wartime atrocities, thereby confirming Bärlach’s suspicions on which the novel is based, but also discloses that she has evolved from eyewitness into an accomplice. (In either case, she is still a victim.) Despite his exhaustion, his malignancy, Bärlach, the consummate representative of the law, reminds her unerringly of her degeneration. “You admit that Emmenberger using Nehle’s name was a physician in Stutthof?” he asked in a feverish state. “Of course.” “You also admit that he killed Nehle?” “Why not? . . .” “If you know all that,” he said, “then you’re also guilty.”28 As the novel is set in the last months of 1948 and the first days of 1949, Edith Marlok had more than ample time to notify the authorities of Emmenberger’s murders, committed outside Swiss confines. She fails to do so. In addition, she acknowledges currently participating in the same horrors that she had only witnessed in Stutthof: “the crimes, which are demanded of me.”29 She brutally confirms what Bärlach only suspects. “Here the boss also operates without the benefit of anaesthesia. Everything, which Emmenberger did in Stutthof, . . . that he does here, in the middle of Switzerland. . . .”30 She hadn’t always been a murderess; not that long ago she espoused ethical principles. “O I had my convictions. . . . Just as you are, inspector, I was committed to battling evil, as long as I lived.”31 How does she cope with her assaulted conscience? How does she suppress her pain,

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___________________________________________________________ that pain caused by her awareness of the discrepancy between what she once was and is now? She becomes addicted to morphine. For her the drug serves a multitude of purposes. By dulling her revulsion, injections of morphine allow Marlok to assist Emmenberger in his criminal pursuits. They also impart a sense of euphoria, a state in which she can still glimpse that innocent world she believes forever lost to her. Thus I, Edith Marlok, a thirty-four-year-old female, commit the crimes demanded of me in return for the colourless liquid, with which I inject myself subcutaneously; during the day it affords me the courage for derision and at night the possibility of dreaming that I might possess, if only as a passing delusion, what no longer exists: this world, as a god created it.32 But this acutely addictive opium derivative does so much more. It alters Marlok’s appearance. An elderly bachelor with a self-ascribed weakness for an attractive woman, Bärlach cannot upon their first meeting extol sufficiently the young medical doctor’s physical attributes. He openly confesses his fascination with her. The woman was beautiful, . . . she was a lady, that he saw at first glance, so distinguished and so reserved. . . . One could readily put her on a pedestal. . . . He looked at the woman once again.33 When he recoils in disgust at their second encounter, only then does the police detective realise that repeated morphine injections jeopardise these same good looks. Intermittently Marlok appears to be what she has become: an addict, “seemingly an old woman; she looked spent; her facial features were swollen.”34 Bärlach’s observations coincide perfectly with those attributed even in the first years of such research to prolonged morphine use. “The flesh begins to fall; the face loses its colour and takes on a sallow, lustreless hue and an aged expression; the teeth are loosened, and gradually even a young person becomes wizened, emaciated, and haggard.”35 To summarise: during the post-war years in Switzerland, Dr. Edith Marlok is, on the one hand, a beautiful young woman, as intelligent as she is eloquent. But on the other, she is also a lawbreaker, a common morphine addict, sometimes appearing to be much older than her chronological age and an individual terribly conscious of how far she has fallen.

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___________________________________________________________ Abject disappointment has replaced both the passion and the tenacity of the young medical doctor once willing to risk so much in order to realise her ideals. Great disillusionment can, if left unchecked, lead to a debilitating cynicism, a fatal sense of detachment, and a rampant carelessness. Ironically enough, these serve as standard self-defence mechanisms36 and Marlok does not prove the exception to the rule. In her pivotal exchange with Bärlach, Marlok’s demeanour – as a physician, it is also her bedside manner – betrays over and over again that she feels isolated from everything and everyone. She feels unreachable, utterly alone. A sense of caring bonds us with others as well as our better selves. She no longer cares. Not about others. Not about herself. In her lengthy conversation with Hans Bärlach, a stark apathy all too frequently characterises her behaviour: “Without paying any attention to the inspector . . .”; “He no longer seemed to exist for the woman.”37 For quite a while, she leans, rather motionless, against the door of Bärlach’s room and consequently positions herself at some distance from him, “both of her hands buried in the pockets of her lab coat.”38 While the policeman alternates between livid outrage and disease-induced resignation, Marlok’s face remains virtually expressionless. “She seemed untouched by it all.”39 Despite Bärlach’s relentless cross-examination, she replies in a voice both “cold and dying away.”40 When she admits that she survived the ordeal in the concentration camp by becoming Emmenberger’s lover, not only the content of her answer, but also its tone speak volumes about her emotional state, the state of her soul. “‘That’s simple,’ she answered him, indifferent to his gaze, as though nothing could move her any longer . . . not the worst of fates: ‘I became Emmenberger’s lover.’”41 Paralysing indifference suffuses every aspect of her being. This same pervasive indifference delineates what ideally should be her closest, her most loving relationship. “No one means anything to me, including Emmenberger, even though he is my lover.”42 Indifference constitutes the diametric opposite of love. A glance at some successful, albeit necessarily partial, attempts to define the undefinable nature of love should lend credence to this last assertion. Martin Buber in his memorable Ich und Du reminds us fervently of love’s possibilities as well as its obligations: Love ranges in its effect through the whole world. In the eyes of him who takes a stand in love, and gazes out of it, men are cut free from their entanglements. . . . Good people and evil, wise and foolish, beautiful and ugly, become successively real to him; that is, set free they step forth in their singleness, and confront him as Thou. In a wonderful way, from time to time, exclusiveness

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___________________________________________________________ arises – and so he can be effective, helping, healing, educating, raising up and saving. He concludes these reflections with the bold statement: “Love is the responsibility of an I for a Thou. . . .”43 Viktor Frankl emphasises the singularity of the beloved: “In love the beloved person is comprehended in his very essence, as the unique and singular being that he is; he is comprehended as a Thou, and as such is taken into the self. As a human person he becomes for the one who loves him indispensable and irreplaceable. . . .”44 Erich Fromm goes one step further: Erotic love is exclusive, but it loves in the other person all of mankind, all that is alive. It is exclusive only in the sense that I can fuse myself fully and intensely with one person only. Erotic love excludes the love for others only in the sense of erotic fusion, full commitment in all aspects of life – but not in the sense of deep brotherly love.45 Keenly aware of his task’s difficulties, Scott Peck enters the realm of the teleological and interjects the notion of intent. The psychiatrist defines love as the “will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”46 Though each of these definitions emphasises different aspects of the inherently elusive configuration, without fail, each one maintains the singularity of the beloved for the lover, of their mutual obligations and declares care and love – whether erotic or not – to be interrelated. In his compelling disquisition on the subject, Rollo May offers the following insight. “Care is a state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is . . . the source of human tenderness.”47 In other words, care and love most assuredly enhance the lives of others as well as our own; care and love are essentially salvific. Obviously those who use others solely for their own purposes do not care for them; they devalue them. By meeting Emmenberger’s physical needs, while blotting out her legitimate desires, Marlok becomes, despite her considerable gifts, far less than she might otherwise be. Part of the blame for her relentless deterioration must undoubtedly be attributed to her. Even after 1945, she elects to maintain her submissive role appropriated during the war years. To paraphrase Frankl once again: who of us could be certain we would have done differently? Nevertheless, Emmenberger’s continuing detrimental effect upon her life should never be minimised. Invariably the timeless Biblical admonition begins to assume additional meaning: “You

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___________________________________________________________ will be able to tell them by their fruits. Can people pick grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, a sound tree produces good fruit but a rotten tree bad fruit.”48 As noted earlier, Marlok is unfortunately not the only member of Emmenberger’s Sonnenstein entourage whom he affected adversely in Stutthof and continues to dehumanise in Switzerland. The dwarf also numbers among his present victims. Though his training in measures diabolical began in Stutthof,49 it is in Switzerland that he ceaselessly carries out the fatal deeds asked of him. Bärlach suspects what Emmenberger states unequivocally:50 the dwarf killed the hapless pamphleteer and Bärlach’s occasional assistant, Ulrich Friedrich Fortschig.51 “So there was Fortschig. – He was condemned to death and executed. My dwarf did good work.”52 Upon publishing the pamphlet in which the current director of a Swiss hospital stands accused of Nazi war crimes,53 Fortschig does not immediately leave for Paris. Bärlach had not only instructed him to do so, but had given him the financial means to carry out these directives.54 Instead, the well-meaning, though misguided, journalist invites his friends to a farewell dinner and yet again proceeds to drink excessively.55 Neither of these ill-considered acts helps to remove Fortschig from harm’s way. Yet no matter how foolishly he conducts himself, clearly he does not deserve to pay such a high price for his lack of judgement. The blame for Fortschig’s death must remain with Emmenberger. And as for the dwarf, does he bear any responsibility for Fortschig’s untimely demise? In his … trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, Viktor Frankl reminded us earlier to refrain from judging others before we have walked in their shoes. Heeding that admonition, only someone who suffered in a concentration camp as he had, who shares in his isolation,56 can speak on this misbegotten creature’s behalf. Perhaps only Gulliver’s point of view should matter. What do we now do with this little animal, who is nevertheless a person, with this little person, who was thoroughly degraded to the level of an animal, with this little murderer, who is the only innocent amongst us all. . . .57 Evidence abounds that both Edith Marlok and the dwarf suffered at Emmenberger’s hands in Stutthof even as they continue to do in his Zurich clinic. Are there any others who could be added to that ignominious list, even if the evidence for their possible inclusion is not as unequivocal and the individual perhaps not as crucial to the plot’s development?

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___________________________________________________________ In Bärlach’s presence Emmenberger speculates as to who could have realised that he is one and the same with a former war criminal. Among others, he advances the following theory: “Either someone who saw me in Stutthof and who knows me here – a slim possibility, as all those creatures, whom I brought with me from Stutthof, are under my control. . . .”58 Needless to say, he could be referring to Marlok and the dwarf, but he could also have another staff member in mind. A master of intimidation, Dr. Fritz Emmenberger receives the ailing Bärlach upon his arrival in an operating theatre,59 and subsequently assigns him a studio-like room in the clinic’s terminal wing.60 Room 15 harbours a number of features deliberately designed to make the patient ever more uncomfortable, ever more anxious. Bärlach makes a mental note of his unique surroundings, but reserves his particular dislike for the mirrored ceiling – “it drives you crazy”61 – and a copy of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson.62 Given the opportunity to exchange this painting for another, he requests Albrecht Dürer’s Ritter, Tod und Teufel.63 Just when the police inspector finally acknowledges that Emmenberger cannot be intimidated, that Fortschig is imperilled – he does not yet know that his inept friend had already died – and that he himself is also threatened, the justifiably frightened detective seems to be offered a way out of his predicament. “Contrary to all expectations, Bärlach seemed to be afforded an opportunity to get in touch with the outside world. A worker entered his room, an enlarged copy of Dürer’s ‘Knight, Death and Devil’ under his arm.”64 While the clumsy and slow-witted fellow replaces the Rembrandt with the Dürer, Bärlach makes several loud and desperate attempts to communicate his needs and instructions. His pleas literally fall on deaf ears. “Only after the worker left the room slamming the door awkwardly behind him, did the old man realise, that he had spoken with a deaf mute.”65 Those obviously impaired were quickly designated for extinction in the earliest of Germany’s euthanasia programs. Did Emmenberger make his acquaintance in Stutthof and simply decide to spare this unfortunate middle-aged man from such a fate?66 As stated earlier, the compelling evidence presented in the cases of Marlok and the dwarf are lacking in this instance. Nevertheless, hints as to the hospital worker’s supposed past do surface. In exchange for his life, the dwarf had been trained to kill.67 Perhaps in exchange for his life, the deaf mute was asked to engender increased anxiety in those already half-crazed with fear. The method is hardly subtle: The worker shook his head repeatedly; the picture seemed uncanny to him. He turned to Bärlach momentarily and spoke exceedingly slowly in an odd,

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___________________________________________________________ overly enunciated manner, while shaking his head back and forth: “The devil doesn’t exist.” “Indeed, he does,” Bärlach screamed in a hoarse voice: “The devil does exist, man! He’s here in this hospital. For heaven’s sake, listen up! I’m sure you’ve been told that I am demented and talk nonsense, but I am in danger of being murdered, can’t you understand that, in danger of being murdered: That’s the truth, man, the truth, nothing but the truth.” The worker had finally hung the picture and turned to Bärlach, grinning he pointed to the knight . . . “Knight done for,” the words emerged slowly and clearly from the stiff and crooked mouth of the man with the blue overalls: “Knight done for, knight done for!”68 Nowhere in the text does Emmenberger ever overtly reveal his connection with the handyman, and yet his imprint seems everywhere. At this juncture it may be helpful to remember one of the Bärlach/Gulliver conversations. To his soul mate’s bold assertion that he works invisibly, the policeman replies so matter of factly: “No one works invisibly. . . .”69 On a literal level, Bärlach is obviously speaking of the advertisement which Feitelbach, his impoverished acquaintance, places in the local newspaper whenever Gulliver stays with him, and he consequently receives some money. Feitelbach’s advertisement tells Bärlach that his Jewish friend finds himself in Bern once again.70 But on a metaphorical level, that seemingly simple remark may be understood in an entirely different way. For whether we are conscious of it or not, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, all of us leave traces upon one another, all of us influence one another for good or ill. Scott Peck reminds us of this reality in his What Return Can I Make? He recalls an accolade overheard at a dinner, he once attended. One of the guests summarised the contributions of a renowned filmmaker in saying: “He has left his mark on history.” Peck responded to this assessment with the words: “We all leave our mark on history.” He continues his reflections: The conversation stopped dead, as if I had said something grossly obscene. Why does it make us so uneasy, this terrible importance to our lives. . . ? The responsibility frightens us. We would prefer to think of ourselves as ordinary, average, normal. We do not want

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___________________________________________________________ the responsibility for history on our backs. But it’s there whether we want it or not.71 In his essay “Christianity and Culture,” C. S. Lewis reinforces the point; “There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.”72 Edith Marlok, the dwarf, and the deaf-mute – Emmenberger victimises them all and he does so for years on end. In each of the three cases, he exploits, demeans, and manipulates. He dehumanises. Absolutely determined to make others less, he is just as determined to make more of himself. Others serve only as appendages designed to actualise his selfaggrandisement, his goals, his desires. His narcissism knows no limits. As Peck would say: he crosses the line. He is evil.73 At the outset of these remarks, I implied that through examination of those who are evil and in particular their treatment of those within their sphere, we could perhaps apprehend more clearly where they went so terribly awry. There are other reasons for such a study. By steadfastly looking at evil, we would finally learn that to evaluate the actions of others or our own and, if necessary, declare them evil, is not itself evil. In the face of the diabolical Emmenberger, Hans Bärlach exhibits the appropriate courage: “we shouldn’t be afraid of our thoughts. Only if we acknowledge them, only then can we examine them and, if we are mistaken, overcome them.”74 He might add: on the contrary not to judge our actions or those of others is wrong. Cognisant of history’s blatant failures, we cannot afford to look away. For if we recognised evil individuals sooner rather than later, could not the damage to themselves as well as others at least be minimised, if not entirely eliminated? A malady cannot begin to be treated until it is named.

Notes 1. The University of Notre Dame’s Office of International Studies, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts as well as the Department of German and Russian defrayed the expenses incurred as a result of my participation in the 5th Global Conference: Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness held in Prague, Czech Republic, March 2004. 2. M[organ] Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (New York: Simon, 1983), 68. 3. Ibid., 107. 4. Verdacht may be translated as “suspicion.” 5. Ibid., 104.

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___________________________________________________________ 6. As indicated earlier, Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote the novel in question: “Der Verdacht: Ein Kriminalroman,” Gesammelte Werke: Romane (Zürich: Diogenes, 1991), 4:119-265. Dr. Emmenberger’s nurse, Kläri Glauber, also belongs on a roster of his victims. Though Emmenberger shamelessly exploits her unbelievable naïveté, consequently diminishing her as well, it is impossible to ascertain how long she has been subjected to his influence or been in his employ. In other words, as a Swiss native, did she elect to participate in wartime atrocities (as did he) or did she first make the physician’s acquaintance after 1945 in Switzerland? She does acknowledge the crimes Emmenberger previously committed (228), but that doesn’t necessarily mean she assisted him in the camp. As the duration of the mistreatment forms an integral part of the essay’s arguments, Glauber’s case will be set aside for the moment. 7. Ibid., 225. 8. Also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, this treaty was designed to assure the sovereignty of the two European principals in regard to each other. Certain sections of the agreement were immediately made accessible to the public; others were not. Just how the country was to be divided between Germany and Russia in the event Germany invaded Poland remained secret. The differences between theory and practise are well known. German troops marched into Poland on Friday, September 1, 1939, and proceeded into the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Martin Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century: Volume Two 1933-1951 (New York: William Morrow, 1998), 253-266, 378-381, Norman Davies, “Nazi-Soviet Pact,” The Oxford Companion to World War II, eds. I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 780-782. 9. Dürrenmatt, 1991, 219. Except when otherwise indicated, all translations from this text as well as others mentioned within the essay are my own. 10. Ibid., 217. 11. Ibid., 218. 12. Ibid., 219. 13. Ibid., 217. 14. Falk Pingel, Häftlinge unter SS-Herrschaft: Widerstand, Selbstbehauptung und Vernichtung im Konzentrationslager (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1978), 51, 119. Additional corroboration of this statement can be found in: Joe J. Heydecker and Johannes Leeb, Der Nürnberger ProzeE (Köln: Kiepenheuer, 1998), 260. 15.“daß man dem Menschen im Konzentrationslager alles nehmen kann, nur nicht: die letzte menschliche Freiheit, sich zu den gegebenen Verhältnissen so oder so einzustellen. Und es gab ein ‘So oder

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___________________________________________________________ so’!” Viktor E. Frankl, … trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, 9th ed. (München: DTV, 1990), 108, italics in original. 16. Dürrenmatt, 1991, 219, and Dante Alighieri, “The Divine Comedy: Inferno,” The Portable Dante, trans. and ed. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1995), 14. 17. Frankl, … trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen, 114. 18. “Wer an eine Zukunft, wer an seine Zukunft nicht mehr zu glauben vermag, ist hingegen im Lager verloren. Mit der Zukunft verliert er den geistigen Halt, läßt sich innerlich fallen und verfällt sowohl körperlich als auch seelisch.” Frankl, …trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen, 120-121. 19. “Keiner dürfte hier den Stein aufheben, bevor er sich nicht in unbedingter Ehrlichkeit selber befragt hat, ob er selber in der gleichen Lage sicher anders gehandelt hätte.” Frankl, …trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen, 80. 20. Dürrenmatt, 1991, 196-197. 21. Ibid., 247. 22. For the “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens,” blame can be apportioned to Hitler’s misappropriation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection as expressed in Mein Kampf: “Ein stärkeres Geschlecht wird die Schwachen verjagen, da der Drang zum Leben in seiner letzten Form alle lächerlichen Fesseln einer sogenannten Humanität der einzelnen immer wieder zerbrechen wird, um an deren Stelle die Humanität der Natur treten zu lassen, die die Schwäche vernichtet, um der Stärke den Platz zu schenken” (145). Or fault can be found with Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the SS, and all those who carried out his wishes in a seemingly endless number of asylums, hospitals, sanatoriums and camps. Nevertheless one fact remains. From the moment Hitler was named Reichskanzler on 30 January 1933 (34) and even beyond his suicide as well as the cessation of hostilities in May 1945 (450-456), the definition of those deemed unfit to live and consequently sterilised, forced to abort their children or murdered changes incrementally, sometimes week by week, to include more and more individuals. At first the criminal element was targeted for extinction, but that included those who had never committed a crime. Just a few months after Hitler assumed power, on 14 July 1933, a law was enacted which demanded the sterilisation - without their consent of all those who could pass on hereditary diseases or conditions (36-39). Eventually that category included anyone considered undesirable to the regime for any reason, be that primarily a congenital defect, ethnic or religious background or an ideological choice. The page references just cited refer to the following texts: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (München: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1942), Ernst

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___________________________________________________________ Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1983). Additional corroborating documentation can be found in: Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager, 15th ed. (1974; München: Kindler; München: Wilhelm Heyne, 1985), 67-74, Volker Rieß, Die Anfänge der Vernichtung “lebensunwerten Lebens” in den Reichsgauen DanzigWestpreußen und Wartheland 1939/40 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995). 23. Dürrenmatt, 1991, 247. 24. Ibid., 261-262. 25. Ibid., 261. 26. Germany’s unconditional surrender on all fronts was signed in the early hours of 7 May 1945. “The Second World War in Europe was over.” Gilbert, 681. 27. Dürrenmatt, 1991, 207. 28. Ibid., 216. 29. Ibid., 226. 30. Ibid., 224. 31. Ibid., 218. 32. Ibid., 226. 33. Ibid., 200. 34. Ibid., 213. 35. Terry M. Parssinen, Secret Passions, Secret Remedies: Narcotic Drugs in British Society 1820-1930 (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983), 95. This statement echoes an observation made by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Dean of the Harvard Medical School, in which he warned about the perils of these seductive pain-killing chemicals. “A frightful endemic demoralization betrays itself in the frequency with which the haggard features and drooping shoulders of the opium drunkards are met with in the street.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted in Charles F. Levinthal, Messengers of Paradise: Opiates and the Brain (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 21. 36. Gerald G. May, The Awakened Heart: Living Beyond Addiction (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 81. 37. Dürrenmatt, 1991, 213. 38. Ibid., 213- 214. 39. Ibid., 215. 40. Ibid., 216. In his The Cry for Myth, Rollo May cites a passage from Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. May’s concern lies with the conversation between Adrian and the devil. And though in The Cry for Myth, Mann’s quote serves a different purpose than it does in this essay, it is remarkable how often in the course of this dialogue, cold, the absence of love and hell are brought into conjunction with one another. “Liebe ist dir

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___________________________________________________________ verboten, insofern sie wärmt. Dein Leben soll kalt sein - darum darfst du keinen Menschen lieben. . . . Eine Gesamterkältung deines Lebens und deines Verhältnisses zu den Menschen liegt in der Natur der Dinge. . . . Ist etwa die Kälte bei dir nicht vorgebildet. . . . Kalt wollen wir dich, daß kaum die Flammen der Produktion heiß genug sein sollen, dich darin zu wärmen. In sie wirst du flüchten aus deiner Lebenskälte….” Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997) 334-335, Rollo May, The Cry for Myth (New York, London: Norton, 1991), 259. In the postscript to her volume on Albert Speer, Gitta Sereny makes the following observation. “Speer himself killed no one and felt no enmity, hatred or even dislike for the millions in Eastern Europe, Christians and Jews, who were systematically slaughtered: he felt nothing. There was a dimension missing in him, a capacity to feel. . . . Pity, compassion, sympathy and empathy were not part of his emotional vocabulary.” Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995; New York: Knopf; New York: Vintage, 1996), 719. 41. Dürrenmatt, 1991, 217. 42. Ibid., 220. 43. Martin Buber, I and Thou, Trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner, 2000), 29; “Liebe ist ein welthaftes Wirken. Wer in ihr steht, in ihr schaut, dem lösen sich Menschen aus ihrer Verflochtenheit . . . : Gute und Böse, Kluge und Törichte, Schöne und Häßliche, einer um den andern wird ihm wirklich zum Du, das ist, losgemacht, herausgetreten, einzig und gegenüber wesend; Ausschließlichkeit ersteht wunderbar Mal um Mal - und so kann er wirken, kann helfen, heilen, erziehen, erheben, erlösen. Liebe ist Verantwortung eines Ich für ein Du. . . .” Martin Buber, Ich und Du, 11th ed. (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1983), 22. 44. Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Bantam, 1969) 106-107; “In der Liebe wird der geliebte Mensch wesentlich als das in seinem Da-sein einmalige und in seinem So-sein einzigartige Wesen erfaßt, das er ist; er wird als Du erfaßt und als solches in ein anderes Ich aufgenommen. Als menschliche Gestalt wird er für den Liebenden unvertretbar und unersetzlich. . . .” Viktor E. Frankl, Ärztliche Seelsorge: Grundlagen der Logotherapie und Existenzanalyse, 4th ed. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1991), 167. 45. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper, 1956), 55. Albert Speer found Erich Fromm to be a “fascinating” conversationalist and his treatise - The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness - worthy of his consideration. Sereny, 689.

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___________________________________________________________ 46. M[organ], Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (New York: Touchstone, 1978), 81. 47. Rollo May, Love and Will (New York: Delta, 1989), 289. 48. The Jerusalem Bible, ed. Alexander Jones, Matthew 7: 16-19 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 25. 49. Dürrenmatt, 1991, 262 50. Ibid., 236, 239. 51. The name of Bärlach’s pen-wielding and ill-fated associate is not accidental. Ulrich was the name of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s paternal grandfather. Serving as a Berner Nationalrat, his was quite the free spirit. A newspaper publisher, he wrote verses satirizing small-mindedness and an over-controlling bureaucracy. Heinrich Goertz, Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1987), 12-13. 52. Dürrenmatt, 1991, 239. 53. Ibid., 229-230. 54. Ibid., 188. 55. Ibid., 234-235. 56. Ibid., 265. 57. Ibid., 262. 58. Ibid., 243. 59. Ibid., 204. 60. Ibid., 207, 210, 211. 61. Ibid., 209. 62. Ibid., 210. Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp represents the first of his group portraits. The twenty-six year old artist (1606-1669) signed and dated this commemorative rendering of the physician’s second public anatomy lesson in 1632. Tulp himself, the ranking member of Amsterdam’s Surgeons’ Guild, commissioned the portrait, which remained in the guild’s possession for decades. In 1828 King Willem I appropriated the painting for his personal collection and removed it to the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Subsequently the canvas underwent a series of restorations and presently belongs to the Mauritshuis collection. Additional information about the significance and history of this painting can be found in: William S. Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp: An Iconological Study (Washington Square, NY: New York UP, 1958), Norbert Middelkoop et al, Rembrandt under the Scalpel: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp Dissected (Amsterdam: Six Art Promotion, 1998), Mariët Westermann, Rembrandt (London: Phaidon, 2000), 79-82.

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___________________________________________________________ 63. Dürrenmatt, 1991, 210. The first of a set of three Meisterstiche, Ritter, Tod und Teufel, measuring a scant 10 by 7 inches, bears Albrecht Dürer’s monogram and the date 1513. Adam Bartsch refers to this engraving as: “Le cheval de la mort.” In his Netherlands diary, Dürer entitled this work simply as “der Reuter.” Both Panofsky and Strieder offer detailed interpretations of the engraving, which include the artistic, historical and theological sources. On a most elementary level, Dürer’s piece can be understood as an allegory. A knight on horseback rides into battle, armed with “a Christian faith so virile, clear, serene and strong that the dangers and temptations of the world simply cease to be real . . .” (Panofsky, Vol. 1, 152). The rider notices neither the devil carrying a two-pronged pickaxe nor the decomposing figure of death holding an hourglass, as he progresses unwaveringly toward the city of God, represented by the castle in the far distance. Adam Bartsch, Le peintre graveur: Maîtres allemands, 7th vol. (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1982), 52, The Illustrated Bartsch 10: Sixteenth Century German Artists: Albrecht Dürer, ed. Walter L. Strauss (New York: Abaris Books, 1980), 85, Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, Vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1958), 151-154, Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, Vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1958), 29, Peter Strieder, Dürer (Königstein im Taunus: Karl Robert Langewiesche Nachfolger Hans Köster, 1981), 174-180. 64. Dürrenmatt, 1991, 231. 65. Ibid., 233. 66. Ibid., 231. 67. Ibid., 247. 68. Ibid., 232-233. 69. Ibid., 148. 70. Ibid. 71. M[organ], Scott Peck, What Return Can I Make? Dimensions of the Christian Experience (New York: Simon, 1985), 89-90. 72. C[live], S[taples] Lewis, “Christianity and Culture,” Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1967), 33. 73. Peck, People of the Lie, 106. 74. Dürrenmatt, 1991, 130.

Select Bibliography Alighieri, Dante. “The Divine Comedy: Inferno.” In The Portable Dante. Translated and edited by Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 1995. Bartsch, Adam. Le peintre graveur: Maîtres allemands. 7th vol. Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1982. Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Scribner, 2000.

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___________________________________________________________ ——. Ich und Du. 11th ed. Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1983. Davies, Norman. “Nazi-Soviet Pact.” In The Oxford Companion to World War II, edited by I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot, 780-782. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Dürrenmatt, Friedrich. “Der Verdacht: Ein Kriminalroman.” Gesammelte Werke: Romane. Vol. 4. Zürich: Diogenes, 1991. 119-265. Frankl, Viktor E. Ärztliche Seelsorge: Grundlagen der Logotherapie und Existenzanalyse. 4th ed. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1991. ——. The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Bantam, 1969. ——. …trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager. 9th ed. München: DTV, 1990. Fromm, Erich. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Henry Holt, 1992. ——. The Art of Loving. New York: Harper, 1956. Gilbert, Martin. A History of the Twentieth Century: Volume Two 19331951. New York: William Morrow, 1998. Goertz, Heinrich. Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1987. Heckscher, William S. Rembrandt’s Anatomy of Dr. Nicolass Tulp: An Iconological Study. Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1958. Heydecker, Joe J. and Johannes Leeb. Der Nürnberger Prozeß. Köln: Kiepenheuer, 1998. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. München: Zentralverlag NSDAP, 1942. Jones, Alexander, ed. The Jerusalem Bible. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966. Klee, Ernst. “Euthanasie“ im NS Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens.” Frankfurt: Fischer, 1983. Kogon, Eugen. Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager. 15th ed. 1974; München: Kindler; München: Wilhelm Heyne, 1985. Levinthal, Charles F. Messengers of Paradise: Opiates and the Brain. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Lewis, C[live], S[taples]. “Christianity and Culture.” In Christian Reflections. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1967. 12-36. Mann, Thomas. Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997. May, Gerald G. The Awakened Heart: Living Beyond Addiction. San Francisco: Harper, 1991. May, Rollo. The Cry for Myth. New York, London: Norton, 1991.

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___________________________________________________________ ——. Love and Will. New York: Delta, 1989. Middelkoop, Norbert et al. Rembrandt under the Scalpel: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp Dissected. Amsterdam: Six Art Promotion, 1998. Panofsky, Erwin. Albrecht Dürer. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958. Parsinnen, Terry M. Secret Passions, Secret Remedies: Narcotic Drugs in British Society 1820-1930. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983. Peck, Scott M[organ]. People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. New York: Simon, 1983. ——. The Road less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth. New York: Touchstone, 1978. ——. What Return Can I Make? Dimensions of the Christian Experience. New York: Simon, 1985. Pingel, Falk. Häftlinge unter SS-Herrschaft:Widerstand, Selbstbehauptung und Vernichtung im Konzentrationslager. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1978. Rieß, Volker. Die Anfänge der Vernichtung “lebensunwerten Lebens” in den Reichsgauen Danzig-Westpreußen und Wartheland 1939/40. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. 1995. New York: Knopf; New York: Vintage, 1996. Strauss, Walter L., ed. The Illustrated Bartsch 10: Sixteenth Century German Artists: Albrecht Dürer. New York: Abaris Books, 1980. Strieder, Peter. Dürer. Königstein im Taunus: Karl Robert Langewiesche Nachfolger Hans Köster, 1981. Westermann, Mariët. Rembrandt. London: Phaidon, 2000.

The Evil of Creation: The Destructive Aesthetic in the Figure of the Romantic Artist Elizabeth McCarthy Abstract The ideological foundation for this essay is an understanding of violence not as a destructive, anti-social force, separate from, and opposed to, productive humanist discourses, but as an implicit part of such discourses. The essay’s focus will be a literary one, and it will take the Romantic Movement as its theme. I have chosen this particular movement in literary history because of its concentrated interest in conceptualising the figure of the artist and his role in society, and because of its prolific theorisation of art and artistic creativity. Equally important, in this regard, is the tremendous amount of ideological and theoretical influence the Romantic era still exacts on present day concepts of art and the figure of the artist. The essay will compare and contrast the cultural construction of figure of the serial killer with the Romantic poet, exploring how both figures are continually configure as individuals set apart from their society and at odds with its values and concerns, be they economic, intellectual, or ethical. From this isolated position, both figures are conceived of as in possession of an intense (occasionally god-like or even satanic) imaginative impulse and insight, surpassing that of common humanity. This profound differentiation between the artist/serial killer and society, which is always understood as a naturally occurring phenomena rather than a carefully cultivated one, is, in turn, often represented as a great burden, requiring huge personal sacrifices, on the part of the artist. The ultimate conclusion drawn from these readings of Romantic artist and their connection to the contemporary image of the serial killer is that, through carefully developed and aesthetically justified processes, the literature of the Romantic period and preceding literary movements under its influence, have propagated a concept of artistic creativity as an a-social and transcendent activity which promotes the devaluation, negation, and often the destruction, of all that is seen as an obstacle to, or in competition with, the creative impulse. And that, concomitant with the creative imperative to explore intensely subjective states of experience comes an equally strong imperative to objectify all that is seen as outside of the self. Key Words: Wordsworth, serial killer, artist. 1.

Introduction When considering contemporary concepts of what constitutes a “true” artist, we find that the myth constructed around this figure has, in many ways, changed very little in almost two hundred years. This

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___________________________________________________________ extraordinary figure is a man who sees things differently from others, his imagination is deeper, and more complex, and his emotional and intellectual world works on a higher, more abstract, set of beliefs and ideas. In his rejection of various social structures, such as a family, a home, and a job, he becomes master of his own destiny, subservient to nothing other than his compulsions as an artist. As a result of these aspects of his experience, the artist is thus perceived as an outsider figure, a courageous loner and rebel, who lives by his own inner-directed motives and rules. The ideological standards that conceive of this antisocial, selfmotivated figure in heroic terms are, to a great extent, founded on theoretical developments of the Romantic era. However, what also becomes increasingly evident, when examining these assumed personality traits in relation to present day figures of the outsider rebel, is how closely allied they are to contemporary, factual as well as fictional, depictions of certain violent criminals, particularly modern day so-called “motiveless” murderers, known as serial killers. In fact, a consideration of such killers’ own comments on their psychological and sociological “predicament” often reveals these very same ideological assumptions to be at work at the deepest levels of self-analysis. The following observation made by the English serial killer Dennis Nilsen, who murdered fifteen young men between 1978 and 1983, is a striking example of just how closely allied the image of the Romantic artist and the serial killer can be, not simply in the cultural representation of these figures but in the mind of the serial killer himself: I was a child of deep romanticism in a harsh plastic functioning materialism... I am an odd personality for today. There was never a place for me in the scheme of things... My inner emotions could not be expressed, and this led to the alternative of a retrograde and deepening imagination.1 The process of myth-making at work in the construction of the artist and the serial killer insinuates itself so successfully into present day culture that, as a consequence, representations of both figures continually propagate the assumptions behind these myths without due consideration of their highly contrived nature. Colin Wilson’s comments on the connection that can be drawn between the serial killer and the artist are a typical example of this. He writes of how outsiders who become killers

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___________________________________________________________ share certain characteristics of the artist; they are unlike other men, they experience drives and tensions that alienate them from the rest of society, they possess the courage to satisfy these drives in defiance of society. But while the artist releases his tensions in an act of imaginative creation, the outsider criminal releases his in an act of violence.2 Within such an interpretation, which places the figure of the artist and the killer in the unique role of social outsider, lies an implicit understanding of their status as a modern day heroic figures, who are, to use Wilson’s terms, courageous and defiant enough to follow their own personal drives and motivations in the face of wide social disapproval and regardless of the consequences. However, what remains conspicuously absent from such a reading is a consciousness of the level of contrivance involved in creating these figures and their assumed personality traits in the first place. The aim of this essay is to examine this contrivance, and to discover how closely linked the optimistic ideological concepts of art and the artist are with present-day interpretations and representations of the serial killer and his actions. The focus of this work will be the Romantic period, an era that witnessed a tremendous level of theoretical attention on the nature of artistic creativity and the role of the artist. As the course of this work will show, it is also a period that, despite the intercession of modernist and post-modernist theory, still exacts a powerful influence on contemporary concepts of art. The essay is comprised of two parts. The first will focus on the construction of the figure of the artist as laid out in numerous critical essays by major literary figures of the period, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, as well as a consideration of the influential figure of the Byronic hero. The second section will develop a profile of this Romantic figure, demonstrating how it coincides with many of the social and psychological traits associated with the violent homicidal individual, as mapped out by modern criminologists. As my sources assume that this hypothetical, figure is male, so shall I. However, I do so with a consciousness of all that such an assumption implies. 2.

Artful Alienation: The Romantic Artist and “The Bliss of Solitude” Although the figure of the Romantic artist has been greatly enhanced by the modern imagination, it is nonetheless, an image initially, self-consciously, constructed and honed by the Romantics themselves, defined and shaped for generations to come, as much as for the time in

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___________________________________________________________ which they lived. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the artist figure during this period is his relation to “common life.” A tremendous emphasis is placed upon him as a figure set apart, this notion is developed in a number of ways involving both social and psychological factors. Romantic essayist William Hazlitt’s comments on this aspect of the Romantic artist’s “personality” are particularly interesting here: He is a limb torn off from society. In possession of eternal youth and beauty, he can feel no love; surrounded, tantalized and tormented by riches, he can do no good. The faces of men pass before him as in a speculum; but he is attached to them by no common tie of sympathy or suffering. He is thrown back into himself and his own thoughts. He lives in the solitude of his own breast, without wife or child or friend or enemy in the whole world... He is himself alone.3 Despite Hazlitt’s depiction of the artist’s disassociation and detachment as a natural element of his “calling,” time and again close consideration of the phenomena suggests that the sense of distance so often understood to exist between the artistic individual and his social environment is actually an artfully contrived perception developed not only to mythologise the figure of the artist but to release him from a certain amount of sociopolitical accountability. Considering this distancing technique in its most literal and most physical manifestation, we see how the Romantic’s love of the pastoral can be read as the love of spaces virtually unpopulated by other people. Often running concomitant to this is the complete denial of the existence of the city or a city life or, alternatively, a representation of the city in negative terms. While a city poet, such as William Blake, might engage in the condemnation of the bad conditions of industrialised living as call for active social change, many other Romantic poets invoked a country/city divide for less explicit motives, defining themselves in complete opposition to city life and the values associated with it. In his study of literary representations of The Country and the City, Raymond Williams makes just this point, arguing that the “Romantic structure of feeling” finds its basis in “the assertion of nature against industry and of poetry against trade.”4 In Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” for example, a link is drawn between city life and a general decline in both intellectual and aesthetic standards; as he explains, among “the multitude of causes, unknown in former times... now acting with a combined force to

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___________________________________________________________ blunt the discriminating powers of the mind... reduc[ing] it to a state of savage torpor” is the Increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies...5 Wordsworth’s concern, regarding his audience’s taste, their penchant for “gross and violent stimulants,” belies a deep anxiety about the place of the artist in a nation undergoing rapid industrialisation, perhaps, most tellingly, it sets up a distance between the true artist, committed to higher goals, and the vulgar capitalism of the daily press and “frantic novels,” engaged in the profit making process of supply and demand. In this sense, we can trace a developing strain in the artist’s conception of himself and his aesthetic goals, as, not merely, in an uneasy alliance with popular taste, and society at large, but actually pitted against it. A significant aspect of this potential antagonism towards broader social mechanisms which threaten to compromise the artistic vision is the institution of marriage and family. Imagining, for a moment, the less than ideal vision of the Romantic artist with a family, we can discern a number of levels on which he may appear to be compromised. Firstly, if he himself is financially reliant on the saleability of his artistic vision (his work), he is further pressurised in his role as a husband and father; he must therefore either compromise his creative instincts to support his family or he must compromise his social and self-image as patriarchal provider and protector by allowing his family to suffer financial hardships. Another element of the compromising place of the family in the artist’s life, which again can be taken from Hazlitt’s illuminating passage, is the emotionally demanding strain it involves. If an artist must indeed “feel no love” and “no common tie of sympathy or suffering” how can he possibly devote himself to family life? Consequently, we can read the family as symbolic of broader social mechanisms, which call for a level of involvement that saps creative energy, turning the artist away from his necessary subjectivity into a confusing mesh of intersubjective relations, waylaying, draining, and dissipating individual artistic expression. With the French and American Revolutions’ ideals of individual rights and liberty, and increasingly dissatisfied political and religious factions at home, a great deal of Romantic literature reflected these developments and undertook its own promotion of the individual. This promotion of the individual mind and the supremacy of its intellect is

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___________________________________________________________ nowhere more evident than in Wordsworth’s epic homage, The Prelude, in which he proclaims, The freedom of the individual mind, Which, to the blind restraints of general laws Superior, magisterially adopts One guide, the light of circumstances, flash’d Upon an independent intellect.6 The process of the idealisation of individuality present throughout the Romantics’ writing, fostered, not only, a deep distrust of authority but of other social networks which might, at some point, require the individual to compromise his personal vision. This strong desire not to concede the superiority of anyone or anything to the self, while seeming to promote individual psychological liberty and political concepts such as universal suffrage, also justified the artist in the preference of his creative imagination over that of the realities of social engagement. As Jerome McGann argues, The idea that poetry, or even consciousness, can set one free of the ruins of history and culture is the grand illusion of every Romantic poet.7 This is not necessarily in conflict with the elements of political thought to be found in the Romantic’s work; in fact, it may be seen as a mode through which the artist can be political and yet remain absolved of responsibility towards his subject. It is, in a sense, a means through which the artist can enjoy the best of both worlds, being, at once, a political commentator and critic, as well as an asocial figure, divorced from the complicated and frustrating elements of actual socio-political negotiation. Such a stand closely corresponds with Romanticism’s preoccupation with the individual and individual subjectivity as an artistic ideal. However, such an artistic ideal entails a considerable element of ambivalence. At the heart of the Romantic idealisation of the individual experience, lies a great positivist belief in the expansivity and multitudinous capacity of the individual; as Blake proclaimed, “All deities reside in the Human breast.”8 With this expansive godlike importance placed on the individual, faith in the “purity” and “truth” of personal experience becomes paramount, whether that experience takes the form of sensory perceptions, childhood reminiscences, dreams, visions, or madness; hence the Romantic writer’s preoccupation with alternative and extreme states of mind, from the turbulent visionary powers of Blake’s

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___________________________________________________________ work, and the dejection and elation of the poetry of Wordsworth, to the Gothic novel’s depiction of obsession, lust, and madness. With the extremes of personal experience conceived of as the one and only possible truth in art, the artist is understood as one who seeks, understands, and expresses those extremes with superior capabilities; as such, he is posited as a figure capable of creating, as Shelley phrases it, “the very image of life expressed in eternal truth.”9 The work of the poet, and consequently the figure of the poet himself, is set apart from other forms of human employment, which can never attain such a level of truth because they must always refer to something outside of themselves, and thus become compromised visions. As Wordsworth explains it, the poet’s occupation is the only form of creative and investigative endeavour that engages with real truths; for poetry’s object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony. 10 Conceived of as an intensely personal, yet universal truth, the poet’s vision becomes the ultimate vision; self-contained, and reliant on nothing but reference back to itself in order to confirm its authority. Allowing for the wilful marginalisation of conflicting visions, the poet’s subjectivity is celebrated as encompassing universal truths. This being the case, when these subjective visions are ignored or challenged, they can become akin to the ravings of a madman or a disgruntled would-be tyrant, whose power of vision is not matched by an equal power to impose such visions. One aspect of the poetic vision that can remain relatively intact in the face of such difficulties is the poet’s imaginative construction of himself, his own truth of self-creation. Immortal and omnipresent within the realms of his own creation, his imagination is, to quote Coleridge, “the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”11 As a result of this intense interest in subjective experience and self-creation, it is not surprising to find critics such as Lionel Trilling claiming that “Psychoanalysis is one of the culminations of the Romanticist literature of the nineteenth century.”12 Just as in the process of psychoanalysis, a narrative of self-creation is developed, beginning with the construction of the subject’s identity as different from what is defined as normal. Thus an active and wilful cultivation of difference and disconnection begins: this process is nowhere more obvious than in the depiction of origins, and childhood experiences. From the Romantic period on, we can trace this highly self-conscious

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___________________________________________________________ tendency to mystify the origins of the artist and to represent his creativity and his insight as distinct from the common experience of humanity. Such an understanding can also be found in C. G. Jung’s description of the artist as “a man who from his very birth has been called to a greater task than the ordinary mortal.”13 This innate difference of the artist, in turn, sets up a polarity between “normal” human endeavour and artistic expression, with one often pitted against the other, as discussed above. With the forging of this divide between artist and society, a certain licence may be given to the figure of the artist, to pursue his vision at the expense of particular ethical concepts of social responsibility and respect, as Jung argues, The creative force can drain the human impulses to such a degree that the personal ego must develop all sorts of bad qualities – ruthlessness, selfishness, and vanity (so-called auto-eroticism) – and even every kind of vice, in order to maintain the spark of life and to keep itself from being wholly bereft.14 What becomes evident when linking this statement of Jung’s with the Romantics’ intense belief in individual liberty, is that while an element of this belief may have taken the form of an anti-authoritarian stand against monarchy, parliament, and organised religion (producing radicals, liberals, and dissenters), another equally prevalent element of this equation resulted in a defiant stand against the moral and ethical values of society as a whole (producing so-called moral and social deviants). Writers such as Sade, Byron, De Quincey, Wilde, and Baudelaire have been depicted as such characters, devoted to selfish and immoral pleasures. Here we see a move from the Romantic myth of the artist engaged in a priest-like abstinence from society, wholly consumed by his artistic vocation, to an equally mythologised image of the Romantic artist as a debauched libertine, whose art and life express a deep-seated antagonism towards moral and social codes. However, whether abstinent or overindulgent, outsider or outcast, the figure of the artist, as developed through the discourses of Romanticism, is posited as an individual intellectually and emotionally set apart, often alienated, from the rest of humanity, whose very position outside of the common lot allows him the insight and freedom to understand and judge that common humanity all the better. The carefully forged difference of the artist is thus a difference judged to be superior. Developing this image of the artist/poet as not only a socially distant but a superior individual, are two major strands of Romantic

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___________________________________________________________ writing. The first group, which has been the focus of this chapter thus far, is epitomised by the so-called Lake Poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. The second strand of this conception of the Romantic poet is best typified by later Romantics like Shelley and Byron and their heroic literary creations, Alastor, Manfred, and Childe Harold, who stand outside the jurisdiction of the ordinary criteria of good and evil, acting as fearless individualists whose outcast status and rebellious spirit is akin to Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost (an inspirational figure for many of the Romantics). Possessed of an over-reaching ambition that leads to an inevitable but heroic damnation, Macaulay defined the Byronic hero as A man proud, moody cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.15 With this air of gloom and tragedy surrounding him, the Byronic hero exhibits the traits of an individual whose ennui and love of solitude manifest themselves in the curled lip of disdainful superiority, a glowering fierce defiance, and an unrelenting belief in self-generated moral codes. This is a figure that Byron continually depicted and modified throughout his writing. Just as in the figure of Milton’s Satan, there is a sort of classical heroism at work in Byron’s creations, which adds a sense of superhuman power to these figures of evil. For Byron’s heroes this superhuman quality manifests itself in the most elemental fashion, through a fiercely superior aura, most keenly felt in a forbidding gaze, which masters all who come into contact with it, and bespeaks “A spirit yet unquell’d and high,/ That claims and keeps ascendancy.”16 Such rhetoric clearly reveals that while Byron’s poetic creations lauded the liberating spirit of individualism, the freedom and rebellion that these works praised and promoted was not concerned with proletarian revolt or universal suffrage. Rather it was, the freedom and privilege of the aristocrat, the dream of sovereign rule – be it in the figure of the feudal despot, the rebel outlaw, or the sexual libertine –, which Byron’s heroes emulated, and, as Bertrand Russell states, “not the inferior sort that might be enjoyed by ordinary mortals.”17 Possessed of, as Russell phrases it, a “titanic cosmic self-assertion,” these Byronic figures can be read as an important stage in the development of a philosophical and political outlook and stance towards social structures which would form the Nietzschean concept of the Superman.18 Nietzsche’s insistence on the struggle for power as the cornerstone of all human action and his singling out of a few great individuals who possess the will to power is in many ways the starting point of Byronic doomed heroism. It is not without

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___________________________________________________________ reason then, that Nietzschean theory has been referred to as “Romantic nihilism,” and it is perhaps, with a nod of appreciation, that Nietzsche includes, not only “philosophical men of great power,” but “artist-tyrants,” among the ranks of his own Supermen.19 As already suggested, this strand of the Romantic conceptualisation of the artist and that created by the Lake School of poets are, in fact, closely linked; they both engage in the development of the ideal artist as a socially distant and superior figure. Part of this superiority is derived from the nature of poetry itself, which is described by Shelley as “the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue and glory.”20 This being the case, it follows that this wisdom and glory are the province of the poet, and therefore, as Shelley phrases it, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”21 Yet, as this genius is not portioned out equally among mankind, it must also follow that, to quote Wordsworth, “one being is placed above another, in proportion as he possess this capability.”22 Such concepts, in both language and logic, freely admit the place of dominance and supremacy in the Romantic’s vision of himself, but, in order to do this, these concepts must also allow for the marking off of others as inferior. Perhaps in an attempt to curb the consequences of this reading, Wordsworth makes specific reference to the nature of such poetic genius: Among the qualities which I have enumerated as principally conducing from the poet, is implied nothing differing in kind from other men, but only in degree.23 Yet, such claims by no means exclude the concept of the poet as superior; rather, they merely state that while the poet is not of a different species to his fellow man, he is nonetheless elevated above them by the quality of his perception, feeling, and expression; while still a man, he may be a Superman. Wordsworth’s poetical agenda, as set forth in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” includes among its vital criteria the concept of the poet as “a man, talking to men,” and the language best suited to this is the language “actually spoken by men,” specifically, the language of “low and rustic life.”24 Yet, as Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, points out “every man’s language varies,” not only according to class, but to “the extent of his knowledge, the activity of his faculties, and the depth and quickness of his feeling,” as well as his county, even his village.”25 Here, Wordsworth’s attempts to, as it were, democratise the language of poetry engage in a process of generalisation and oversimplification based on the poet’s own narrow assumptions regarding the “elementary” and “simple” life of the farmer and rural peasant. The same highly selective processing

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___________________________________________________________ is evident in Wordsworth’s choice of subject matter, also to be taken from the “low and rustic life,” in which “incidents and situation from common life” can be gathered and, subsequently, translated into powerful, yet simple, poetry.26 How can this preference for the “low,” favoured in so many Romantics’ work, be read in relation to the continual assertions of superiority, implicitly and explicitly, made in their theoretical writings? What may, at first, appear to be conflicting poetic impulses – on the one hand, to draw on low subjects and, on the other, to claim superior poetic insight – can in fact be understood as working in tandem. Put bluntly, the lower the subject matter, the greater the poetic achievement in transforming it into an aesthetically pleasing work, imbued with profound timeless and universal truths; truths which only the poet, with his superior insight, can uncover. In light of this, the Romantic poet’s elevation of the “meanest,” and therefore, most unpromising subject to the realms of high art, can be read, not as a part of an idealistic humanist or democratic agenda, but rather, as a cunning mode of self-aggrandisement. This concept of the artist “using” his subject matter as a means of self-aggrandisement is particularly significant to the poets of the Romantic period. With decreasing patronage and increasing secularisation in the arts, the Romantic poet finds himself freer to choose a subject most fitting to his own artistic purposes. Bearing in mind the period’s intense interest in individual subjectivity, we may consequently question to what extent the Romantic artist’s subject matter is incidental to his desire to explore and express his own subjecthood. In part, the answer to this lies in a consideration of the Romantic poet’s treatment of his subject matter as a mere extension of himself. In his comments on Ode: Intimations of Immortality to Isabella Fenwick, Wordsworth fondly reminisces about his youthful “confusion” on this very subject: I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all I saw as something not apart from me, but inherent in me, my own immaterial nature.27 In psychoanalytic terms, this sort of experience could be interpreted as an example of the pre-oedipal stage of childhood, before the individual has begun to conceive of the world and the people around him as distinct from him. Wordsworth chose to interpret it as evidence of a possible preexistent state of being, in which one could detect the interconnectedness of all living things. However, it is also possible to read such an understanding of the self and its surroundings as yet another example of what Russell calls “titanic cosmic self-assertion.” In such an instance, the apparently

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___________________________________________________________ humbling experience of discovering one’s place in the vast interconnectedness of all things becomes, instead, an egomaniacal belief that all matter is an extension of the self, and that, as such, all selfexpression displays individual pre-eminence and power. In his philosophical writing, Eureka, Poe’s belief in the sentience and the interconnectedness of all matter turns into such an act of “titanic cosmic self-assertion,” with clearly violent and destructive implications: If I venture to displace, by even the billionth of an inch, the microscopic speck of dust which lies upon the point of my finger, what is the character of that act upon which I have ventured? I have done a deed which shakes the moon in her path, which causes the sun to be no longer the sun, and which alters forever that density of the multitudinous myriads of stars that roll and glow in the majestic presence of their creator.28 While most analogies between God and the artist tend to focus on the connection between human and divine creation, what often remains understated is the extent to which issues of power and control, dominance and possession, continually surface in relation to both. In Poe’s comments, the figure of the artist moves from an individual in touch with the profoundest truths of existence to a being capable of altering and destroying that existence with a godlike omnipotence and power. In fact, what Poe’s statement does is draw on the concept that at the heart of the myths of both divine and artistic creation there is an implicit understanding of creation and destruction, not in opposition to one another but in a cyclical union, whereby the former invokes the latter in order to continually reinstate the authority and power of the original creative forces. It is clearly the Romantic artist’s power of imagination which places him in the unique position as an earthly equivalent to God, as Jerome McGann explains: “final mastery lies in those who create and master the world of ideas; God ultimately, but in the mortal sphere the manipulators of the creative imagination.”29 During the Romantic period such concepts are evident in the influential idealist philosophies of Schiller and Schopenhauer who argued for a distinct link between creativity in man and the concept of divine creation, emphasising the importance, and the power, of the individual will in the act of creation. It is as if in an attempt to counteract the image of the artist as a passive “feminised” participant in the creative process that this concept of the artist as a

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___________________________________________________________ profoundly masterful creative force, continually surfaces in Romantic literature and criticism. Despite this attempt to remasculinise the artist’s role, for Freud there ultimately seems to be very little separating the artist from what he refers to as the neurotic, for both are engaged in the “separation of imagination and intellectual capacity” and, as a result, both are “destined to be [either] a poet or a neurotic.”30 Presumably, what differentiates these categories from one another is the level of reason and control evident in the former and the lack of such qualities in the latter; anyhow, the distinction, it seems, is to be made by degrees rather than types. Present day psychological theories have often maintained this differentiation between the controlled and creative imagination of the artist and the uncontrolled and destructive imagination of the neurotic or psychopath, while still defining the two forms of imagination as each other’s correlative, with both being in opposition to the “normal” and “moderate” use of the imaginative faculties. Criminal psychologist James Gallwey’s comments on the imagination and the “schizoid personality” are a typical example: A normal person enriches experience and life with imagination. A schizoid personality indulges imagination for its own sake. This can produce artists, but in schizoids it can be dangerous, causing split personality.31 What seems to be proffered by such interpretations of the imaginative faculties is the potential danger of their usurping reality when “overused.” In the case of the artist, and particularly the artist since Romanticism, this overindulgence in the imagination is seen as an acceptable abnormality as long as it adheres to the concepts of artistic control, mastery, and purpose. Without this sense of control over his imaginative world the artist and his work often become associated with states of emotional, even mental, instability, with a myriad of negative implications. As Freud suggests in his essay on “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming”: If fantasises become overluxuriant and overpowerful, the conditions are laid for an onset of neurosis or psychosis. Fantasies are, moreover, the immediate precursors of the distressing symptoms complained of by our patients. Here a broad by-path branches off into pathology.32

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___________________________________________________________ 3.

“Kindred Mutations”: The Romantic Artist and the Serial Killer Turning from this psychoanalytical evaluation of the dangers of fantasy in the artist, to the branch of psychology known as criminology, we can observe how the serial killer is also often understood to be in possession of a rich, active, and complicated fantasy life; a life so intense, absorbing, and preferable to reality that everyday living becomes increasingly difficult: Even as a child he is likely to have been withdrawn, living in part in his own dream world. His fantasy life is in many ways more important to him than his ordinary life, and in a sense more real, so diminishing the value he puts on external life and other people. It is almost as if he were forced by practical realities to emerge unwillingly from fantasy at times, but returns as soon as he can.33 The similarities which can be drawn between this psychological outline of the “typical” serial killer and the figure of the artist are numerous. In both there is an understanding of difference (defined as an unusually strong imaginative faculty) as developing during childhood, there is also a construction of the figure as withdrawn and distant from “common” experience or “ordinary” life; all of which are familiar themes in the Romantic and post-Romantic artist’s projected “life story.” Driven or forced by inner-directed passionate, yet abstract, purposes, both are often seen as unable or unwilling to function in everyday life. This being the case, both figures are conceived of as rejecting or, as some commentators describe it, sacrificing the intersubjective experience of societal relations to indulge in an intensely subjective world of their own creation. Constructed as intellectually and emotionally alienated from the society in which they find themselves, both the figure of the serial killer and artist are continually depicted as outsiders, disdainful of what they see as society’s rigid demands, and its narrow definition of decency and morality. Such defiant individualism and general disdain of “common” life can also lead the figure of the artist/serial killer to be considered as a likely harbourer of egomaniacal tendencies; an individual who revels in his own subjecthood to the exclusion of all else. In fact, both figures can be linked together by their apparent desire for self-expression in which the subject matter or object of self-expression (that is, the poetic theme or the victim) becomes incidental, merely acting as a vehicle for the exploration and expression of the figure’s subjecthood. For the serial killer, this

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___________________________________________________________ tendency is evident in his inability to recall or differentiate any personal attributes of his victims; chosen as types reflecting certain attitudes and desires of the killer, their existence and subsequent death is significant only to the extent to which it bears a relation to the killer’s own subjecthood. With the importance of personal vision placed above external reality, the figure of the Romantic artist and the serial killer can be interpreted as, in as sense, transcending not merely the general but the “real,” of binding together a world image through the force of their own intellect, and of doing so by a process of depersonalising and objectifying others; mirroring the Romantic philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s argument for the dualism of subject (me) and object (everything not-me), it sets up a tension between the subject’s inner life and the outer world of things and other people. The following comment on the attitude of a serial killer towards his victims, made by criminal psychologist John MacKeith, shows just how such a profound incomprehension of the otherness of others is concomitant with depersonalisation and objectification: He recalled some physical aspects of his victims, but scarcely anything about them as people. They were objects who filled his assumptions, indicating a strange depersonalised state.34 Such acts of depersonalisation, and subsequent objectification, can also include a process of self-projection. As MacKeith goes on to explain, Divorced from normal awareness that his victims were real people, enlivened with human properties, they became objects to him. Sometimes they seemed to be himself.35 Within this process, whereby, everything outside the self is only a product of the self’s awareness, lies the Romantic aesthetic which conceives of the outer world as the creation of the subjective mind, and as such an extension or projection of the self. In the case of relationships with other people, we see in the later Romantics’ work, a great propensity for self-projection, particularly in matters of romantic love and sexual attraction. Some commentators emphasise this aspect of the Romantic artist through biographical details of incestuous love; Byron’s “affair” with his half sister and Poe’s marriage to his first cousin, for example. However ample evidence of the Romantic poet’s tendency to project himself on to an idealised image of the beloved exists in the poetry itself.

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___________________________________________________________ It can be found, for example, in the following lines from Byron’s play, Manfred, detailing the narrator’s ideal love: She was like me in lineaments – her eyes, Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone Even of her voice, they said were like to mine.36 However, as Thomas Weiskel explains: “If you love what is essentially an ideal version of yourself, your love nourishes a growing ‘selfhood’ which is incapable of desire and … stands alone,” leaving the poet to, as Hazlitt phrased it, live “in the solitude of his own breast.”37 Bertrand Russell argues that such Romantic tropes of idealised and narcissistic love stem from the Romantic artist’s profound ambivalence towards societal relations in which he feels compromised and entrapped; an ambivalence that, as we have already seen, extends to include familial relationships and marriage, both of which pose a threat to the artist’s sense of autonomy. This tension between the artist and his loved ones is often conceived of, and represented as, a battle of competing egos. As Russell explains: Not only passionate love, but every friendly relation to others, is only possible, to this way of feeling, in so far as others can be regarded as a projection of one’s own self... This is made more feasible if others are blood relations.38 Such a description inevitably brings the work of Edgar Allan Poe to mind, with its line of lovers and siblings whose physical and psychological similarities are the basis of a profound attraction which is nonetheless underlined by an intense fear of ego sublimation and eventual destruction. In what is a typically Romantic vein, D. H. Lawrence echoes rather than analyses this attitude to passionate love in relation to Poe’s short story, “Ligeia.” He writes: It is a tale of love pushed over a verge. And love pushed to extreme is a battle of wills between the lovers... What he [Ligeia’s Husband] wants to do with Ligeia is analyse her, till he knows all her component parts, till he has got her all in his consciousness... It is easy to see why each man kills the thing he loves.39

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___________________________________________________________ In one brief swoop of Romantic rhetoric, profound love and the desire (perhaps even the necessity) to kill are made inseparable. Following the logic of this particular Romantic theory, it becomes somewhat difficult to accept the phrase used by Anthony Storr when referring to the serial killer, Dennis Nilsen. By calling Nilsen a “terribly distorted Romantic,” Storr suggests that, in the killer’s acts of murder, a clear warping of Romantic ideology has taken place.40 However, it would seem more accurate to suggest that Nilsen is a terribly extreme Romantic, rather than a distorted one, who violently literalises some of the most fundamental aspects of Romanticism. One of Nilsen’s psychological examiners, for instance, describes Nilsen’s “dangerous ability to place false meanings on to what people say” as connected to his “unusual capacity to invest others with attitudes and feelings reflecting his own.”41 This understanding of other people as selfprojections also allowed Nilsen to feel morally justified in taking their lives; assuming he knew their thoughts and their needs, he could allow himself the decision of whether they would be better off dead. In fact, Nilsen even described his murders as a sort of suicide by proxy, acknowledging: “It may be that when I was killing these men I was killing myself.”42 Through a process of depersonalisation and self-projection, Nilsen (and killers who follow a similar psychological pattern) uses the murder of others as a form of self-articulation, while substituting for the lives he has taken by insisting on the continued presence of his victims in his psyche. In what is fundamentally a Romantic manoeuvre, Nilsen thus appropriates his subject (his victim) and presents it as a part of himself, of his ego. Devoid of any true significance outside of the “animating” principle of his own psyche, his victims become the ideal objects for Romantic contemplation and self expression, not only through the act of murder, but also through its subsequent representation in his many drawings and poems. While connections may be drawn between this dangerous egotism of the serial killer and the “darker” exponents of Romanticism (Poe, for example, comes to mind when examining the case of Nilsen), it also has implicit connections with the Romantics whose work is less conspicuously antagonistic in its stance towards its environment and its subject. Consider for example, the following lines from The Prelude: There I beheld the emblem of a mind That feeds upon infinity, that broods Over the dark abyss, intent to hear Its voices issuing forth to silent light In one continuous stream; a mind sustained By recognitions of transcendent power,

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___________________________________________________________ In sense conducting to ideal form, In soul of more than mortal privilege.43 Detecting the air of exclusive egotism in such writing, William Hazlitt’s comments on Wordsworth and the poets of the Lake School arrive at the following conclusion: He tolerates only what he himself creates; he sympathises only with what can enter into no competition with him, with “the bare trees and mountains bare, and grass in the green field.” He sees nothing but himself and the universe.44 Drawing attention to these poets’ emphasis on the natural world, devoid of thinking subjects (that is, alternative, competing consciousnesses); Hazlitt’s comments suggest that concomitant with the egomania which may be detected in such work is a fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness. Reading this hostility as, at least in part, an expression of a deep fear of losing individual consciousness or ego, aligns it to what numerous criminologists have isolated as a major force behind apparently “motiveless,” repeated murders. In both cases there is what the criminal psychologist describes as: An instinct towards aggression closely linked to self-presentation, self-assertion, and selfaffirmation at the expense of another; an extreme form of assertion of individual identity...45 The notion of killing for self-esteem or as “a defence against impending psychotic ego rupture” is relatively new in criminology, and has been developed primarily as a means of explaining serial killing.46 Arguing that The Prelude, for example, may also represent a similar defence against impending ego rupture is not to argue that Wordsworth himself was personally in need of such a psychological defence. However, there certainly is a legitimate argument for comparing the ideological contexts under which the Romantic artist, and his work, has been created and perceived, with present day interpretations and representations of the serial killer. Indeed, a closer examination of their connection to one another may prove useful to a greater understanding of both.

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Notes 1. Dennis Nilsen, in Brian Masters, Killing for Company (London: Cape, 1985), 196. 2. Colin Wilson, The Outsiders (London: Pan Books, 1978), 64. 3. Quoted in Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London: Fontana, 1971), 14. 4. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press, 1993), 79. 5. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems,” in William Wordsworth: The Poems, edited by John O. Hayden (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 1: 872-880. 6. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 1805, 10: 826-830. 7. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 91. 8. William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in Complete Poems of William Blake, edited by Alicia Ostriker (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 186. 9. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Percy Shelley’s Prose or The Trumpet of a Prophecy, edited by David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), 281. 10. Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 1981, 879. 11. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 7, vols. 1-2, edited by Kathleen Coburn and James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Routledge and Paul Kegan, Princeton University Press, 1983), 2: 304. 12. Lionel Trilling, “Freud and Literature,” in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: A Reader, edited by David Lodge (London and New York: Longman, 1995), 276. 13. Carl Gustav Jung, “Psychology and Literature,” in Lodge, 185. 14. Ibid., 186. 15. Quoted in J. D. Jump, “Lord Byron,” in The Pelican Guide to English Literature 5, From Blake to Byron, edited by Boris Ford (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 240. 16. George Gordon, Lord Byron, “Giaour,” in Poetical Works, edited by Frederick Page, correction ed. John Jump (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 40-41. All further references to Byron’s work are from this edition.

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___________________________________________________________ 17. Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), 718. 18. Ibid., 717. 19. J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, edited by David Lodge (London and New York: Longman, 1995), 284. Nietzsche quoted in Russell, 731. 20. Shelley, “Defence of Poetry,” in Percy Shelley’s Prose or The Trumpet of a Prophecy, edited by David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), 295. 21. Ibid., 297. 22. Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 1981, 872. 23. Ibid., 882. 24. Ibid., 869. 25. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1983, 1: 55. 26. Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 1981, 869. 27. Ibid., 978. 28. Edgar Allen Poe, Eureka, in Poe: Poetry and Tales, edited by Patrick Quinn (New York: Literary Classics of the USA, 1978), 1245. 29. McGann, 1983, 102. 30. Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” in Lodge, 1998, 40. 31. James Gallwey, quoted in Brian Masters, Killing for Company (London: Cape, 1985), 226. 32. Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” in Lodge, 1981, 48. 33. Robert Brittian, quoted in Masters, 247. 34. John MacKeith, quoted in Masters, 223. 35. Ibid., 226. 36. Byron, Manfred, 2.2. 37. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 148. 38. Russell, 657-58. 39. D. H. Lawrence, “Classic American Literature,” quoted in Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, translated by Angus Davidson, (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 178. 40. Anthony Storr, “Postscript,” in Masters, 319. 41. Masters, 256. 42. Dennis Nilsen, quoted in Masters, 193. 43. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1979, 14.70-77. 44. William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols., edited by P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1935), 5: 163. 45. Anthony Storr, quoted in Mikita Brottman, Meat is Murder! An Illustrated Guide to Cannibal Culture (London: Creation, 1998), 27.

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___________________________________________________________ 46. Masters, 262.

Select Bibliography Blake, William. The Complete Poems of William Blake. Edited by Alicia Ostriker. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977. Brottman, Mikita. Meat is Murder! An Illustrated Guide to Cannibal Culture. London: Creation, 1998. Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Poetical Works. Edited by Frederick Page, correction editor, John Jump. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. General editor, Kathleen Coburn. Princeton: Routledge and Paul Kegan, Princeton University Press, 1983. Curran, Stuart, ed. The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Ford, Boris, ed. The Pelican Guide to English Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965. Hazlitt, William. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Edited by P. P. Howe. London: Dent, 1935. Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image. London: Fontana, 1971. Lodge, David, ed. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London and New York: Longman, 1995. ——, ed. Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: A Reader. London and New York: Longman, 1998. Masters, Brian. Killing for Company. London: Cape, 1985. McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Poe, Edgar Allan. Poe: Poetry and Tales. Edited by Patrick Quinn. New York: Literary Classics of the USA, 1978. Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Translated by Angus Davidson. London: Oxford University Press, 1951. Russell, Bertrand. The History of Western Philosophy. London: Allen and Unwin, 1974. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Percy Shelley’s Prose or The Trumpet of a Prophecy. Edited by David Lee Clark. London: Fourth Estate, 1988. Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City, London: Hogarth Press, 1993. Wilson, Colin. The Outsiders. London: Pan Books, 1978.

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___________________________________________________________ Wordsworth, William. William Wordsworth: The Poems. Edited by John O. Hayden. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981. ——. The Prelude, 1779, 1805, 1850. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth and M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979.

Part IV Evil, Despair, and Distorted Realities

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The Evils of [Same] Sex: The U.S. Gay Marriage Debate Margaret Sönser Breen Abstract This essay examines the U.S. gay marriage debates that have occurred over the past decade. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the gay marriage debates turned largely on the demonisation of sex (that is, sexual expression in general and same-sex activity especially) and the consequent need to regulate or normalise it through marriage. Since September 11 [,2001], the terms of this debate have intensified as the country has come to re-examine its understanding of social and political security. This larger context has shaped the gay marriage debate so that, on the one hand, sex outside of marriage has been figured as a form of domestic terrorism, while, on the other hand, marriage itself has become a figure for national security. It is within the framework of this heightened debate that, I believe, same-sex marriage will be increasingly politically recognised within the next several years. Key Words: gay marriage, gay priests, sex, sexuality. Ideologically, capitalism drives people into heterosexual families: each generation comes of age having internalised a heterosexist model of intimacy and personal relationships. Materially, capitalism weakens the bonds that once kept families together so that their members experience a growing instability in the place they have come to expect happiness and emotional security. Thus, while capitalism has knocked the material foundation away from family life, lesbians, gay men, and heterosexual feminists have become the scapegoats for the social instability of the system.1 2

Only connect… 1.

Introduction: E. M. Forster, Sexual Identity, and Marriage Why not start with Howards End? In that novel, published in 1910, E. M. Forster’s heroine Margaret considers the role of sex and gender within the context of heterosexual love and intimacy. Thinking of her sister, Helen, Margaret wonders: “She could pity, or sacrifice herself, or have instincts, but had she ever loved in the noblest way, where man and woman, having lost themselves in sex, desire to lose sex itself in comradeship?”3 Margaret’s question is a telling one. Even as she is

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____________________________________________________________ wondering about her sister here, she is also thinking of herself, particularly her marriage, which has not answered her desire to “lose sex itself in comradeship.” “Comradeship,” Margaret’s – and Forster’s – standard for measuring sexual love between two people, can only be realised insofar as the categories of “man” and “woman” have been suspended. “Comradeship” is a term that Forster would have gotten from classical Greek literature, but also his readings of Walt Whitman and, more immediately, Edward Carpenter, whom he met in 1913, three years after Howards End’s publication. Carpenter, as John Fletcher notes, “was an exponent of socialism and the Whitmanian doctrine of ‘the love of comrades.’”4 He believed that gay men (and by implication lesbians) …combined positive qualities of both sexes…[They] were sexual “intermediaries,” [who] could act not only as “interpreters of men and women to each other” but also as a bridge to a more spiritually advanced, more harmonious future.5 “The love of comrades” for Carpenter and for Forster proves itself the vehicle for examining and redefining conventional relations across gender, as well as class and, implicitly in Howards End, race. Forster’s comrades are those whom today we might term the “gender queer,” including (among others) gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders, who in their gender presentation and/or sexual orientation point to the constructed “nature” of gender and disclose the differences between sex, sexuality, and gender. As theorist Judith Butler explains, compulsory heterosexual identities, those ontologically consolidated phantasms of “man” and “woman,” are theatrically produced effects that posture as grounds, origins, the normative measure of the real…There are no direct expressive or causal lines between sex, gender, gender representation, sexual practice, fantasy, and sexuality.6 Socially transgressive insofar as it exposes the unequal distribution of power lodged within such social norms as class and gender divisions, queerness itself figures the possibility of a social unity based on the transgression of those norms, as well as their possible reconstitution. Returning to Carpenter and Forster, one thinks of Carpenter’s comradeship with the working-class George Merrill or of Forster’s own relationship with R. J. Buckingham. In Howards End, in turn, the power of the trope is

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____________________________________________________________ such that, ironically, wonderfully, marriage for Margaret must aspire to its own undoing. The ideal of comradeship that inspires marriage assumes the suspension of the rigid categories of “man” and “woman,” and, as borne out by the Margaret’s sister Helen’s relation with Leonard Bast, the transgression of seemingly insuperable class divisions. Writing less than twenty years after the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” appeared in English,7 Forster in effect discloses the link between marriage, on the one hand, and sexuality as an identity category, on the other hand. One might say that Howards End – as well as perhaps his other novels – constitutes an early example of the gay marriage debate. One might even argue further that “comradeship” is Forster’s answer not only for Margaret in her marriage but also for an England divided between aesthetic and imperialist values and for a Europe edging ever closer to World War I. “Comradeship,” in its suspension of gender binarisms and class barriers, is Forster’s trope for marital, national, and even world stability. Stated in slightly different terms, the issue of marriage has been hovering over the question of sexual identity more or less since the latter’s construction just over a century ago. Recognising as much is crucial when considering the U.S. gay marriage debates that have occurred over the past decade. Those debates have not simply been shaped by the political and cultural events of the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century; those debates have been epistemic to the very understanding of sexual identity as a vehicle for/an agent of social stability. My paper examines this epistemic relation over the last ten years in the United States. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the gay marriage debates turned largely on the demonisation of sex (that is, sexual expression in general and of same-sex activity especially) and the consequent need to regulate or normalise it through marriage. Since September 11 [,2001], the terms of this debate have intensified as the country has come to reexamine its understanding of social and political security. This larger context has shaped the gay marriage debate so that, on the one hand (or fist), sex outside of marriage has been figured as a form of domestic terrorism, while, on the other hand, marriage itself has become a figure for national security. It is within the framework of this heightened debate that, I believe, same-sex marriage will be increasingly politically recognised within the next several years. 2.

The 1990s: Normalising Gayness and the “Maelstrom of Sex” While in the United States marriage has been a gay rights issue “for several decades,”8 it is in the mid 1990s, when many gay rights groups invested in the assimilation of lesbians and gays into the mainstream population pushed for gay marriage via mainstream media,

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____________________________________________________________ that the debate gained prominence. Same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue. Yet the arguments in its favour are not necessarily progressive ones. Indeed, in discussing the push for gay marriage in the mid 1990s, I have chosen to focus on one of its most powerful and problematic expressions. Andrew Sullivan’s 1995 “Argument about Homosexuality,” Virtually Normal, offers one of the most rhetorically savvy and disturbing calls for that assimilation. In this book Sullivan calls for a “politics of homosexuality,” at the centre of which lies the issue of civil marriage. Marriage, Sullivan argues, is not simply a private contract; it is a social and public recognition of a private commitment. As such, it is the highest public recognition of public integrity. Denying it to homosexuals is the most public affront possible to their public equality.9 Sullivan’s definition of marriage here discloses his conservative social vision: marriage is the bedrock of a virtuous society. For Sullivan, gay marriage is preferable to domestic partnership, because the latter “could open a Pandora’s box of litigation and subjective judicial decision making about who qualifies.”10 Further, domestic partnership “chips away at the prestige of traditional relationships and undermines the priority we give them.”11 Marriage, by contrast, maintains the privileged social status of married couples; it reaffirms the nuclear family as the social ideal; and, importantly, it protects couples from the potentially destructive power of sex. In these instances, Sullivan argues, the gay couple is no different than the heterosexual couple: Society…has good reasons to extend legal advantages to heterosexuals who choose the formal sanction of marriage over simply living together. They make a deeper commitment to one another and to society; in exchange, society extends certain benefits to them. Marriage provides an anchor, if an arbitrary and often weak one, in the maelstrom of sex and relations to which we are all prone. It provides a mechanism for emotional stability and economic security. We rig the law in its favour not because we disparage all forms of relationship other than the nuclear family, but because we recognise that not to promote marriage would be to ask too much of human virtue.12

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____________________________________________________________ What is problematic here is, of course, that Sullivan’s argument for gay marriage happens at the expense of many, many people who do not regard marriage as either a personal goal or an expression of human worth or the organising feature of society. Marriage may be a cultural ideal for some, but, one must remember, it is an ideal with particular class and race inflections. Troubling on the figurative level is the characterisation of sex. Sullivan invokes that standard Christian trope for the believer’s battle against temptation – the storm-tossed ship: in this case it is marriage that proves to be the “anchor” that will keep him from the powerful chaos of sex, that vortex of ineluctable fluids that would swallow him up – anchor and all. Critic Michael Warner provides an acute reading of that chaos, which extends beyond the question of sex to the issue of political equality. In The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, Warner discloses how assimilation does not lead to equality: …marriage, not just straight marriage…sanctifies some couples at the expense of others. It is selective legitimacy. …To a couple that gets married, marriage just looks ennobling…Stand outside it for a second and you see the implication: if you don’t have it, you and your relations are less worthy. Without this corollary effect, marriage would not be able to endow anybody’s life with significance. The ennobling and the demeaning go together. Marriage does one only by virtue of the other. Marriage, in short, discriminates.13 Warner’s critique of Sullivan’s same-sex marriage argument discloses how the latter turns on a definition of marriage as the moral foundation of family and state – a definition that in turn permits the state’s (immoral) penalization of those who are not married. The legitimisation of the gay couple through marriage happens at the expense of a renewed delegitimisation of other gay relations and of sex acts not directly linked to the production and maintenance of the two-parent family. And that delegitimisation plays out differently, according to the class and race dynamics of the people affected. Stated another way, an expanded, inclusive definition of marriage has depended in part on a politics of sexual policing and shaming that disregards various class- and race-based understandings of the relations among sex, family, and community. Ironically, the inclusive definition has depended on a narrowing understanding of and tolerance for sex itself. Where “f” is for family, one is tempted to ask, what the f—?

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____________________________________________________________ Yet, even so, one may say that Warner’s categorical dismissal of marriage is too hasty. Need marriage necessarily discriminate? Theoretically, at least, that would appear not to be the case. Judith Butler explains: It is important to recognise the ways in which heterosexual norms reappear within gay identities, to affirm that gay and lesbian identities are not only structured in part by dominant heterosexual frames, but that they are not for that reason determined by them. They are running commentaries on those naturalised positions as well, parodic replays and resignifications of precisely those heterosexual structures that would consign gay life to discursive domains of unreality and unthinkability. But to be constituted or structured in part by the very heterosexual norms by which gay people are oppressed is not, I repeat, to be claimed or determined by those structures. And it is not necessary to think of such heterosexual constructs as the pernicious intrusion of “the straight mind,” one that must be rooted out in its entirety.14 In choosing marriage, gay men and lesbians are not necessarily merely replicating a dominant and oppressive paradigm. Within the United States, marriage’s oppressive power depends largely on its legal linkage to family, on the one hand, and to basic social rights constructed as “benefits” (such as health care), on the other hand. As John D’Emilio has so eloquently argued in his essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” marriage’s status as a trope for social harmony depends largely on its socially divisive reach within a capitalist society that does not extend basic rights to its citizens who exist beyond the chuppa of marriage. In the name of marriage, the state can erase or, borrowing Sullivan’s phrase, relegate other relations to a juridical “maelstrom of sex.” Marriage under such conditions is a far cry from the “love of comrades.” Sullivan’s apologia for gay tolerance ends with a self-admitted moment of homophobia. He argues that the cessation of public discrimination against gays and lesbians will result in a reinscription of gender norms. Sullivan describes his own struggle to come to terms with his own gayness. He details how he first …developed mannerisms, small ways in which I could express myself, tiny revolts of personal space – a speech

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____________________________________________________________ affectation, a ridiculous piece of clothing – that were, in retrospect, attempts to communicate something in code which could not be communicated in language. In this homosexual archness there was, of course, much pain. And it came as no surprise that once I had become more open about my homosexuality, these mannerisms declined. Once I found the strength to be myself, I had no need to act myself. So my clothes became progressively more regular and slovenly; I lost interest in drama; my writing moved from fiction to journalism; my speech actually became less affected.15 His journey toward self-acceptance is marked by the move from affectation to authenticity, from fiction to fact. His comfort level is achieved once he effaces the distinction between sex and gender and delightedly recovers his own “nature” as gender normative. He is, he discovers, assimilable; he is “virtually normal.” Sullivan’s argument is not, of course, the definitive one for samesex marriage. There are many, important, poignant, and progressive aspects of the gay marriage push. One need only consider some of the following examples: the dilemma of the same-sex couple with children, where one partner has no legal claim to her family; the precarious task of staying together for partners, one of whom is not a U.S. citizen or a green card holder; the horrific refusal of a hospital to allow a gay man to administer the medical wishes of his dying partner. The same-sex marriage debate does not by any means speak to the needs of all queers. The struggle to grant gay and lesbian couples the right to marry is only one of many civil rights struggles regarding “the love of comrades.” It is only when same-sex marriage becomes “the gay issue” – when, in effect, it is put forth at the expense of other queer issues – that it loses its connection to a progressive politics. Gay marriage holds immediate effects for lesbian and gay couples and their families. Defined within these limits, same-sex marriage is a social justice issue. 3.

The Aftermath of 9/11 and the Catholic Church Sexual Abuse Scandal: The Sexual Terrorist Yet, the issue has not remained defined within these limits. Since 2001 two events especially have reinvigorated the call for same-sex marriage. These two events are September 11 and the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal, which broke some three months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Taken together, the attacks and the scandal have produced competing narratives regarding gays and lesbians. On the one hand, there is the narrative of the heroic queer – the

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____________________________________________________________ comrade in arms – comprised of several individual stories, such as that of Mark Bingham, the gay man who battled hijackers over the skies of Pennsylvania; the story of Father Mychal Judge, the gay New York Fire Department chaplain who was killed when the World Trade Center towers collapsed; and that of the numerous bereaved gays and lesbians who, having lost their partners in the attacks, fought for and won the right to receive survivor benefits.16 On the other hand, there is the narrative of the evil homosexual: the queer as the domestic terrorist, culturally implicated in the attacks, and the gay man as sexual predator, the monstrous threat to family and society. It is on this latter narrative that I will place special emphasis. It is by now commonplace to represent September 11 as a day of profound change, one that has shaped the political and cultural debates of these last few years. September 11 ruptured the American psyche of the 90s (with its disposition toward assimilationism) and resuscitated a political understanding of the country as a nation at war. In his speech to Congress nine days after the attacks, President Bush implicitly answered the question on so many people’s minds – “why did this happen?” – with the following sentence: “All of this was brought upon us in a single day – and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.”17 The attacks on the United States targeted American values. Indeed, the president’s speech figures the experience of the attacks as distinctly American; there is little identification here with other countries – one thinks, for example, of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s later dismissive denomination “Old Europe” – that have been at war with terrorism for a long time. The United States was now at war, and that war needed to be understood as in part a cultural war. Tellingly, the president’s language here mixes secular with religious language. His sentence recalls the early passages of Genesis, the cadences and descriptions of God’s creation of the universe. Here, though, the sequence of night and day is inverted: with the attacks, day has turned to night. This connection between an inverted Creation and a declaration of war is crucial for understanding the homophobic backlash that occurred post 9/11. The attacks on the U.S. could be read as attacks on a country founded not simply as a “free” secular society but on a country founded as a new Eden and a country still rooted in its Christian heritage. This tension between secular and religious values resurfaces in fundamentalist leader Jerry Falwell’s infamous response to 9/11, in which he blames gays and lesbians, among others, for the attacks: I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make an alternative lifestyle, the

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____________________________________________________________ ACLU, People for the American Way – all of them who have tried to secularise American – I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen.”18 Where for President Bush September 11 signals an inverted Creation, for Reverend Falwell it figures a Fall into secularism, a Fall that, notably, turns on the issue of sexuality. While the reverend eventually retracted his comments, they should not be read as anomalous. Shortly after 9/11, Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, known for his conservative Catholicism, sent a letter to his constituents in which he urged them to contribute to the Alliance for Marriage, “a non-profit group lobbying against same-sex marriage.”19 According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Santorum wrote, “I know it may sound like a huge exaggeration, particularly in light of the attack on America, but this may truly be the most important letter I ever write you.”20 For Santorum as for Falwell, the terrorist attacks needed to be linked to a kind of sexual terrorism that, having been allowed to flourish in an increasingly secular America, had hijacked the country’s core Christian values. The sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, which broke a few months after 9/11, seemed at first to crystallise the religious right’s argument that homosexuality was a sin and so necessarily a threat to family and state. In March 2002, Vatican spokesman Joaquin NavarroValls, stated that reforms proposed to combat priests’ sexual abuse of children and teens – reforms such as “better psychological screening and revamped training in church seminaries” – would do little to curb the abuse.21 What was needed instead, he argued, was the prevention of gay men from entering the priesthood. “People with these inclinations just cannot be ordained. That does not imply a final judgment on people with homosexuality, but you cannot be in this field.”22 Joaquin Navarro-Valls’s comments did meet with opposition. Critics quickly pointed out that sexual abuse and homosexuality were not equivalent. Yet, conservative Catholics continued to call for the purging of gay priests. G. Thomas Fitzpatrick, writing for the New Oxford Review, maintained that priestly paedophilia is very much a homosexual issue.…Of the 87 priests whose names were turned over to prosecutors for having one or more incidents of paedophilia on their records, at most one or two are accused of molesting girls, but along w/boys as well.…Yes, the molestations and sexual seductions are routinely of a homosexual nature.23

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____________________________________________________________ In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, at a time when the media has depicted terrorism as an amorphous, invisible, and ubiquitous threat, the Church scandal has functioned as a visible and localisable horror. Particularly within the Church, gay male priests have become the stand-ins for terrorists. This equation is fairly direct in Fitzpatrick’s June 2002 piece: “[N]ot all Muslims are terrorists. But all the September 11 terrorists were Muslim. Not all homosexuals are paedophiles. But all the paedophiles I have heard about in Boston are homosexual.”24 With its almost exclusive focus on man-boy sexual relations (as opposed to, say, man-girl or man-woman relations or woman-girl, woman-boy, or womanman relations) and the blanket and elided categorisation of those relations as “abusive”/“gay,” this demonisation of the clergy has produced a range of discursive effects – nationalist, religious, and psychological, to name a few – for a public overwhelmed by the events of 9/11. The depiction of gay priests as terrorists has not only reaffirmed the U.S.’s status as a primarily Christian country, it has offered the public a mythic and ahistorical narrative of ruptured innocence – a narrative that has allowed the public to experience the feelings of fear, loss, and retribution that the attacks have engendered on a deeply personal level. 4.

The Current Gay Marriage Debate Yet, most importantly, within the context of the gay marriage debate, the Church sex abuse scandal has effected not simply a demonisation of the gay priest but also a backlash against the Church itself that has widened the gap between civil and religious discourse regarding homosexuality. So, for example, discussions of the distinction between “normative” (or “good”) homosexuals and the inassimilable (or “bad”) homosexuals present in the mid 1990s civil marriage debates have been expanded to encompass the priesthood itself. One of the social repercussions of the Church’s decades-long cover-up of paedophilia has been an increasingly vocal critique of the viability of the Church’s understanding of matters of gender, sex, and sexuality. The question “what is wrong with homosexuality” has morphed into the question “what is wrong with the Church?” The vow of celibacy, in particular, has met with the charge that it is an “unnatural” state. Ironically, the Catholic sexual abuse scandal has produced a paradigm of the sexual terrorist who is not simply a paedophile but, potentially, any priest. Having taken the vow of celibacy, the priest is the inassimilable sexual subject par excellence. He remains beyond the state’s oversight, an oversight whose focal point is marriage. The comments of long-time gay marriage rights supporter Michelangelo Signorile are fairly indicative of this reading. In response to

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____________________________________________________________ Navarro-Valls’ call that gay men should not be allowed to enter the priesthood, Signorile observes, …[B]anning gays from the priesthood…would go far toward dismantling the homosexual closet in America and I suspect other countries, as the priesthood has been a refuge for a lot of confused and struggling gay men who turn to it, with its vow of celibacy, rather than come to terms with their sexual orientation.25 Here Signorile understands the vow as a kind of closeting mechanism, a “don’t ask, don’t tell” posture. His argument figures celibacy as a spectral sexuality whose expressive (including abusive) possibilities are always already there. Seen from this perspective, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ November 23, 2003 statement, “Between Man and Woman: Questions and Answers about Marriage and Same-Sex Unions,” attempts to turn public attention away from the Church’s own implication in the sex abuse scandal. The statement reaffirms the Church’s position that marriage is a “union of a man and a woman.” As a “personal relationship with public significance,” it “makes a unique and essential contribution to the common good.” Because of this, “[t]he state rightly recognises [it] as a public institution in its laws.” Further, because [t]he legal recognition of marriage, including the benefits associated with it, is not only about personal commitment, but also about the social commitment that husband and wife make to the well-being of society, [i]t would be wrong to redefine marriage for the sake of providing benefits to those who cannot rightfully enter into marriage.26 This statement sustains the demonisation of homosexuals, particularly same-sex couples, and reasserts Church teachings that marriage defined as heterosexual union is the only “natural” form of sexual relation that contributes to the “well-being of society.” This representation of gay couples as pretenders to marriage also, of course, reverberates with fundamentalist-inflected political discourse, one of the best examples of which is President Bush’s January 20, 2004 State of the Union address. In a speech in which he mentions the words “terrorist(s)” or “terrorism” sixteen times, the president speaks of the government’s need to defend “the unseen pillars of civilisation”: “families and schools and religious congregations.”27 Bush’s rhetorical strategy here

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____________________________________________________________ is to efface the gay couple (not to mention family) as either a social or a political unit and, concomitantly insist that gay individuals be understood solely within the framework of moral failure. The country, he argues, “must defend the sanctity of marriage,” even as “[t]he same moral tradition that defines marriage also teaches that each individual has dignity and value in God’s sight.”28 The recognition of same-sex marriage would amount to a sanctioning of sexual terrorism, with gay and lesbian couples, in a metaphor that works to undercut itself, cast as so many benighted (morally blind) latter-day Samsons, seeking to topple those pillars of civilisation. Homosexuality may be treated with a kind of benign social tolerance only to the extent that it is understood to be God’s problem. Yet one is left wondering whether the president’s line of reasoning has not been cut short by that other narrative trajectory for the civil same-sex marriage debate. While fundamentalists may make no distinction between “good” and “bad” homosexuals (those assimilable and those not), the state has actually done so and done so with increasing frequency. The narrative of heroic queerness engendered by the 9/11 attacks has been amplified and re-contextualised by any number of recent legal decisions. So, for example, in the summer of 2003 the Supreme Court overturned the Texas sodomy law; in so doing the Court affirmed the right of gay couples to engage in consensual sex within the privacy of their homes. A few months later the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that there was nothing in the state constitution to prohibit gay marriage. They extended this interpretation in the beginning of 2004 by ruling that not civil union but rather only marriage would grant gay couples the same rights as their heterosexual counterparts. And then there is San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom’s valentine to the queer community: his granting of marriage licenses to same-sex couples and, with it, his challenge of California’s prohibition against gay marriage. Tellingly, all of these decisions focus on the gay couple, not on the gay individual.29 Same-sex marriage is itself a response to the threat of sexual terrorism, where the terrorist is himself the inassimilable sexual subject. Embodying the desire of Forster’s Margaret to “lose sex itself in comradeship,” the married same-sex couple also becomes a figure for social stability. 5.

Conclusion Religious and secular opposition to gay marriage is of course very real and very powerful in the United States. As part of his re-election campaign, President Bush has even called for a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, gay couples will inevitably gain the right to marry. Same-sex marriage will ultimately win out, and not simply because the granting of same-sex couples the right to marry is the decent or even the just thing to do. Same-sex marriage will prevail

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____________________________________________________________ because the “love of comrades” has become a trope not simply for private union but for cultural heroism. Finally, problematically and disturbingly, same-sex marriage will be legitimised because of its assimilative potential. The epigraph to Howards End reads “only connect.” It seems, though, that the current same-sex marriage debate depends at least in part on various kinds of disconnection – and these not only along class and race lines. Marriage as an extension of sexual identity reaffirms the standards of social normalcy, and it does so at the expense of other expressions of sex held in check by labels of otherness and by a politics of shame.

Notes 1. John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove et al. (New York, London: Routledge, 1993), 473. 2. E. M. Forster, Howards End (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998). 3. Ibid., 221. 4. John Fletcher, “Forster’s Self-Erasure: Maurice and the Scene of Masculine Love,” in Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. Joseph Bristow (London, New York, 1992), 68. 5. Steve Hogan and Lee Hudson, Completely Queer: The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998), s.v. “Carpenter, Edward.” 6. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove et al. (New York, London: Routledge, 1993), 313, 315. 7. See The Oxford English Dictionary. 1892 marks the first appearance of both “heterosexual” and “homosexual.” The terms appeared in a translation of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. 8. Urvashi Vaid, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 14. 9. Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1995), 179. 10. Ibid., 182. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., emphasis added. 13. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: The Free Press, 1999), 82. 14. Butler, 314, emphasis in original. 15. Sullivan, 199. 16. Dr. Diana Medlicott has reminded me that this narrative of the heroic queer has of course been decades in the making. It was profoundly shaped by the political activism that, from the mid 1980s

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____________________________________________________________ through the early 1990s, drew public and government attention to the AIDS crisis. 17. George Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,” 20 September 2001, (4 February 2004). . 18. Falwell’s comments are quoted in Eric Alterman, “The Uses of Adversity,” The Nation, 8 October 2001, 10, emphasis added. 19. See “Santorum Letter for Anti-Gay Marriage Group Draws Critics, ” 30 April 2003, (3 February 2004). . 20. Ibid. 21. See “Vatican Threatens Gay Purge of Priesthood,” 6 March 2002, (3 February 2004). . 22. Ibid. 23. G. Thomas Fitzpatrick, “Understanding the Pedophilia Crisis in the Boston Priesthood,” New Oxford Review, 2 June 2002, (3 February 2004). , emphasis in original. 24. Ibid. 25. Michelangelo Signorile, “The Vatican’s Closet,” New York Press, 12 March 2003 (3 February 2004). . 26. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Between Man and Woman: Questions and Answers About Marriage and Same-Sex Unions,” United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 12 November 2003, (3 February 2004). . 27. George Bush, “President’s State of the Union Message to Congress and the Nation,” New York Times, 21 January 2004, sec. A, pp. 14-15. 28. Ibid., sec. A, p. 15. 29. Nor do they focus on what one might term queer sex acts, including, arguably, musical performer Janet Jackson’s breast exposure at the January 2004 American football superbowl.

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Select Bibliography Alterman, Eric. “The Uses of Adversity.” The Nation, 8 October 2001, 10. Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove et al., 307320. New York, London: Routledge, 1993. D’Emilio, John. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove et al., 467-476. New York, London: Routledge, 1993. Fitzpatrick, G. Thomas. “Understanding the Pedophilia Crisis in the Boston Priesthood.” New Oxford Review, 2 June 2002. (3 February 2004). Fletcher, John. “Forster’s Self-Erasure: Maurice and the Scene of Masculine Love.” In Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, edited by Joseph Bristow, 64-90. London, New York, 1992. Forster, E. M. Howards End. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998. Hogan, Steve and Lee Hudson. Completely Queer: The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998. s.v. “Carpenter, Edward.” Signorile, Michelangelo. “The Vatican’s Closet.” New York Press. 12 March 2003. (3 February 2004). Sullivan, Andrew. Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1995. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Between Man and Woman: Questions and Answers About Marriage and Same-Sex Unions.” United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 12 November 2003. (3 February 2004). Vaid, Urvashi. Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: The Free Press, 1999.

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Inside Out and Outside In: Constructions of Evil in Contemporary British Drama Annette Pankratz Abstract This paper analyses how contemporary British drama culturalises and deculturalises evil. On the one hand, plays by, amongst others, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Caryl Churchill, Mark Ravenhill, and Sarah Kane show how evil originates in social and political structures, be they the patriarchal system, Nazi suppression, or consumer culture. On the other hand, they demonstrate that a disidentification with evil or the exclusion of evil “others” from the social system, is not only impossible, but itself the source of evil. Due to this post-metaphysical stance, the plays confront their audiences with disturbing instances of violence and suffering, which highlight the contemporary ethical aporia – accepting evil as part of one’s human nature, at the same time acknowledging the human need to fight against evil. Key Words: British drama, “in-yerface,” postmetaphysical evil. 1.

Introduction Contemporary British drama abounds with crass examples of violence and suffering. Evil, in the definition of Claudia Card, as “foreseeable intolerable harms produced by culpable wrongdoing,”1 is shown to be always and everywhere: in the mythical past of ancient Greece, in Nazi Germany of sixty years ago or at the turn of the millennium in Blair’s “Cool Britannia,” as well as in countries of the former East Block. By presenting instances of evil, the plays try to come to grips with old questions: why can evil, injustice, and suffering happen? What do they mean? The constructions of evil, however, follow decisively modern, or rather post-modern patterns. Life in these plays looks like a meaningless joke and evil is without redemption. With this bleak view on the world, the dramas take up modern attitudes, which developed after the Second World War. Especially after the atrocities of the Holocaust, theodicy, “as systematic justification of suffering, and of God’s goodness in the face of it,”2 proved no longer possible. Claims by theology, philosophy, biology, or history that one could discern a rational order of things crumbled away in the face of systematic genocide.3 Belief in a constant advance of civilisation gave way to a grappling with chaos and absurdity: “Thought stood still, for the tools of civilisation seemed as helpless in coping with the event as they were in preventing it.”4 What was more, Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” replaced models of demonic villainy or depravity.5

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____________________________________________________________ Post-metaphysical attempts to make sense of this new kind of evil emphasise its contradictions: evil is a human construct; at the same time it is a disturbingly real problem that threatens to undermine security and stability. One the one hand, the concept of evil is essential for the formation of collective moral standards, on the other hand, the “pervasive language of morality”6 with its distinctions between absolute right and wrong often vilifies and excludes supposedly evil “others.”7 A way to avoid the pitfalls of “othering” is to construct evil “as a symbolic horizon constituted by what we take to be the image of ‘us at our worst.’”8 2.

Evil and Drama Theatre and drama with their “signs of signs”9 and their secondary models of the world both reflect contemporary norms and critically put them to the test. Representing evil on stage, firstly, partakes in the “culturalising”10 of evil: “Evil must be coded, narrated, and embodied in every social sphere,”11 in order to define its counterpart, the good. Secondly, and more importantly, due to the doubling of worlds, drama also reflects and comments on this overall “social construction of evil.”12 By refusing to replicate the normative pattern of value and antivalue,13 by blurring the boundaries between good and evil, the plays point out the faultlines and blind spots of contemporary ethical systems. Hence, contemporary British plays oscillate between externalising and internalising evil. They depict instances of evil, suggesting that the audience should disidentify with, for instance, racism, sexism, homophobia, or capitalist greed. The plays, however, refuse to make evil safely distant. Instead, they foreground the negative effects of externalising evil and emphasise everyone’s potential for evil. The spectators can never sit back and watch evil others, they always also see images of themselves at their worst. This double function – culturalising and de-culturalising evil – happens on two levels: in the relations between the dramatic worlds and the real world as well as in the relations between the characters. 3.

Macrostructures: Dramatic Worlds Many contemporary plays experiment with familiarity and alienation. By means of shifts in perspective, the dramas probe the relevance of past sufferings for the present time (ancient myths, for instance, as archetypal cases of evil); they connect Western culture with supposedly distant examples of violence and suffering (such as the civil war in the former Yugoslavia); last, but not least, the plays deconstruct the predilection to classify wickedness as somebody else’s problem. Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale (1988), for example, adapts Ovid’s myth of Philomela: Patriarchal oppression triggers

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____________________________________________________________ off a chain of violence. Philomele is raped and later mutilated by her brother-in-law Tereus. She and her sister Procne take revenge by killing Tereus’ son Itys. Before the final showdown, the characters metamorphose into birds – nightingale, hoopoe, and swallow. The Chorus brings the action closer to home by asking: June: Why do countries make war? Helen: Why are races exterminated? Hero: Why do white people cut off the words of blacks? Iris: Why do people disappear? ... Helen: Why are little girls raped and murdered in the car parks of dark cities? Iris: What makes the torturer smile?14 Evil thus appears as the result of the “hostility of the phallocentric, Eurocentric system towards all others.”15 Using myth as an “oblique image of an unwanted truth, reverberating through time”16 could naturalise patriarchal violence. The Love of the Nightingale avoids this by emphasising its own status as theatrical construct. Especially the comments of the Chorus and two playswithin-the-play constantly remind the audience that they are watching a piece of theatre and that they have to “question the import of what they have been watching.”17 The play asks questions, which do not take the status quo for granted. It ends with Itys’ unanswered and unanswerable queries: “What does wrong mean?…What is right?”18 Trying to find answers, the play implies, might break the behavioural patterns that cause violence and suffering. While The Love of the Nightingale bridges the gap between a distant mythical past and our present by means of anachronistic choral commentaries, Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000) works with subtle shifts of perspective, which play with preconceived notions about “far away” times and places. The first two acts seem to be set in some dictatorial regime reminiscent of Nazi Germany or the former East Block. The third act presents a distorted image of our everyday world. This move from “far away” to “here” is repeated in the structure of each act: a stable and safe domestic space is at first set off from an outside world of evil, only to come across as one of its sources later on. In the first act, Aunt Harper tries to comfort her niece, Joan. Joan heard screams in the night. She saw blood on the ground and her uncle was torturing people. Harper explains that these occurrences were all part of a bigger plan. The uncle was merely fighting against bad people and bad people naturally have to be punished. By accepting this, Joan can become part of a “big movement…to make things better. You can look at

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____________________________________________________________ the stars and think here we are in our little bit of space, and I’m on the side of the people who are putting things right, and your soul will expand right into the sky.”19 By the second act, Joan has learnt her lesson. She and her colleague Todd work as hat-makers. Both take a stand against ordinary evil – corruption and nepotism –, but they overlook radical evil – the systematic extinction of “others,” which by now even takes place in public. Joan and Todd accept the televised trials and regular mass murders as a matter of course. Moreover, their jobs as hat-makers depend on the killings; the prisoners have to wear the elaborate hats for the execution ritual. Afterwards, corpses and hats are cremated.20 In the third act, Joan, Todd, and Harper fight against the whole world. The group of enemies comprises everyone who is not like them, or rather: everyone who is not them: “the Canadians, the Venezuelans and the mosquitoes. ...the engineers, the chefs, the children under five, the musicians.”21 The frantic differentiations and the persecution of all “others” lead to a state of utter paranoia. Joan feels threatened by cats, birds and the weather. Harper fights butterflies. Todd butchers “pigs and musicians.”22 The denouement links this state of war with our immediate present. Joan describes a “pile of bodies” she has seen: “there was one killed by coffee or one killed by pins, they were killed by heroin, petrol, chainsaws, hairspray, bleach, foxgloves, the smell of smoke was where we were burning the grass that wouldn’t serve.”23 We realise that Far Away is not only an account of totalitarian regimes of the past, but a parable of the present mentality of exclusion, according to which good and bad are synonymous with economic and uneconomic.24 What at first sight seems like a history play or a stylised nightmare, turns out to be a portrait of the present. Far Away deliberately draws the audience in to identify with the characters before it makes them realise that Joan, Todd, and Harper re-enact the blind spots of Western culture. While Far Away moves from outside to inside, Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) follows the opposite course: it starts from a familiar domestic scenario, which is then alienated. Ian and Cate, a middle-aged journalist and his young lover, meet in a hotel room in Leeds. Ian torments Cate with his aggressive cynicism and his overbearing manners. He browbeats and rapes her. What starts out as realistic “chamber piece about relationships with which the British theatre-goer is so familiar,”25 develops into a global nightmare as soon as a soldier from an unspecified civil war enters the scene. “The boundary between a British location and the images of a war both present in every household and kept at a safe distance by the television screen”26 breaks down.

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____________________________________________________________ Keeping evil at a safe distance by ignoring or externalising it, no longer works. When the solider demands that Ian should write about the incredible carnage of the civil war,27 the journalist refuses. He remains fatalistically aloof and declares that the atrocities are none of his business: “I don’t cover foreign affairs….Not soldiers screwing each other for a patch of land. It has to be…personal….No joy in a story about blacks who gives a shit? Why bring you to light?”28 With the soldier present, this stance is no longer tenable, though. He rapes Ian and sucks his eyes out. With this act, both shockingly real and symbolic, the hotel room encompasses all war-zones: from the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear, to domestic violence in Britain, to the war in the former Yugoslavia.29 Blasted reverses externalisations of evil – domestic versus foreign violence, Britain versus Yugoslavia. The atrocities of supposedly remote civil wars are shown to be an escalation of everyday violence.30 Theodicy and teleology are presented as absurd residues in a world forsaken by God, “the cunt.”31 4.

Microstructures: Configuration of Characters The microstructural equivalent of situating evil far away is to present one single character as the source of all evil. But this demonisation of individuals, firstly, would not get to grips with the banality of nonfictional evil. Secondly, the opposition between heroes and villains would again facilitate the externalisation of evil, and it would make the search for personal responsibility superfluous. Instead of portraying their characters as either wholly good or evil, many contemporary plays contain ambivalent shades of grey. As depicted in these plays, evil does not result from one single cause, nor does it emanate from one single source. This paradigm is especially prominent in Holocaust plays. Due to their topic, they concern themselves with the “banality of evil” as well as with the problems of attributing responsibility.32 The protagonists do not embody radical evil. On the contrary, most of them are likeable, “good” people. Their deeds, however, are not. In Ronald Harwood’s The Handyman (1996), for example, the cuddly old Russian immigrant Roman Kozachenko probably killed thousands of Jews. Until the end, he refuses to face up to his past actions and insists that “I am innocent man. I did not kill Jews. I did not kill anyone.”33 The main attention of Harwood’s play lies not on proving Kozachenko’s guilt, but on the reactions of supposedly innocent people. When Roman is accused as a war criminal fifty years after the end of the Second World War, his employers and friends Cressida and Julian refuse to believe that a basically good person like him could be a mass murderer. As a last resort to maintain this presumption, Julian excuses the Holocaust as a necessary act of “culling,”34 and Cressida reconstructs it as “Jewish

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____________________________________________________________ fantasy.”35 Because of their Manichean attitude, dividing the world into absolute good and absolute evil, Cressida and Julian repeat the Nazi’s strategies of exclusion and vilification. They turn into “accessories after the fact.”36 The Handyman draws parallels between past guilt and present attempts to deal with this guilt. The play thereby emphasises the timeless human potential for radical evil; and it points towards the necessity to incorporate past evil into the present public consciousness. Other dramas come to similar conclusions and fulfil a similar function by way of concentrating on one person’s grappling with his or her culpability. David Edgar’s Albert Speer (2000) stages the protagonist’s “battle with truth,” as the subtitle puts it. Hitler’s willing architect of mass murder undergoes a lifelong psychomachia until he finally acknowledges his guilt. Like The Handyman, Albert Speer refrains from demonising the perpetrators of radical evil. Instead, the play highlights “those impulses and resentments and fears within ourselves that could – we have painfully to admit – drive us to commit dreadful acts under different circumstances.”37 Edgar’s play tries to make Speer’s involvement during the Third Reich comprehensible. Speer is not a villain, but a weak and ambitious person who commits himself to what he and most Germans believe as morally good: “Of course, we knew that Hitler sought world domination …at the time we asked for nothing better. Eighty million Germans didn’t follow Hitler because he was going to murder people in lime ditches and gas chambers. They didn’t follow him because they knew that he was evil, but because they thought he was extremely good.”38 For the sake of this supposed good, Speer gets involved in the genocidal machinery of the Third Reich. He agrees to exploit the prisoners in the concentration camps and to “work them all like dogs to death.”39 After the war, Speer admits that he readily collaborated with a murderous regime, but he adamantly claims that he did not know about the systematic extinction of Jews and others who did not fit the new Germanic ideology: “My crime consisted of not knowing and not asking what I didn’t know, about an evil we will perish if we do not understand.”40 It is only at the end of his life that Speer openly admits his personal guilt. In a nightmare vision, Hitler’s ghost confronts him with the “real” truth: “I said it – clearly, time and time again….How could the world have been so blind? And how could you?”41 At last, Speer declares that “I knew. I helped to build a boneyard. Yes. I knew.”42 By winning the battle with truth, he finds redemption. In spite of the religious overtones and the rather facile ending, Albert Speer shows that one cannot reduce the protagonist’s plight to a simple matter of good and evil. Moreover, like The Handyman it

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____________________________________________________________ implicitly involves the audience in its negotiations about ethics, because “it denies a contemporary audience the soothing message that, by fulfilling an act of collective Holocaust memory in a visit to the theatre, one could purge oneself from the past evils of this world.”43 One also cannot purge oneself from the present evils of this world, as plays by “in-yer-face” dramatists such as Anthony Neilson, Sarah Kane or Mark Ravenhill demonstrate. In contrast to Holocaust plays, in-yer-face plays do not distinguish between victim and perpetrator. Instead, they focus on the tensions between free will and the pressures of society, which sometimes have catastrophic consequences. Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996), for instance, culminates in the gang rape of Gary. The male prostitute yearns for “someone to look after me. And I want him to fuck me. Really fuck me. …And, yeah, it’ll hurt. But a good hurt.”44 That is why he pays Robbie, Lulu, and Mark for elaborate torture. Playing out Gary’s fantasies, they “buy” him, tie him, and rape him. Gary wants to go further, however, and asks to be anally penetrated with a knife.45 He claims that the laws of the market supersede ethical norms: “When someone’s paying, someone wants something and they’re paying, then you do it. Nothing right. Nothing wrong. It’s a deal.”46 Changing the currency by promising Mark “[if you d]o it…I’ll say ‘I love you’”47 eventually clinches the deal. Shopping and Fucking accentuates the vicious circle of capitalist culture. The laws of the market are responsible for the emptiness of Gary’s life, for the “big sadness swelling like it’s gonna burst.”48 He, in turn, tries to cure this sadness by recourse to the market. Torture and death appear as transactions to end all transactions; both a symptom of the schizophrenic life in contemporary society and a way out of it. No one is guilty of Gary’s death apart from Gary himself; at the same time: everyone is more or less responsible. The aporia of evil and responsibility is taken to its extremes in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998). The dramatic world is a laboratory of evil ruled over by Tinker. He kills Graham by injecting heroin into his eyeballs; tortures Carl by driving a pole up his anus; then he successively cuts off Carl’s tongue, hands, feet, and, lastly, his penis. The same penis is afterwards operated onto Graham’s sister, Grace. Tinker cuts Rod’s throat and he humiliates Robin until he commits suicide. Is Tinker evil? Not really. Unlike Sade’s heroes,49 he does not revel in pure evil, neither does he enjoy making others suffer. Moreover, unlike the protagonists in the Holocaust plays, Tinker merely reacts to his victims’ requests and promises. In the subplot between Graham and his sister Grace, Tinker fulfils their wishes. Graham expressly wants “out” and asks for more heroin.50 After his death from an overdose, Grace asks

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____________________________________________________________ Tinker to treat her “as a patient”51 and requests to become “Graham outside like Graham inside.”52 Tinker’s function in the Carl-Rod-subplot is to test promises and to punish perjury. Carl swears Rod his undying love, even to the point of death.53 Under torture inflicted by Tinker, Carl betrays his lover. Afterwards he is castigated by a series of mutilations. In spite of Carl’s betrayal, Rod stays with him and also swears: “I will always love you. / I will never lie to you. / I will never betray you. / On my life.”54 He keeps his oath and allows Tinker to cut his throat. The impulses for the tortures come from the victims. But are they therefore responsible for the inhuman forms of punishment? Is it the decisions of the benevolent Mephistophelean Tinker which cause the suffering?55 Or is there an ethical system justifying the acts of violence? By refusing definite answers, Cleansed undermines clear-cut distinctions between an absolute right and an absolute wrong. Blurring the boundaries between evil torturers and innocent victims and focusing on the painful processes of assuming responsibility for evil deeds done without evil intentions can be presented via the juxtaposition of hypothetically-real characters as in The Handyman or in Shopping and Fucking. Albert Speer’s battles with his inner self and the suffering of the characters in Cleansed are portrayed in a fantastic-realist mode, which combines realistic or, in the case of Albert Speer, factual violence with eerie dream sequences. The plays literally turn evil inside out by making people’s nightmares and delusions visible on stage. A. Split Selves Quite a few plays zoom in on this dynamics between externalised and internalised evil by focusing on a pair of characters: one seemingly monstrous, the other one seemingly normal. There are two variants of this strategy: split selves and mixed doubles, that is, a human character plus his or her surreal evil twin or an inexplicably evil character versus a supposedly normal counterpart. Both variants aim at deconstructing the traditional hero versus villain pattern in order to probe the boundaries between normal and abnormal, guilty and innocent. In Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker (1994), the three protagonists are split selves in more than one sense. Lily and Josie, two young women in their late teens, suffer from paranoid schizophrenia. Josie killed her baby and has to spend some time in a mental hospital. Her friend Lily, also a single parent, breaks down due to the demands by her environment. The idiosyncratic views of the two women on a supposedly inimical world transpire through their interactions with the Skriker, a “shapeshifter and death portent”56 from the fairy world. He/she assumes various guises – as an old woman, a child, a middle-aged man, and an

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____________________________________________________________ American woman – which personify “ordinary evil” in contemporary society,57 while his/her realm in the underworld symbolises transhistorical evil.58 Simultaneously, the Skriker’s fairy tales represent ethical systems which try to make evil and suffering meaningful. The linguistic tour de force of the Skriker’s addresses to the audience accentuates the manic insanity of his/her norms: “I give you three wishy washy. An open grave must be fed up you go like dust in the sunlight of heart.”59 The stream of fragmented associations indicates the “schizophrenic breakdown of language,”60 as well as the schizophrenic quality of the simplistic fairy ethics applied to today’s complex societies.61 The play demonstrates how the lore of just returns for the “beautiful and good”62 only ensures the submission of the powerless. Lily and Josie are torn between what they ought to do and what they would like to do. The tensions between the unattainable ideal and the confusingly real cause their breakdowns. In the end, both women literally leave reality and descend to the grotesque fairy underworld ruled over by the Skriker.63 By introducing the Skriker as field of projection for Lily and Josie’s anxieties, the audience gets a view of the world from the women’s perspectives. What would normally look like sheer madness therefore becomes comprehensible. The surreal scenario emphasises the ambiguity of evil, both “arising ‘naturally’ within” and “generated from outside.”64 Madness also looms large in Antony Sher’s I.D. (2003). Again, the play dramatises the split between a good and an evil inner self by introducing a non-realistic character. I.D. deals with the life of Demetrios Tsafendas. In 1966, the real-life Tsafendas assassinated South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd and claimed that a tapeworm had told him to do so. In I.D. this tapeworm appears on stage as Tsafendas’s alter ego Lintwurm, a “smiling, seedy bar-fly type, speaking in a smoky South African drawl […] wearing goggles.”65 The schizophrenic duo Tsafendas/Lintwurm personifies both Tsafendas’ nervous breakdown and the principles of Apartheid, the violent discrimination of supposedly inferior ethnic groups, promoted by Verwoerd. The racist system feeds on a kind of communal madness just like Lintwurm parasitically worms himself into Tsafendas’s brain. Tsafendas experiences Apartheid in all its inhuman absurdity, because as a Greek-Portuguese-Mozambican South African66 he defies simplistic categories. His black lover, Helen, leaves him, because he is classified as white by the South African bureaucrats. When he applies to be reclassified as “coloured,” the South African administration starts persecuting him as “Undesirable Alien.”67 The only way out of this muddle, according to Lintwurm, is the murder of Verwoerd: “There’s a Pig running the country….C’mon – for once in your life – come on!”68

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____________________________________________________________ But I.D. implies that murder only repeats the insanity inherent in the regime. A tapeworm coming from a “long line of South African pork”69 calling another person “pig” re-enforces the dichotomies used by Apartheid. Attacks on the Prime Minister challenge the system, but they do not change it, because they rely on the same premises of vilifying and dehumanising an evil “other.” Accordingly, enemies can always be expelled from the community of “good” people as “mad,”70 as belonging to a “riotous mob of Communists and other criminals,”71 or even as “living proof of the existence of Satan.”72 From the perspective of I.D., however, these binaries appear arbitrary and nonsensical. Instead of mad or evil characters, the play presents a group of “gentle-spirited”73 people and one amusing tapeworm, indirectly promoting Tsafendas’ alternative vision of a “continent of bastards.”74 B. Mixed Doubles While the non-naturalistic presentation of split selves mainly focuses on psychological processes, mixed doubles highlight the social construction of good and evil. Setting a seemingly good against a supposedly evil character and gradually undermining this initial dichotomy, accentuates everyone’s potential for evil and examines the dynamics of personal and societal responsibility. Anthony Neilson’s Normal (1991) reconstructs the case of the so-called Düsseldorf-Ripper Peter Kürten, who had committed nine murders, attempted seven more between 1929 and 1930 and was sentenced to death in 1931. Normal contrasts the “monster”75 Kurten with his defence-lawyer Justus Wehner. At first, the differences between the two characters prevail. The sexually inexperienced, naïve and ambitious middle-class lawyer stands in obvious opposition to Kurten, who grew up in extreme poverty and whose life was shaped by violence. For him, “brutality belongs to love.”76 And killing attains sexual overtones. As a child, he discovered sexual pleasure when slaughtering animals.77 Afterwards he learns that these feelings intensify whenever he murders human beings. Wehner’s goal is to prove Kurten insane and to save him from the death penalty. He fails. The court declares Kurten “normal” and sentences him to death. Parallel to this “normalising” of the murderer by society, Wehner gradually identifies with his client.78 On stage, Wehner’s fantasies and obsessions attain the status of reality. Thus, we see how the lawyer has an affair with Kurten’s wife and how he slaughters her. Prompted by Kurten, Wehner batters Frau Kurten with a hammer; bleeding she “escapes, invading the audience space. Wehner bolts after her, catches her and drags her kicking and screaming back to the stage.”79

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____________________________________________________________ Normal not only makes the spectators accomplices in the murder, it constantly explores (and partly exploits) the fascination for violence. Kurten taunts Wehner with the sexual attraction of his deeds. After his condemnation, he boasts that his life and crimes will be turned into a movie.80 The play itself transfers this onto the meta-theatrical level. The grotesque in-yer-face aesthetics of Normal plays with the ambivalent attractions of murder, tying in with the horror boom of the early 1990s associated with thrillers such as The Silence of the Lambs.81 Analogous to playing with the audience’s expectations, the play also explores society’s responsibility for its supposedly abnormal evil others. Declaring Kurten “normal”82 in order to be able to sentence him to death begs the questions: how normal is a mass-murderer or rather how murderous is social normality? As Wehner puts it in the defence speech: “Do we bear monsters? Or do we create them?”83 Normal implies that it is not a question of either/or, but of both/and. Evil resides both in society and inside the individual’s psyche. The mixed double Wehner/Kurten forces the point by visibly eroding the demarcation between normal and abnormal, fantasy and reality, good and evil. 4.

Conclusion Contemporary British plays confront us with moral questions like Itys’ in The Love of the Nightingale: “What does wrong mean? …What is right?”84 At first sight, the answers seem easy. The striking representations of torture and murder in The Love of the Nightingale, Normal, Blasted, Shopping and Fucking, and Cleansed make the audience flinch and reenforce gut feelings: violence and suffering are wrong. Plays such as The Love of the Nightingale, The Handyman, Albert Speer, and I.D. with their precise frames of reference specify this: the Holocaust, Apartheid, sexism, and racism were and are wrong. But it is not as simple as that when one tries to look beyond the shocking images and asks for the reasons of violence and the meaning of suffering. The plays “culturalise”85 evil. Shifting the boundaries between past and present, distant and imminent evil on the macrostructure and playing with the audience’s beliefs and expectations, the plays serve as part of cultural memory. They keep images and narratives of past atrocities alive and demand that the audience draw conclusions for the present. Deconstructing binaries in the microstructure, they enhance both the disidentification with evil and the recognition of everyone’s potential for evil. By deconstructing traditional ethical categories, the plays do not take up an eccentric or a-social position. On the contrary: turning evil inside out and outside in reflects contemporary cultural patterns. Evil as category of evaluation is situated both inside and outside of the cultural

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____________________________________________________________ system. On the one hand, “the constitution of ourselves as moral subjects requires that we distance ourselves from shared images of radical evil,” on the other hand, we have to recognise evil as images of “us at our worst.”86 In their secondary models of the world, the plays replicate these postmetaphysical strategies. Furthermore, on the meta-dramatic level, they observe society dealing with evil. They thus point out moral blind spots and question the efficacy of traditional discourses of evil. Normative systems which could make sense of evil are exposed as highly doubt- and harmful. Nazis and the supporters of Apartheid murdered and tortured supposedly evil others in the name of the “good.” The laws of the capitalist market place allow Gary to demand his murder, arguing: “Nothing right. Nothing wrong. It’s a deal.”87 The strict Old Testament logic of Blasted and Cleansed add to the horror instead of alleviating it, just as the simplistic fairly-tale ethics of The Skriker drives Josie and Lily mad. In short: by representing evil, contemporary British plays do not provide answers or the “real” truth about suffering, but they goad the spectators into recognising the necessity of a constant “quest for ethics,”88 the need for ongoing negotiations, constructions, deconstructions, and reconstructions of evil.

Notes 1. Claudia Card, The Atrocity Paradigm. A Theory of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3. 2. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought. An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 291. 3. Cf. Neiman, 259-260. 4. Neiman, 256. 5. Cf. Neiman, 280-281. 6. Margaret Sönser Breen, “Reading for Constructions of the Unspeakable,” in Understanding Evil. An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Margaret Sönser Breen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 44; cf. Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Sociology of Evil. Getting beyond the Common Sense about the Alternative to ‘the Good,’” in Rethinking Evil. Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Maria Pia Lara (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 172. 7. Breen, 45; Alexander, 159. 8. Alessandro Ferrara, “The Evil that Men Do. A Meditation on Radical Evil from a Postmetaphysical Point of View,” in Rethinking Evil. Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Maria Pia Lara (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 186. 9. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Semiotik des Theaters. Volume 1: Das System theatralischer Zeichen (Tübingen: Narr, 1983), 19. The following

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____________________________________________________________ is based on the theories of Fischer-Lichte, Michael Titzmann, Strukturale Textanalyse (München: Fink, 1993) and Susan Melrose, A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994). 10. Cf. Alexander, 156. 11. Alexander, 162. 12. Alexander, 158. 13. Cf. Alexander, 156. 14. Timberlake Wertenbaker, Plays One (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), scene 20, 349. (In the following references, the title will be abbreviated as LN.) 15. Margarete Rubik, “The Silencing of Women in Feminist British Drama,” in Semantics of Silences in Linguistics and Literature, ed. Gudrun Grabher / Ulrike Jessner (Heidelberg: Winter, 1996), 182, her italics. 16. LN scene 8, 315. 17. Christine Dymkowski, “Questioning Comedy in Daniels, Wertenbaker and Churchill,” in New Forms of Comedy. Papers Given on the Occasion of the Second Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, ed. Bernhard Reitz (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1994), 39. 18. LN scene 21, 354. 19. Caryl Churchill, Far Away (London: Nick Hern, 2000), act 1, 14-15. (In the following references, the title will be abbreviated as FA.) 20. Cf. Elaine Aston, Caryl Churchill (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2001), 118-119. 21. FA act 3, 30-31. 22. FA act 3, 35. 23. FA act 3, 37-38. 24. Cf. Aston, 120. 25. David Greig, “Introduction,” in Sarah Kane, Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001), ix. All following quotes from Blasted (abbreviated as B) and Cleansed (C) are from this edition. For the structure of Blasted see also Graham Saunders, “Love me or kill me.” Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 40-51. 26. Ute Berns, “History and Violence in British Epic Theatre. From Bond and Churchill to Kane and Ravenhill,” in New Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Theatre and Drama. Essays in Honour of Armin Geraths, ed. Christiane Schlote / Peter Zenzinger (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2003), 65; cf. Kenneth Urban, “An Ethics of Catastrophe. The Theatre of Sarah Kane,” PAJ 69/23 (2002): 45. 27. B scene 3, 47. 28. B scene 3, 48.

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____________________________________________________________ 29. Cf. Peter Paul Schnierer, “The Theatre of War. English Drama and the Bosnian Conflict,” in Drama and Reality. Papers Given on the Occasion of the Third Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, ed. Bernhard Reitz (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1996), 106; Saunders, 54; 58-64. 30. Cf. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre. British Drama Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 101. 31. B scene 4, 57. 32. Cf. Neiman, 271-277. 33. Ronald Harwood, The Handyman, edited and annotated by Gunther Volk (Stuttgart: Klett, 2000), act 1, 42. (In the following references, the title will be abbreviated as HM.) 34. HM act 2, 75-76. 35. HM act 2, 79-80. 36. HM act 2, 77. 37 David Edgar, “Afterword” in Albert Speer (London: Nick Hern, 2000), 151. (In the following references, the title will be abbreviated as AS). 38. AS act 1, 41-42. 39. AS act 1, 55. 40. AS act 1, 84; cf. act 2, 93-94; 116-117; 123-124. 41. AS act 2, 144. 42. AS act 2, 147. 43. Christoph Houswitschka, “(Dis)Continuities in Recent British Holocaust Drama,” in (Dis)Continuities. Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English. Papers Given on the Occasion of the Tenth Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, ed. Margarete Rubik / Elke Mettinger-Schartmann (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2002), 206. 44. Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking (London: Methuen, 1996), scene 11, 54. (In the following references, the title will be abbreviated as S & F). 45. S & F scene 13, 82. 46. S & F scene 13, 83; this belief is later taken up by the drug dealer Brian. For him “[c]ivilization is money. Money is civilization” (scene 14, 85). 47. S & F scene 13, 83. 48. S & F scene 13, 83. 49. Cf. Neiman, 278. 50. C scene 1, 107. 51. C scene 3, 114. 52. C scene 7, 126. 53. C scene 2, 109.

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____________________________________________________________ 54. C scene 16, 142. 55. Cf. Saunders, 96. 56. Caryl Churchill, Plays Three (London: Nick Hern, 1998), 243. (In the following references, the title will be abbreviated as S). 57. S 283. 58. Karl-Heinz Stoll, Postmoderner Feminismus. Caryl Churchills Dramen (Frankfurt: Lang, 1995), 107. 59. S 246. 60. Aston, 101. 61. Jale Abdollahzadeh, “Departures from Realism. Contemporary Feminist Theatre and the Power of Surreal Effects,” in Drama and Reality. Papers Given on the Occasion of the Third Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, ed. Bernhard Reitz (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1996), 128. 62. S 258. 63. Cf. S 268-273 for a representation of Josie’s sojourn and 289291 for a narrative of Lily’s stay in the fairy world. 64. Istvan Nagy, “The Modern Fairy of an Urban Folktale,” The Anachronist (1998): 245. 65. Antony Sher, I.D. (London: Nick Hern, 2003), scene 1, 14. 66. Cf. I.D. scene 1, 17; scene 6, 30-31; scene 24, 90. 67. I.D. scene 18, 66. 68. I.D. scene 19, 68; 70. 69. I.D. scene 24, 89. 70. I.D. scene 11, 42. 71. I.D. scene 8, 35. 72. I.D. scene 13, 48. 73. I.D. scene 2, 15. 74. I.D. scene 4, 24. 75. Anthony Neilson, Plays One (London: Methuen, 1998), scene 9, 17. (In the following references, the title will be abbreviated as N.) 76. N scene 7, 12. 77. N scene 7, 15. 78. In the first production Wehner and Kurten were also dressed identically; cf. Sierz, 69. 79. N scene 26, 52. See Sierz, 70-71 for a detailed account of the audience’s reaction. 80. Cf. N scene 7, 13-14; scene 29, 56. 81. Cf. Sierz, 74. 82. N scene 22, 53. 83. N scene 9, 18-19. 84. LN scene 21, 354.

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____________________________________________________________ 85. Cf. Alexander, 156. 86. Ferrara, 186. 87. S & F scene 13, 83. 88. Urban, 37.

Select Bibliography Abdollahzadeh, Jale. “Departures from Realism. Contemporary Feminist Theatre and the Power of Surreal Effects.” In Drama and Reality. Papers Given on the Occasion of the Third Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, edited by Bernhard Reitz, 123-132. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1996. Alexander, Jeffrey C. “Toward a Sociology of Evil. Getting beyond the Common Sense about the Alternative to ‘the Good’.” In Rethinking Evil. Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Maria Pia Lara, 153-172. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Aston, Elaine. Caryl Churchill. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2001. Berns, Ute. “History and Violence in British Epic Theatre. From Bond and Churchill to Kane and Ravenhill.” In New Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Theatre and Drama. Essays in Honour of Armin Geraths, edited by Christiane Schlote and Peter Zenzinger, 49-72. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2003. Breen, Margaret Sönser. “Reading for Constructions of the Unspeakable.” In Understanding Evil. An Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by Margaret Sönser Breen, 43-53. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Card, Claudia. The Atrocity Paradigm. A Theory of Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Churchill, Caryl. Plays Three. London: Nick Hern, 1998. Churchill, Caryl. Far Away. London: Nick Hern, 2000. Dymkowski, Christine. “Questioning Comedy in Daniels, Wertenbaker and Churchill.” In New Forms of Comedy. Papers Given on the Occasion of the Second Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, edited by Bernhard Reitz. 33-44. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1994. Edgar, David. Albert Speer. London: Nick Hern, 2000. Ferrara, Alessandro. “The Evil that Men Do. A Meditation on Radical Evil from a Postmetaphysical Point of View.” In Rethinking Evil. Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Maria Pia Lara, 173-188. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Semiotik des Theaters. Volume 1: Das System theatralischer Zeichen. Tübingen: Narr, 1983.

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____________________________________________________________ Harwood, Ronald. The Handyman. Edited and annotated by Gunther Volk. Stuttgart: Klett, 2000. Houswitschka, Christoph. “(Dis)Continuities in Recent British Holocaust Drama.” In (Dis)Continuities. Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English. Papers Given on the Occasion of the Tenth Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, edited by Margarete Rubik and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann, 193-209. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2002. Kane, Sarah. Complete Plays. London: Methuen, 2001. Melrose, Susan. A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994. Nagy, Istvan. “The Modern Fairy of an Urban Folktale.” The Anachronist (1998): 233-247. Neilson, Anthony. Plays One. London: Methuen, 1998. Neiman, Susan. Evil in Modern Thought. An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Ravenhill, Mark. Shopping and Fucking. London: Methuen, 1996. Rubik, Margarete. “The Silencing of Women in Feminist British Drama.” In Semantics of Silences in Linguistics and Literature, edited by Gudrun Grabher and Ulrike Jessner, 177-190. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. Saunders, Graham. “Love me or kill me.” Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Schnierer, Peter Paul. “The Theatre of War. English Drama and the Bosnian Conflict.” In Drama and Reality. Papers Given on the Occasion of the Third Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, edited by Bernhard Reitz, 101-110. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1996. Sher, Antony. I.D. London: Nick Hern, 2003. Sierz, Aleks. In-Yer-Face Theatre. British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. Stoll, Karl-Heinz. Postmoderner Feminismus. Caryl Churchills Dramen. Frankfurt: Lang, 1995. Titzmann, Michael. Strukturale Textanalyse. München: Fink, 1993. Urban, Kenneth. “An Ethics of Catastrophe. The Theatre of Sarah Kane.” PAJ 69/23 (2002): 36-46. Wertenbaker, Timberlake. Plays One. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.

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Evil and Despairing Individuals: A Kierkegaardian Account Karen D. Hoffman Abstract My paper has three aims: to give a Kierkegaardian interpretation of evil as proceeding from a deficient moral character, to show how this interpretation accounts for both demonic and banal evil, and to discuss the relationship between these two types of evil, specifically the ways in which demonic evil constitutes an escalation of the despair that characterises banal evil. Acknowledging a distinction between the demonic and the banal, I argue that both of these are importantly related to moral character inasmuch as each results from a problematic misrelation of the self. I begin by discussing each of these types of evil, explicating some of the similarities and differences between the two. Drawing on The Sickness unto Death, I then show how Kierkegaard’s reflections on despair can help to explain both banal and demonic evil and to show how both result from problems within the self. Key Words: despair, evil, Kierkegaard, Arendt, Eichmann. 1.

Introduction Reflection on the evils of the twentieth century, particularly the Holocaust, has prompted some thinkers to postulate the demonic character of the perpetrators of heinous crimes and led others to speculate that a number of those responsible for committing monstrous deeds might be very ordinary bureaucrats. There are potential dangers with either approach: emphasising the demonic nature of people like the Nazis risks elevating them to a kind of satanic greatness; stressing the banality of evil risks minimising the responsibility of the individuals involved and the horrific consequences of their crimes. Yet there also seems to be something right about each approach: Hannah Arendt presents compelling evidence that some Nazis, like Adolf Eichmann, were guilty of banal, unreflective evil,1 which had its source in personal ambition and shallowness, rather than in hatred of the victims; other SS officers, like some of the guards at Auschwitz, engaged in behaviour that was much more intentionally cruel and demonic.2 It seems, therefore, that an account of the psychology of evil would do well to incorporate both the demonic and the banal. Soren Kierkegaard’s discussion of despair in The Sickness unto Death does precisely this. While his aim in The Sickness unto Death is to provide a “psychological exposition” of the self and of the kinds of despair to which human selves are prone,3 his reflections on the myriad types of despair can be used to generate a psychology of various types of evil. Just

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____________________________________________________________ as individuals with differing deficiencies will experience alternate types of despair, so will these individuals display a propensity for engaging in different types of evil. In the following paper, I borrow from Kierkegaard’s account of the types of despair to show how different types of failure within the self can generate different types of evil, both demonic and banal. Moreover, I hope to show how Kierkegaard’s discussion of despairing individuals makes these seemingly divergent types of evil related, inasmuch as both have their origins in problems within the self and inasmuch as the demonic constitutes an escalation of the despair present in individuals who exemplify the banality of evil. 2.

Banal Evil and Demonic Evil Before delving into Kierkegaard’s account of the various types of despairing individuals, it might be helpful to explain what distinguishes banal evil from demonic evil. When speaking of banal evil, I have in mind the type of evil that is committed by ordinary, otherwise seemingly decent people, whose actions are not typically characterised by the vicious motives of hatred and contempt. These individuals do not evince a desire to terrorise or to engage in wanton destruction; their actions are not characterised by violence. Banal evil is not a product of the desire to annihilate; it does not have cruelty or wrongdoing as such as its aim. As Arendt explains, banal evil refers to the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which [can]not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction [is] perhaps extraordinary shallowness.4 While the person who commits banal evil commits a horrendous act, and while this evil is a reflection of a deficient moral character, the type of moral deficiency from which this person suffers is better characterised by inattentiveness, self-deception, or slavish servitude. Such a person is most likely to commit evil acts as a result of the failure to fully recognise them as such, rather than as the result of a concerted effort to pursue evil for evil’s sake. Pursuing evil precisely because it is evil characterises the demonic. As I hope will become clear in the paper that follows, a demonic individual has vicious motives and has destruction (of other people, of life, of property, of goodness) as her explicit aim.

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____________________________________________________________ While some of their actions might be similar in character, individuals who are demonically evil differ from those who exemplify banal evil, particularly with regard to the motivation and intention with which each proceeds. A demonic individual desires to terrorise and destroy; she intends to inflict cruelty and harm. A banal individual lacks the explicitly vicious motives and intentions that characterise the demonic. Although both commit monstrous acts, they are differently motivated to do so. It is important to stress that the distinction between banal evil and demonic evil hinges on differences in motive and intention, not on differences in the hideousness of the acts committed. Banal evil is no less horrendous than demonic evil in terms of the atrocity of its results. 3.

Banal Evil and Despair in the Structure of the Self In order to explicate the connection between banal evil and despair, I turn now to Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death.5 Even though this text was originally published under the pseudonym AntiClimacus, with Kierkegaard designated as the editor, Kierkegaard explains in his Journals and Papers that Anti-Climacus is a higher pseudonym, with whose writings Kierkegaard himself agrees.6 So I will refer to the account offered in The Sickness unto Death as Kierkegaard’s. Kierkegaard begins this text by discussing what he takes to be some of the general truths about human despair [Fortvivlelse]. First, he maintains that all human beings are in despair: though many people may lack awareness of their despair, the sickness unto death is universal.7 Second, despite the universality of despair, Kierkegaard contends that every individual is responsible for her despair. Despair results from a deficiency that an individual has chosen, not one that is necessary to her humanity.8 Kierkegaard believes, then, that it is universally but contingently true that all individuals are in despair. There is nothing about human nature that necessitates despair. Indeed, one the aims of self should be the elimination of this condition. It is important to note that Kierkegaard does not take despair to be a feeling or emotion. Instead, despair is an ontological state in which the self fails to be what it should. Because human beings are psychical as well as physical, Kierkegaard believes we possess an aspect of the eternal and of the infinite. We are beings endowed with possibility and potentiality, each of which allows us to transcend the necessary. For Kierkegaard, the task we face is one of integrating the finite, temporal, and necessary actualities of who we are with the infinite, eternal, and possible beings we might become. It is in synthesising these various aspects of the self and in relating the physical and psychical to this synthesis that an individual actualises and becomes herself.9 This is what Kierkegaard

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____________________________________________________________ means in explaining the human self to be “a relation that relates itself to itself.”10 An individual in despair does not successfully integrate and relate these differing aspects of her self, and this is likely to lead to an improper relation to others. In his discussion of the forms of despair, Kierkegaard devotes Section A of The Sickness unto Death to a consideration of despair in the structure of the self, regardless of whether or not the individual is conscious of being in despair. Here Kierkegaard reflects on the various aspects of the self: the aforementioned infinitude/finitude, eternal/temporal, and possibility/necessity. He then explains that despair is characterised “dialectically by reflection on its opposite.”11 Infinitude’s despair is a lack of finitude, while finitude’s despair is a lack of infinitude. Similarly, possibility’s despair is to lack necessity, while necessity’s despair is to lack possibility. Of particular interest for my paper are the forms of despair characterised by a lack of infinitude and by a lack of possibility. Both of these forms are generated by immersion in the mundane temporal world and by the failure of the self to focus on what it could become if it transcended its current situation. Both forms may be present in the life of an individual, even if she is not aware of being in despair. In discussing the person who lacks infinitude, Kierkegaard explains that such a person is lost because he has become “a number instead of a self.” 12 Surrounded by hordes of men, absorbed in all sorts of secular matters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world – such a person forgets himself, …finds it too hazardous to be himself and far easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, a mass man.13 Kierkegaard explains that such a person is “ethically narrow” and mistakenly places an infinite value on relatively insignificant finite secular matters, like his occupation and position, while ignoring that which is truly of infinite value, namely the development of an eternal self. This person is lost because he is so completely finitised. He forgets to become himself, so involved is he in being what others would like him to be. Instead of fashioning his self by thoughtful carving, the despairing individual who lacks infinitude grinds down all his intricate edges, becoming so smooth as to be indiscernible from all the others. Interestingly, once such a person has lost himself by becoming “as smooth as a rolling stone,” he often finds himself becoming more successful in his social and professional surroundings. He may even be considered

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____________________________________________________________ exemplary by those who do not recognise that he lacks what is most essential: a self.14 The person who lacks possibility reveals similar limitations. Kierkegaard contends that such a person is either a fatalist for whom everything has become necessary (and for whom there is no longer any possibility of becoming anything other than what she is) or a philistine for whom everything has become trivial. In the latter case, an individual displays a “philistine-bourgeois mentality” that follows the “parrotwisdom of routine experience, …reassures itself with the trite and obvious,” and “thinks it controls possibility, …thinks that it…leads possibility around imprisoned in the cage of probability.”15 Such a person immerses herself in the probability of routine. Failing to raise critical questions about the future and about the multiple possibilities open to the self, this person essentially settles for the most probable future. While the self that does this mistakenly thinks it is the “master of possibility,” it is instead the slave to mere probability.16 Readers of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem might recognise her characterisation of Eichmann in Kierkegaard’s description. A bureaucrat responsible for organising and coordinating the transportation of millions to concentration camps, Eichmann seems to have been the kind of person who did very little thinking for himself and who instead relied upon party slogans and clichés when asked about his actions. “[O]fficialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.”17 Arendt notes that the longer one listened to him [Eichmann], the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.18 Eichmann relied on routine and seemed to take comfort in the fact that he was just like many others around him. Indeed, “the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience [about the Wannsee Conference] was the simple fact that he could see no one…who actually was against the Final Solution.”19 According to Arendt, “everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.”20 While despair is an internal condition that cannot necessarily be accurately diagnosed by reflection on an individual’s external actions, Arendt’s description of Eichmann presents us with compelling reasons to suspect he was a despairing individual who lacked infinitude and possibility. Such a person will likely be (as Eichmann seems to have been) caught up in the mundane temporal world of daily affairs, eschewing

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____________________________________________________________ reflections about the larger significance of his actions. Ethically, though not intellectually, narrow, this individual will typically (unthinkingly) follow the mores of his culture, without evincing any desire for destruction and annihilation. Consequently, this person, who unquestioningly does what is expected of him, may luck into living a life consistent with what morality requires. But such a person may also find himself in a situation in which his ethical narrowness and propensity to uncritically play out the role assigned to him will lead him to commit horrendous evils. Although he is not a moral monster, he may be led into committing monstrous deeds. This is what is meant by the banality of evil. 4.

Demonic Evil and Conscious Despair In contrast to the despairing individual who embodies the banality of evil and who may or not be consciously aware of her despair (or of the true extent of the evil she perpetuates), a demonic individual is acutely aware of the despair she possesses and the evil she enacts. So, in explicating the type of despairing individual who is demonic, it will be necessary to turn to Section B of The Sickness unto Death, where Kierkegaard addresses despair as defined by consciousness. In Section B Kierkegaard divides despair into two primary types, specifically the despair of not willing to be oneself (alternately feminine despair, or despair in weakness) and the despair of willing to be oneself (alternately masculine despair, or despair in defiance).21 In the former an individual does not will to be herself but wills instead to be someone else (or to be an alternate version of herself). In the latter an individual wills to be himself and to have complete freedom of self creation without acknowledging the necessity of those aspects of his self and its history that have already been actualised. Given that despair is, for Kierkegaard, a misrelation of the self, it is not surprising that he believes despair deepens as a person gains greater conscious awareness of her self. An increased awareness of self generates an increased potential intensity of despair. Kierkegaard explains the basic development of conscious despair in terms of several stages.22 In the first stage of conscious despair, a person who lives for something temporal and finite – love, money, fame, power, talent, beauty – becomes increasingly aware of the fact that she has mistakenly identified her self and her worth with her possession of something external to the self, something that she may lose. The possibility of loss is constantly present, even if (in actuality) the loss is never realised. Recognising this, she begins to experience despair over the possible loss of this earthly, temporal, finite attribute or possession; she begins to realise that she really has no permanent self apart from this attribute or possession. In identifying her self with something outside herself, she has failed to truly develop at all. What she thought was her

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____________________________________________________________ self was merely a mask, a façade, a door behind which there is nothing of substance. It is at this stage that conscious awareness of despair begins.23 While Kierkegaard notes that the real problem is her improper attachment to something outside herself and her failure to develop her self in its “eternal validity,” the person who experiences this type of despair will likely see her difficulty as residing in the world (and its misfortunes), not within herself. She may believe that her despair has its source in some external misfortune – for example, the fact that she has lost or might lose her beauty, rather than in her problematic identification of her self with her appearance. The more that she becomes aware of the fact that her real problem consists of a problematic lack of self, the more likely she is to move to the next stage of despair: despair over her failure to be the self she should be, which Kierkegaard calls “despair of the eternal or over oneself.”24 Here the individual makes a dialectical movement from mere awareness of her shortcomings and enters into despair over her failures, over the fact that she is the type of person who has defined herself by that which is external to her self. At this stage, her despair is “qualitatively a full level deeper” as the mask, or false door, which previously covered nothing, is “here a real door, but a carefully closed door, and behind it sits the self, so to speak, watching itself.”25 When this turning in on the self, which Kierkegaard calls “inclosing reserve” [Indesluttethed],26 intensifies, the individual in question typically longs for solitude: he confesses the truth of his weakness “to himself in his inclosed innermost being.”27 Should this person fail to find the path to faith that will end his despair, Kierkegaard maintains that this individual’s despair may lead him to become a kind of restless spirit who seeks oblivion, perhaps in sensuality, and who desires to return to being a person of immediacy, living for something outside the self and identifying himself with this externality. Kierkegaard identifies suicide as a likely result of continued inclosing reserve: “if this inclosing reserve is maintained completely, …then [the self’s] greatest danger is suicide.”28 Alternately, an individual with inclosing reserve may have her despair over her weakness shift into despair of defiance.29 Instead of remaining in despair over her weakness or giving in to this despair through suicide, a despairing individual may turn to a despair of defiance, declaring that she will be the self she is and that she would adamantly refuse to change, even if she could. She may defiantly assert that she is the complete master and creator of her self and that she is the self she wants to be. According to Kierkegaard, such an individual problematically wants to play God and to have complete freedom of self-creation. Unwilling to lose

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____________________________________________________________ herself by giving her self over to God, she defiantly wills to be the self that she is. While Kierkegaard is concerned about the theological difficulties and religious implications of this attempt to play God, he also suggests that there are secular, practical problems with this attempt. One such practical problem is the fact that the despairing individual who attempts to exercise complete freedom of self-creation risks creating no self at all. A person who creates herself anew every day might succeed in being a number of consecutively different people, but she would not have created a continuous self. There would be no narrative unity to her personality, history, experiences, or characteristics. As Kierkegaard explains, “the negative form of the self exercises a loosening power as well as a binding power; at any time it can quite arbitrarily start all over again.”30 Consequently, the result is “that this absolute ruler is a king without a country, actually ruling over nothing; …his sovereignty is subordinate to the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate at any moment.”31 In light of this, a second practical problem arises, namely that a person who can at any time start all over again and create herself anew is likely to have a warped understanding of moral responsibility. The individual who fails to acknowledge that she is the same person she was yesterday is unlikely to take responsibility for yesterday’s actions. This concern about a failure to acknowledge moral responsibility for one’s actions is deepens with the awareness that the person defiantly asserting herself is likely asserting a morally problematic self. In the process of trying to construct the self anew, Kierkegaard explains that a defiant individual may, if she is honest with herself, discover some basic defect that she cannot simply ignore or erase. Acknowledging the defect, as well as her inability to remove it, a despairing individual may begin to identify her self with this defect. Since her “thorn in the flesh gnaws so deeply that [she] cannot abstract himself from it,” she decides that she “might as well accept it forever, so to speak.”32 Instead of despairing over her inability to lose her defect, she may instead embrace it and defiantly assert that this “defective” person is who she really is. In so doing, she eschews “hope in the possibility of help” and would no longer accept help even if it was offered to her.33 If her despair further intensifies, she arrives at what Kierkegaard considers the highest form of conscious despair: the demonic. Here despair has moved through mere defiance and become a demonic rage. While this person once desired to be rid of her agony and despair, now she “would rather rage against everything and be the wronged victim of the whole world and all of life.”34 Believing in her “infinite superiority” to others, she expresses her “hatred toward existence” and wills to be her defective self “for spite.”35

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____________________________________________________________ In contrast to a person whose evil actions are the result of a banal shallowness or indifference, a demonic individual perpetuates evil for the sake of evil. Motivated by hatred and rage, a demonic person aims to terrorise and to destroy. Her intentions are to defiantly affirm the demonic self through the annihilation of all that is good and the elevation of all that is evil. Unlike an individual whose life exemplifies the banality of evil – an individual who might, under other circumstances, never have committed horrendous acts, a demonic person’s evil acts are explicitly intended as such. For a historical example of such demonic individuals operating in Nazi Germany, consider the records of some of the guards at Auschwitz. Several of these guards repeatedly engaged in acts of cruelty whose sole aim seems to have been to make life as difficult as possible for those under their command. In reviewing transcripts from the trials of several of these officers, Katz notes that a culture of cruelty existed at Auschwitz, with guards engaging in competitions to invent new horrors for inmates. Here evil was pursued for its own sake; suffering was perpetuated out of a delight for creating and witnessing it. Games for bringing about swift death, as well as for prolonging an inmate’s demise, were created. According to Katz’s reading of the transcripts of the trials, the evil of these acts “was obvious … even to the guards themselves. Yet they seemed to derive joy from their deeds, and that joy seemed to be rekindled in the courtroom when their actions were being recalled.”36 In direct contrast to those whose evil actions are indicative of the banality of evil, the intentional evil of the guards seems demonic.37 5.

The Role of Community and Circumstances Reflecting on the use of the guards at Auschwitz as examples of demonic evil might lead a careful reader to wonder whether Kierkegaard’s account of the demonic, which explains this as a problematic failure of the self, is really so helpful. One might think that it would be more instructive to point to a social context that elicits demonic behaviour, rather than to focus attention on an antecedent deficiency in the self.38 Indeed, Katz’s account of the behaviour of the guards at Auschwitz does precisely this. Comparing the cruelty exhibited by the SS officers with that of the soldiers at My Lai during the Vietnam War, Katz argues that social groups can promote a “culture of cruelty” in which individuals compete to outshine one another in the imaginative infliction of suffering.39 Particular communities, like those formed by guards at concentration camps and by soldiers on the battlefield, can create a “Local Moral Universe” that embraces values and encourages behaviours typically forbidden by various moral codes.40 For this reason the significance of the community must be considered.

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____________________________________________________________ Surely there is something right about this observation. Individuals do not exist in isolation. As social creatures we are influenced by the actions of others. But to admit that we are influenced by others does not fully explain why some choose to participate in perpetuating the evil deeds of their local community, while others do not. In order to explain why some are more susceptible to the influences of their community, it is necessary to point to an individual’s antecedent receptivity to these influences – one that is due to an antecedent deficiency in the self. Even if membership in a particular community is sufficient for eliciting violence from some participants, the fact that some elect not to join these communities or decline to participate in their cruelties indicates that membership in the community is not sufficient for causing demonic behaviour.41 While the community may surely be an important part of explaining why an individual acted as she did at a particular point in time, the community is not the only causal factor: antecedent deficiencies in the self must be noted. As Katz himself admits, “abhorrent behaviour can be generated by a catalyst, such as a cult leader. But the catalyst does not, alone, implement the horrors…. [it] merely sets the stage.”42 Part of what Arendt found so alarming about Eichmann was that his character and the evils he perpetuated were so banal as to raise the possibility that many others might have followed Eichmann’s path: Eichmann had no particular pathology or hatred of his victims. Still, he possessed an internal imbalance that allowed him to act as he did. Had Eichmann not been the despairing individual that he was, he would probably not have acted as he did, even if the circumstances of his life and of his community remained the same. My aim is this paper has been to use Kierkegaard’s psychological and phenomenological discussion of despair to discuss some of the different types of deficiencies in the self that might lead one, through banal or demonic intentions, to commit evil. While it is not the case that every individual characterised by lack of infinitude or lack of possibility will become an Eichmann, nor that every individual characterised by demonic inclosing reserve will become an SS officer, each of these individuals has the propensity to commit monstrous acts, given the right circumstances. Although circumstances, including one’s local community, exert an important influence in terms of bringing out certain qualities and deficiencies in the self, the significance of these qualities and deficiencies in the self cannot be overstated.43 6.

The Significance of Kierkegaard’s Account The account of despair offered in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death is particularly significant for several reasons. First, Kierkegaard’s discussion aims at awakening individuals to the types of

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____________________________________________________________ despair and to their own exemplification of a particular type. Moreover, an awareness of the typology of despairing individuals might lead not only to an awareness of a one’s own existence as characterised by a particular form of despair but also to an awareness of the tendency for one’s own actions to be similarly influenced by the type of despair one embodies. This may lead an individual to be more likely to watch out for the various ways that her actions might end up expressing evil. For example, consider the person who suffers from despair of lacking infinitude or possibility. Recall that Kierkegaard’s description of this person fits well with some of the claims Arendt makes about bureaucrats like Eichmann. One of the questions that is sometimes asked about such individuals concerns how such otherwise seemingly normal people could be guilty of the monstrous evil of sending millions to their deaths. Kierkegaard’s account points to the fact that, apart from whatever other cultural, political, or social factors might have been operative in such a person’s life, there is also a serious deficiency of the self, a failure of the self to be what it should. Unfortunately, this deficiency produces a very real propensity to evil – one that exists even if the conditions that would allow it to be expressed are never realised. So, any explanation of human wickedness needs to make some reference to the antecedent deficiency in the self. Kierkegaard’s account does this. Kierkegaard’s discussion of despair also has the benefit of providing a unified account that can help explain the existence of both banal and demonic evil. Both forms are the result of problematic misrelations of the self according to which the self fails to become what it should. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s account helps to show how demonic evil might itself be an outgrowth of banal evil, as the latter can be understood as a failure of the self at a lower level of consciousness, while demonic evil represents the qualitatively deeper despair that requires a higher awareness of the self and its limitations. Of course, this discussion of demonic despair as qualitatively higher might strike some as problematic. The worry here would be that this type of despairing individual is seen as somehow special, perhaps mistakenly supporting this person’s belief in her superiority to others. I take it this is the worry Jaspers has in mind when he writes to Arendt that a guilt that goes beyond all criminal guilt inevitably takes on a streak of “greatness” – of satanic greatness – which is, for me, as inappropriate for the Nazis as all the talk about the “demonic” element in Hitler and so forth. It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what truly characterises them. Bacteria can cause

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____________________________________________________________ epidemics that wipe out nations, but they remain merely bacteria.44 I share Jaspers’ concern. But I think one of the benefits of Kierkegaard’s account is that, even though he characterises demonic despair as “higher” in the sense of involving greater self-awareness, he makes it clear that possessing demonic inclosing reserve is still just another way of being misrelated to oneself. If one misses the mark, the fact that one misses is the salient point. Moreover, according to Kierkegaard’s account, there is no unique quality that a demonic individual possesses that makes her special or gives her an element of greatness. Any other human being is similarly capable of achieving that type of despair. The true achievement, however, is to be found in overcoming despair, rather than in possessing a more intense form of it. 7.

Conclusion Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death calls attention to the different forms of despair that often characterise the lives of individuals. Borrowing from Kierkegaard’s analysis, I have suggested that an individual like Eichmann, who exemplifies the banality of evil, is likely to suffer from one kind of despair, while a person who acts demonically evil is likely to possess another. I have argued that the evils perpetuated by both types of despairing individuals, demonic and banal, proceed from problems within the self – problems that may be exacerbated by certain circumstances and by participation in certain communities. Connecting expressions of evil to different types of despairing individuals not only provides a unified account of both demonic and banal evil but also demonstrates how these different forms of evil are themselves related.

Notes 1. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1994). 2. Fred Emil Katz, Confronting Evil: Two Journeys (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). See especially 150-160, where Katz discusses the behavior of the guards at Auschwitz as creating a culture in which cruelty was encouraged and rewarded. 3. Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 4. Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 159. Highlighting the distinction between banal

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____________________________________________________________ and demonic evil, Arendt elaborates: in cases of banal evil, “the doer [is] neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one [can] detect … [in his past and present behavior is] something entirely negative: it [is] not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think” (Ibid.). 5. It is worth noting that Kierkegaard’s text bears the subtitle “A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening” and that this is indicative of the text’s primary function: to provide a psychological exposition that will help individuals to recognize the form(s) of despair that characterize their lives. 6. In discussing Kierkegaard’s decision to attribute The Sickness unto Death to a pseudonym, Hong and Hong note that he did this because he was “humbled under the ideality of the work.” They appeal to Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers to substantiate their claim: “[t]he difference from the earlier pseudonyms is simply but essentially this, that I [Kierkegaard] do not retract the whole thing humorously but identify myself as one who is striving.” Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, “Historical Introduction,” in The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), xx. 7. Indeed, to be unconscious of despair is the most common form of despair. (Kierkegaard, 23) 8. More accurately, Kierkegaard explains that “every moment he is in despair he is bringing it upon himself. It [his responsibility for being in despair] is always the present tense” (Kierkegaard, 17). 9. It should be noted that the task is not one of mere synthesis of psychical and physical. To be a self consists of relating the psychical and the physical to this synthesis. This is what Kierkegaard means in defining the human self to be “a relation that relates itself to itself.” He goes on to add that, as a Christian, he also believes that, in relating itself to itself, the self must also “relate itself to the power that established it, [namely] God” (Kierkegaard, 13). 10. Ibid. For a particularly helpful explication of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the self as a relation, see Gregory R. Beabout, Freedom and Its Misuses (Marquette: Marquette University Press, 1994). 11. Kierkegaard, 30. 12. Ibid., 33-34. 13. Ibid., 33. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 41-42. 16. Ibid.

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____________________________________________________________ 17. Arendt, Eichmann, 48. 18. Ibid., 49. For fuller discussion of Arendt’s claim, see Bernard J. Bergen, The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and “The Final Solution” (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), especially Chapter Two, 39-78. 19. Arendt, Eichmann, 116. 20. Ibid., 54. 21. For additional review of these types, as well as discussion about which is more fundamental, see Alastair Hannay, “Basic Despair,” in Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays (New York: Routledge, 2003), 76-88. Additionally, for an analysis of the differences between masculine and feminine despair, see Sylvia I. Walsh, “On ‘Feminine’ and ‘Masculine’ Forms of Despair,” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Sickness unto Death, edited by Robert L. Perkins (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987), 121-134. Finally, for a fuller explication of the forms of despair in The Sickness unto Death, see Kresten Nordentoft, Kierkegaard’s Psychology, translated by Bruce Kirmmse (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978), 240-322. 22. For discussion of the dialectical development of despair, see Jon Stewart, “Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of Despair in The Sickness unto Death,” in Kierkegaard Studies: 1997, edited by Niels Jorgen Cappelorn and Hermann Deuser (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 117-143. 23. Here I am considering Kierkegaard’s “man of immediacy” and his man of immediacy with “some reflection.” See Kierkegaard, 5060. 24. Kierkegaard, 60. 25. Ibid., 63. 26. Ibid., 66. 27. Ibid., 65. 28. Ibid., 66. Here is another possible connection between Kierkegaard’s phenomenological description of despair and the actions of SS officers, since some of these officers committed suicide, presumably as a result of despair over the evils they perpetuated. 29. Ibid., 67. 30. Ibid., 69. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 71. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 72. 35. Ibid., 73. Kierkegaard notes that, at its highest intensity, “this kind of despair is rarely seen in the world” (Ibid., 72). 36. Katz, 151.

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____________________________________________________________ 37. I use the qualifier “seems” here because, if Kierkegaard is right that a demonic individual is so because of her internal attitudes, values, motives and intentions, rather than because of the external consequences of her actions, it will be difficult to accurately attribute demonic despair to individuals as a result of external examination. 38. I am indebted to the participants at the Fifth Global Conference Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, held in Prague in March 2004, for calling this objection to my attention. 39. Katz, 149-160. 40. Ibid., 67-86. 41. Katz notes one such example: a soldier at My Lai deliberately shot himself in the foot to take himself out of the killing spree. (Katz, 156.) 42. Katz, 73. 43. For discussion about the social dimension of Kierkegaard’s account of despair, see John W. Elrod, “The Social Dimension of Despair,” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Sickness unto Death, edited by Robert L. Perkins (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987), 107-120. 44. Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers: Correspondence 1926-1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 62.

Select Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin, 1994. ——. “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” In Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2003. Beabout, Gregory R. Freedom and Its Misuses. Marquette: Marquette University Press, 1994. Bergen, Bernard J. The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and “The Final Solution.” Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Hannay, Alastair. “Basic Despair.” In Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays. New York: Routledge, 2003, 76-88. Katz, Fred E. Confronting Evil: Two Journeys. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Kohler, Lotte, and Hans Saner, eds., Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers:

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____________________________________________________________ Correspondence,1926-1969. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Nordentoft, Kresten. Kierkegaard’s Psychology. Translated by Bruce Kirmmse. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978. Perkins, Robert L., ed., International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Sickness unto Death. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987. Stewart, Jon. “Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of Despair in The Sickness unto Death.” In Kierkegaard Studies: 1997, edited by Niels Jorgen Cappelorn and Hermann Deuser, 117-143. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997.

Part V Individuals, Groups, and Evil Actions

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Relationality and Evil: Judging Bystanders Gideon Calder Abstract “Bystanders” at the scene of acts of moral extremity are, by the nature of the term, connected to it: situated in more or less proximate relation to those to whose suffering they are not attending. Yet the culpability of bystanders seems anomalous, and difficult to calibrate in the terms of conventional moral discourse. Against this background, this paper explores two main points: firstly, whether the moral and cultural “relationality” of bystanders’ acts and omissions makes any difference to judgements as to the “evilness” of such behaviour; and secondly, the idea that “evil” might be applied as much as to relations between individuals, as to the thoughts and actions of individuals themselves. Using recent work by Stanley Cohen, Norman Geras and Alan Norrie as reference points, and building on an insight from St Augustine, I argue not only that there is sense in this idea, but that it offers a greater depth of explanation than a “methodologically individualist” conception of evil, by itself, is able to. Key Words: bystanders, genocide, evil, relationality, luck, blame, responsibility. For evil to come into being, the actions of a few are not sufficient; it is also necessary that the vast majority stand aside, indifferent; of such behaviour, as we know well, we are all of us capable. Tzvetan Todorov1 Sin is nothing but the refusal to recognise human misery. Simone Weil2 1. Introduction There are places, it’s often said, where ethical discourse comes up against its limits: where conventional categories of approbation and blame cannot apply without dissonance, or rank discrepancy. Such events, at the extreme of what is conceivable in terms of human behaviour, are also likely to be those in reference to which the language of “evil” is most readily invoked. A reverberating theme in reflections on the genocides of the twentieth century is that here, perhaps exclusively so, we find events which it is impossible to accommodate within the boundaries of the kinds of “ethics talk” which might suffice elsewhere. This claim has figured prominently in discussion of the Nazi Holocaust – and in particular, in conjunction with the claim that this event is not just unique, historically

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___________________________________________________________ speaking, but of an entirely separate order to the rest of human history.3 But it features, too, in the widely-held view that it is both an intellectual misprision and a moral affront to treat events of such enormity as somehow commensurable with the stuff of more mundane ethical discourse. Such events occupy a different kind of ethical plane. As Jonathan Glover has put it, they make it “hard for thinking about ethics to carry on just as before.”4 And yet, as Alain Badiou has observed, treatment of such events tends to be Janus-faced. We find that the Nazi Holocaust is declared to be “unthinkable, unsayable, without conceivable precedent or posterity,” and meanwhile “constantly invoked, compared, used to schematise every circumstance in which one wants to produce, among opinions, an effect of the awareness…of Evil.”5 We seek measurability in events described unmeasurable. This in itself suggests that a coherent response to events of such extremity cannot simply declare them in advance to be ineffable, or beyond comparison. Whatever the offence caused by any insinuation of equivalence between genocidal and more everyday moral failures, we certainly seek, in both cases, an explanation of how it is that they have come to pass. And we will want to address the question of where (if anywhere) we might place blame for happening as they did. The trouble with events of genocidal scale is that both of these matters will be deeply complex to resolve – in direct proportion, indeed, to the intensity of the need we feel to resolve them. Much of this complexity stems from the fact that such events are instigated collectively: that their happening as they do depends not just on individual will, but on collective cooperation, appeasement, and failure to resist. (By comparison, the actions of the lone psychopath are relatively easy to “process” in terms of conventional ethical discourse – whatever the risks involved.) This collectivity applies, of course, to other events of far less magnitude. But it poses particular problems for our understanding of, and ethical response to, events of genocidal scale. In what follows, I try to flesh out a tentative hunch: that moral failures which are by their nature collective, and could not have happened otherwise, do indeed show the limits of conventional, modern ethical frameworks – and especially those which we might term “liberal individualist.” In particular, they show a certain inability – characteristic of our legal, as well as our moral discourse – to address relations between individuals, as well as individuals themselves, in explaining moral failures and apportioning blame in response to them. It’s crucial to my case here that this “space between” – the “relationality” alluded to in my title – is not an incidental aspect of the moral and social processes through which such events are enabled to happen.6 Rather, it is at their core. To put it differently: the “evil” done amid large-scale atrocities can be calibrated

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___________________________________________________________ only by addressing the relationality between individuals, as well as their individuated motives and actions. And yet, we struggle so to do. Our notions of evil remain overwhelmingly individualistic. And similarly, our notions of blame make it hard to locate it anywhere other than with the atomised individual: either it lies there, so the logic goes, or it is something to which we cannot respond coherently in a normative sense. This, for all its dominance, is in my view a mistaken assumption, both ethically and in a sociological sense. To explore why, it’s instructive to look at the role played by bystanders in the occurrence of acts of moral extremity. This is for two main reasons. Firstly: bystanding is by its nature a relational phenomenon. Secondly: it is a necessary feature of large-scale genocide. What I mean by these points should become clearer as we go on. What I hope to show, by exploring these issues in this way, is that however one responds to claims such as that the Nazi Holocaust was an event fundamentally separate from the rest of history, the particular issues we’ll be focusing on apply there in ways equivalent to their application to far more mundane events. Typically, “bystanderism” (if the term is not too clumsy) is required for collective moral failures to take place. The more extreme these failures are, the greater the scale of the bystanderism that is likely to be required. These events will often be discussed using the language of evil, with all its attendant moral power. Given this, we need to address the possibility that situations, social structures, relations between people, and historical contexts might themselves be evil. If we find ourselves unable to accommodate such dimensions within a viable notion of evil, then it seems that the notion will always be denied a degree of explanatory power. 2.

Situating Bystanders We have noted already that by its nature, bystanding is relational. To be a bystander, in the ethical sense, is to be situated in more or less proximate relation to another, or others, who require help. Bystanding represents a failure to get involved when one should, in a situation of which one is not the author. It is thus, in general, a wrong by omission, rather than commission. Largely because of this definitive element of passivity, it is not, typically, designated as “evil” – for all that bystanderism is a feature, indeed a condition, of the perpetration of those atrocities which most commonly attract the usage of that term. And yet the particular moral complexities of the phenomenon stem from its broader significance.7 It comes in degrees. The more proximate and “everyday” examples are not, by their everydayness, rendered less shocking. Sometimes, indeed, the effect is the reverse.

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___________________________________________________________ Some such examples will come to public attention; some will not. Stanley Cohen, amid a compelling survey of the ways in which we live with atrocities we know about but do not intervene in, offers a selective list of recent known cases in one corner of Europe: In Britain there were: neighbours who didn’t report hearing children next door being beaten by their parents; a young woman dragged screaming from a Birmingham shopping centre in daylight and raped in partial view of dozens of shoppers; a woman in a suburban railway carriage threatened and abused by three youths, while fifteen passengers sat quietly, ignoring everything. And then, most resonantly, the blurred closed-circuit television images of Jamie Bulger, wandering from his mother’s side in a Liverpool shopping centre, being dragged away by two ten-year-old boys, then (witnessed by some thirty people) being shoved, kicked and thrown in the air, before eventually being led out of sight and killed on a nearby railway line.8 Why exactly do such incidents strike us as more disturbing than similar cases where no-one other than perpetrator and victim are present? Part of the explanation seems to lie in the particular way in which others are present in the examples Cohen gives. “Bystander” is an ambiguous term, implying not merely being present, not merely being a passer-by or an observer, but a more intimate involvement in what is taking place. As Cohen notes, many infer from it not just indifference towards the events in question, but complicity in them. On the one hand, as noted earlier, bystanderism represents a failure to act: a wrong by omission. But it is also – whether or not paradoxically – a kind of active failure to act. There is an element of willful ignorance about the stance, of bystanders choosing not to view themselves as implicated when, in fact, they already are. They are likely to be viewed as if they have contributed to the situation at hand: and thus, as if they bear some responsibility for it. Cohen himself discusses this under the heading of “states of denial.” In another context, Primo Levi describes “those who faced by the crime of others or their own, turn their backs so as not to see it and not feel touched by it, … deluding themselves that not seeing [is] a way of not knowing.”9 It is the attitude of bystanders, rather than simply their standing-by, which seems key to the moral concern which their behaviour provokes. Levi talks here of the behaviour of the majority of Germans under the Third Reich; Cohen’s focus is more general. For both, bystanderism is an ongoing danger, not limited by its nature to particular social or

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___________________________________________________________ historical junctures. It seems uncontroversial to suggest that – using Cohen’s terms – both indifference and complicity, if they become typical, may contribute to a culture in which further such events are made more likely. The assumption that they are likely to is one reason for the “moral panics” (to use an earlier, famous phrase of Cohen’s),10 which tend to follow in the wake of cases such as the Jamie Bulger murder. But beyond its “knee-jerk” aspects, there is a deeper, more sober dimension to such alarm. If people are capable of such passivity in this case, what follows? It seems plausible that they might develop a sort of immunity towards the ethical demands made by situations where intervention seems most urgent. The presumption may develop that there is no expectation of intervention; that passivity itself is routine, perhaps expected. And insofar as this results from the motivations and (non-) actions of individuals themselves, it seems clear that the stances assumed by bystanders are implicated in those atrocities in respect of which evil is most commonly discussed. The reason for this is stark, purely at the level of socio-historical explanation. Namely: for events such as the Jamie Bulger murder – and, a fortiori, the mass deportation of millions of Jews to the extermination camps of central and eastern Europe – to take place, bystanderism needs to happen. In the opening quote above, Tzvetan Todorov suggests that “indifference” on the part of the majority is a prerequisite for evil to emerge. In fact, we need not go even that far, for the point to stand: simply their standing aside is enough, whether indifferently, or wracked by remorse, or otherwise. Lack of resistance or obstruction by the majority is necessary for any minority to achieve their calamitous objectives. Precisely how bystanderism is inculcated, in any given case, is another question.11 But the fact that it must somehow be inculcated must, I think, be a necessary acknowledgement in any serious explanation of the preconditions of such events. Thus, by extension, such explanations need to “factor in,” as active elements in the causal process, the relationality of bystanders to both perpetrators and victims: the nature of the space between them. For this space is – as it were – where bystanderism either takes hold, or does not. If this is right, then so what? Or to put it differently: if this point is as uncontroversial as suggested here, then why need it have any particular moral resonance which itself is beyond the commonplace? 3.

Judging Bystanders: Two Questions To take up that theme, I think it is useful to consider two more specific questions, both of which have implications in terms of the overall issues at stake in this article. Firstly: a cluster of interrelated issues. Does the relationality of bystanders to the victims of the events in respect of which they have stood

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___________________________________________________________ by make them culpable, in any sense, for those events? Bystanders’ role is necessary to those events unfolding as they have; it is also knowing. Are their hands thereby irrevocably dirty, in a similar way – though to a lesser degree – to those of the actual perpetrators of such crimes? Or might there, on the other hand, be a non-facile sense in which being finding oneself so connected to acts of atrocity is a kind of moral “bad luck”; the sort of situation in which any of us might find ourselves, and in which all of us, even the saintly, would struggle to “do the right thing”? And secondly: can we indeed talk of “evil” as a predicate of relations between individuals, or social structures, as well as the motivations and actions of individuals themselves? My response to these questions is this: that if we can answer “yes” to the second question, then this gives us a more nuanced, more subtly textured position from which to address the first batch. But to argue thus, we need to address aspects of the nature of (i) moral agency, (ii) evil itself, and (iii) those forms of social relations which might facilitate bystanderism as we have described it. 4.

Considerations of Moral Agency Deep and nuanced consideration of the nature of moral agency is beyond my scope here. So for the sake of argument, I will assert a position which is substantiated by the most convincing accounts of moral agency to emerge in recent philosophy and social psychology. It’s a claim which is common to, though not exclusively owned by, a whole range of recent such perspectives, from communitarianism to feminism, and from Marxism to queer theory. To be sure, it needs to be handled with care: it comes in problematic forms, and is put to dubious purposes. But the essence of the claim will survive whatever the fate of those particular positions in which it features. The claim is this: that to be a moral agent is to be a socially situated human being. Or to put it the other way around, relations with others are a requirement for moral agency. (They are not the only requirement, nor a sufficient requirement. Neither is “moral agency” here equated with “moral worth”; beings incapable of moral agency can and do take a place in moral relations. The claim is just about moral agency, rather than about the nature or scope of morality.) One reason why this claim is important is that – whatever its normative implications – it offers us descriptive purchase in explaining how relations between individuals take the forms they do. To say that moral agency cannot be affected by such relations, or by wider social structures, is, I would argue, to rely on an untenably “methodologically individualist” view both of agency, and of responsibility. Methodological individualism is the doctrine that – to borrow the definition of key contemporary proponent Jon Elster – “all social phenomena – their

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___________________________________________________________ structure and their change – are in principle explicable in ways that only involve individuals – their properties, their goals, their beliefs, and their actions.”12 From this angle, the basic elements in the social world are individual human beings, society being a kind of by-product of the practices and preferences of these individuals. Thus for the methodological individualist, the causes of all historical events, from petty crime-waves to revolutions to George W. Bush, must in principle be explicable in ways which reduce down, at the “micro” level, to individuals’ properties, goals, beliefs and actions. There isn’t the space here to embark on a sustained refutation of this position – except to say that as a technique of analysis it will struggle to explain the most elementary of social phenomena, morality included. For instance, explaining a revolution simply as the outcome of the coalescence of certain individuals’ preferences, without reference to the social characteristics of those individuals, would seem at best to offer only a partial picture, and at worst, to be point-missingly useless.13 To explain the Rwandan genocide of 1994 simply in terms of individuals’ “properties, goals, beliefs and actions” seems similarly, perhaps even more drastically, misfocused. The trouble with methodological individualism is that it implies that we can explain everything within society – including individuals themselves – without reference to specifically social phenomena, or predicates. And the trouble with this, as a view, is that it fails to acknowledge the intrinsic relationality of different elements of any given social context. That’s to say: the properties, goals, beliefs and actions of individuals can themselves only be fully understood with reference to social structure, and vice versa. Individuals and their social contexts exist in a more fluid and dialectical relation than the one-way explanation of either in terms of the other can allow. If this necessity to accommodate relationality is true of the explanation of political actions, and of social behaviour in general, it is (partly because of this) just as true in the moral sphere. I act not simply as an atomized agent, but as an agent in relation to others: as an occupier of certain roles, with attendant expectations, rules and duties. Not all of these roles are chosen; however I execute them, or not, the existence of some will be part of the inherited background of my life. I, as an agent, am not somehow coterminous with such roles and relations as I occupy. The roles themselves are not simply fixed or reified. There being such roles, and such relations to others, though, is a condition of my acting morally. Indeed, a couple of further qualifiers are worth inserting at this point, not least to distance this general claim from some of the more awkward “communitarian” baggage with which it might be associated. It is not to say that the occupation of specific, or formal, roles is a precondition of agency as such, so that we need to be in a role which is

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___________________________________________________________ “officially sanctioned” as having duties attached in order to act in a moral way. Nor does it mean that I need to have a specific, designated role in respect of every individual I come across in order to act morally towards them (so that, for instance, I could have no obligations towards strangers). Rather, the point is just that the occupation of some kind of role with respect to other people is a necessary precondition for moral action in any meaningful sense. In other words: moral agency depends on the constitutive nature of relationality, not to specific others, but to others in general.14 A child somehow self-reared on a desert island, who never encounters another human being, could not come be a moral agent in this sense. Moreover, and crucially: neither does this position deny that human beings have, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, “a capacity for recognising that they have good reason to acknowledge the authority of evaluative and normative standards that are independent of those embodied in the institutions of their own particular social and political order.”15 It is not to say, then, that moral agency is delimited by social context in some “transcendental” sense. It is not that our moral horizons somehow reduce to the social context in which we have the roles we do, or that moral standards are simply relative to such contexts. To use a standard example, the SS officer cannot exonerate themselves simply by claiming that they were “only obeying orders,” or carrying out a designated role. For it is a key part of moral agency that it allows access to moral standards beyond one’s immediate surroundings, by virtue of which those surroundings, and the norms implicated in them, may appear to one to be morally unjustifiable. Thus to address the relationality of moral agency is not to displace that agency to a structural level, so that individuals’ actions are simply reiterations of a pre-inscribed set of norms, or the acting out of a script over which they have no authorship. To be a moral agent does not consist just in doing a particularly good job of discovering the constitutive norms of one’s community, and (whatever those norms might be) finding smooth accommodation with them. We are not reducible to our roles and our relations, crucial though these may be to our moral agency.16 But on the affirmative side, it’s central to the position put forward here that the enactment of responsibilities can be either enabled or constrained by social structure. Thus, the nature of the “space between” individuals, the nature of social relations, can condition the ways in which the possibilities for moral agency cash out, just as Elster’s individualised properties, goals, beliefs and actions can. As individuals can be agents of change, so the social relations they reproduce and transform are themselves the necessary location of the agency they possess.

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___________________________________________________________ If this case has any substance to it, then this has important implications in terms of our discussion here. For it enables us to characterise bystanderism as a failure of social relations, as well as a symptom of levels of moral will, compassion, negligence, moral courage, and so on, on the part of the individuals concerned. Bystanderism cannot be explained purely in “methodologically individualist” terms, crucial though individual perceptions and actions are to its coming about. This is because those perceptions and actions themselves, as aspects of moral agency, cannot simply be described in terms of strictly atomised selfgeneration on the part of the individuals who bear them. At least to a degree – and any degree is sufficient for the general point to stand – they will be furnished and enabled by social context. 5.

Understanding Evil: Borrowing from Augustine So what about evil, in particular? Why connect it up with this discussion at all? One good reason is that mainstream discourse on evil has itself tended to reflect some of the more untenable elements of the position just rejected. That is to say, most accounts of evil centre (in more or less methodologically individualist fashion) on the conditions of the possibility of a given individual committing an act of wrong “for its own sake,” or for the sake of some underlying motive which is itself evil. Typically, they may centre on psychological factors (perhaps a malproperty of the brain) which allow some to be capable of such acts – or else, on an appeal to the “monstrous,” or “inhuman” qualities which inhere in those epitomising evil itself. One alternative to this, of course, is the view that “evil itself” is simply a cultural construction, an effect of the need to project some form of demonised “other” to serve as a reinforcement of norms of “acceptable” or “reasonable” behaviour. Like those standards themselves, on the simple constructionist account, the notion of evil is there to serve a social function, to be defined in these terms rather than as the reflection of anything “given.” This dichotomy between “naturalistic” and “cultural” explanations is familiar enough from a whole slew of debates about human attributes which seem (at first glance, at least) plausibly explicable in terms of either pole: sexuality, gender, intelligence, aggression, and so on. In the case of evil, whatever the contributions from either direction, neither seems exhaustive – and taken by itself, in pure terms, each seems problematically undialectical. The trouble with solely naturalistic explanations is that – like methodological individualism – they will tend to try to explain behaviour purely in terms of attributes “inherent” to the individual agent; their genetic profile, their early behaviour patterns, and so on. For reasons beyond those broached already, this position is hard to sustain, simply as

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___________________________________________________________ an explanation of why people behave as they do, depending as it does on a drastic discounting of cultural factors as an influence on our attitudes and orientations towards the world. It tends towards an account of evil purely as a kind of inherent malfunction within the individual, and of “evil” traits as immutable and simply “given.” To explain the Nazi Holocaust in such reductive terms, one would need to put it down to the freak, disastrous coincidence of an unusually high proportion of like-minded congenital psychopaths being born in central Europe around the late 1800s, and being lucky enough to fall in with enough like-minded people to devise and pursue the Final Solution. If this sounds flippant and crass, well so it should: as a historical explanation, it is worthless.17 But a problem with the social constructionist approach, on the other hand, is that it tends, in the hands of many proponents, to imply that the “constructedness” of the behaviour we happen to have labelled “evil” indicates that it can be readily “deconstructed,” by discursive means alone: that it is endlessly malleable, and so somehow less “real” than naturalistic explanations would suppose. In its cruder forms, constructionism of this kind can imply that there really is nothing to what we call “evil” but a set of perceptions, or habits of thinking – so that any issues or phenomena involved might be circumvented by being redescribed in different terms. Even when more sophisticatedly put, it still struggles to explain how behaviour of any kind can have only social preconditions, can be solely relevant to power, or to discursive productions. It runs the risk of implying that all moral behaviour – “good” or “evil” or in between – is the pure effect of social processes, rather than being the product of agency in any substantial sense.18 But the texture of such debates need not be explored in any more depth for a general point to be made. If it is grantable that moral agency can be influenced, at least partly constituted, and threatened, by the social relations in which an individual operates (or the “space between” individuals as well as their attributes in an atomistic sense), then it is grantable that evil can exist without individual intentions. It can be a symptom of social relations. What is needed is a conception of evil which can grant that its epitome may well consist, as one helpful description has it, in the direction of an individual’s actions towards deliberate wrongdoing – to “intend and to try to do what is evil” – while leaving space for a further sense.19 In this non-individualised sense, evil can subsist in social relations themselves – not just in the sense that certain social structures might lend themselves more readily to its emergence than others, but in the sense, again, that social relations themselves might be wrong in this way. To make this claim, one would have to insist that evil can be understood non-anthropocentrically, as a characteristic of entities other than individual minds.

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___________________________________________________________ Can this equate with traditional notions of evil? Yes, at least part of the way: but in a way that transcends the simple dichotomy between natural and cultural explanations. For Augustine, evil is primarily an absence, rather than some natural, “hydraulic” part of the furniture of life which must either be extinguished or adjusted to. Thus: “no nature at all is evil, and this is a name for nothing but the want of good.”20 From this perspective, again, evil is a lack in nature, rather than an intrinsic aspect of it: evil is removed, not by removing any nature, or part of a nature, which had been introduced by the evil, but by the healing and restoration of the original which had been corrupted and debased.21 I’m not recommending the reconstruction of a wholesale account of evil on the Platonist-Christian underpinnings of Augustine’s own philosophy: and even if I were, this would not be the place to unzip the metaphysical baggage which such a project would carry. Rather, I want to highlight a more limited, if important point, which transfers instructively from Augustine’s own framework to the context of the present discussion. (Other definitions of evil might serve this purpose too; still, it seems to me that Augustine’s is a particularly helpful example.) Say we resist the exclusive emphasis on either nature or culture in explanations of individuals’ behaviour, propensities, orientations, and so on – and instead, allow that it may be a matter of contributions from both one direction and the other. And say we agree that evil can be understood primarily in terms of “absence” rather than “presence,” of the lack of what is required for “good” rather than a freestanding, independent entity in itself. Pace methodological individualism, it seems that such an absence can just as reasonably be said to be a feature of societies (their structures, their conventions, their practices) as of individuals. In other words, this quality of “lack” – or as Augustine would put it, the privation of the worth of being – is as much predicable of social relations in societies where atrocities are taking place as it is of the characters of the individuals concerned. 6.

“The Contract of Mutual Indifference” Of what kinds of social relations might such a “lack” be predicable? Recent work by Norman Geras gives a helpful example of a form of analysis which chimes with the general approach I’m sketching here.22 Geras directly addresses the moral implications of bystander behaviour during the Nazi Holocaust. He considers not just the mass inaction of ordinary people in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere while the

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___________________________________________________________ victims went to their deaths. Bystanderism operated at other levels too, and among people whose relations to the victims varied greatly: the silence of the Vatican; the Allies opting not to bomb Auschwitz or its serving railway lines; the startling lack of small-scale obstruction of the process of extermination by office workers who might relatively easily have “lost” files; the refusal of many countries to accept refugees, and so on. These are, of course, different forms of behaviour, against different backgrounds, and with different conditions affecting them. But Geras suggests a way in which we might interpret them in general. Such behaviour exemplifies what he calls “the contract of mutual indifference,” a kind of implicit code in which the assumption is that if I do not help others in grave danger or grave need, I cannot expect such aid myself, should I find myself in similar need. For Geras, this “imputed contract” is not a formal undertaking; rather, it can be read, in a more immanent sense, “from the realities of our time.”23 Thus while he presents it in the first instance as a way of accounting for bystanderism in Germany, he sees this ethos not just as a feature of the societies in which the Nazi Holocaust took place, but as underlying much of social life under late capitalism. In particular, it characterises the widespread indifference to torture, hunger and other forms of suffering endured by those who for us, are strangers. Geras argues that “a liberal culture underwrites moral indifference,” in so far as it inculcates a culture of rights and obligations conceived in negative terms: where not harming others is a matter of right, but helping or not helping them is a matter of individual inclination.24 We need, he suggests, a stronger sense of reciprocal obligation than that which a culture of unconditional individual rights is likely to foster. That is, if people feel no mutual ties – the weakening of such ties being, for Geras, a tendency of liberal individualism in practice – they are more likely to take the kinds of perspective typical of bystander behaviour. They are more likely to assume that it is enough, even in the face of another’s clear and urgent need, merely to avoid inflicting direct harm on that person, rather than actively coming to their aid. Meanwhile, says Geras, the possibility of an alternative kind of moral culture is suggested by the actions of those who rejected this attitude – who performed acts of rescue, often at great risk to their own livelihoods. Geras has offered us an account of the perpetration of evil acts which hinges not on the simple “monstrousness” of those involved, but on the quality of social relations – and relations not simply chosen by the individuals concerned, but complexly textured by structural and individualised factors. This form of explanation is, then, a viable one. And if so, then it provides a firm basis on which to explore, in greater depth,

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___________________________________________________________ the possibility that a situation, or a social context might (whatever its provenance) be evil. 7.

“There but for the Grace of God…”? Luck and Responsibility Having responded to the second, let’s return now to the first question we asked earlier. Are bystanders morally unlucky, and so deserving of sympathy rather than straight censure? Or are they similarly culpable to those who fit the “monstrous” caricature of the figure of evil? If the scope for bystanderism might, in principle, be enhanced or denied by social relations not simply chosen by those involved, then there does seem to be a real sense in which being a bystander may be a form of moral bad luck. But it is a delimited sense. Certainly, others would not choose to find themselves in that context; would not envy the predicament in which responding to the duty to bring aid to those suffering may carry such a high likelihood of self-sacrifice. Self-flatteringly easy allegations of moral failure are made from the privileged position of those who are here, now, rather than there, then. And yet, as MacIntyre makes the point, while agents in such circumstances “may indeed inhabit a type of social and cultural order whose structures to some large degree inhibit the exercise of the powers of moral agency,” they are not thereby guiltless. They are not completely without authorship in respect of the situation in which they unenviably find themselves: “[t]heir responsibility is that of co-conspirators, engaged together in a consiprance that functions so that they can lead blamelessly compliant lives.”25 For even in the first place to understand myself as a moral agent is to “understand myself and to present myself to others as someone who brings with her or himself to each role qualities of mind and character that belong to her or him qua individual and not qua role-player.”26 This space between individual and current role or circumstances, in turn, is a condition of the possibility of the alternative relations, equally plausible if hard to achieve, to which Geras alludes. So the “bad luck” which attaches to their situation is not simply a matter of fate having dealt them a bad hand. It is also, at least to some degree – and here, to talk of “luck” seems imprecise – contributed to by their own deliberate inaction. At least it will be in most cases, and to a large extent. There seems not to be any special bad luck about the condition of the bystander under Nazi rule, compared to the position, say, of the agent at any other period of history who passes a preventable catastrophe while going about their own business. There are differences of scale, certainly: the latter individual may be in a position to exert far greater, more immediate, positive influence than the former. But there seems not to be a difference in kind – except, that is, in the following respect. In the first case, the

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___________________________________________________________ individual’s moral agency will have been conditioned more directly by the historical milieu in which they are acting, in a way directly relevant to their purported moral failure. That is to say: the ideological and political context in which they are acting explicitly exhorts them not to intervene to aid those others who would otherwise seem to be entitled to assistance. Does this offer more of a defence for their actions? It’s hard to see how it could be decisive, for precisely the reasons that MacIntyre sets out. While there is certainly a luxury about the kinds of moral judgements which we can make from afar, and a poverty about the kinds of moral superiority which we may bestow upon ourselves for not having been caught in the same situation, bystanders are blameworthy as well as unlucky. To argue that moral agency has social preconditions is not, thereby, to exonerate individuals for their failure to assist. It is, however, to advocate that we should resist the urge to apportion blame in an exclusively individuated way. In blaming, we are identifying the cause of an action, and expressing disapproval of it. The causes of bystanderism are not simply, or exclusively, the individuals themselves. That much is clear from any plausible analysis of its occurrence as a social phenomenon. If this model of blame – in which it points in the direction of both individual and social relations – seems paradoxical or misplaced, then this, I’d suggest, is symptomatic of the problematically individualistic presumptions which underly routine conceptions of blame, as well as of evil. For in attributing responsibility, we have typically do perform a manoeuvre which Alan Norrie has identified as being both necessary, and false. That manoeuvre is this what he calls “the separation of individual from social being where the two are inherently and intrinsically connected.”27 This is a necessary part of any system of law based on individuated justice, even in cases where wrongs are plainly social phenomena with structural causes: “picking out the person and separating her from her context, from which she is largely not responsible, is a necessary requirement of a system that wants to blame individuals.”28 If the space between individuals can, in a direct sense, be a causal factor in engendering the bystanderism which, in turn, is one precondition for the occurrence of the extreme events of recent history, then we have to treat social factors as, in some way, contributing to events for which, typically, we then seek to blame individuals. To raise this point is not to disrupt the notion of moral agency, or of individual responsibility and blameworthiness. It is simply to recognise that it is not the whole story. The “dialectical-relational” view of responsibility put forward by Norrie suggests that – against the claims both of liberal morality and of methodological individualism – “responsibility exists both in and beyond individual moral agents in the same moment.”29 It furnishes a system of ethical judgement which would in the same moment include agents,

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___________________________________________________________ structures and communities.30 This would offer us a way of approaching evil which was adequately nuanced in its taking into account of both individual and social factors – a way which, in most discussion of the notion, is not taken up. It allows us to source the responsibility for passivity in the face of calamity which Geras describes in a way adequate to the balance between individual and relational factors which that description seems to require. 8.

Conclusion Bystanding is relational, in a non-complex sense. To understand the place of the bystander is, of necessity, to understand not just their individual character but the interweavings of their actions and inactions with those of others, and with a wider social context of which they are not simply the authors. But neither, by the same token, are they simply not the authors of that context. If to be a moral agent is to be party to social relations on which one is dependent for one’s moral identity, it is also to be capable of contributing to the transformation of those relations. This carries with it a heavy burden; its exercise may depend on aspects of moral courage which are themselves, to a large extent, matters of moral luck. To be confronted by the dilemmas attending whether, and how, to intervene amid acts of atrocity is an unenviable, indeed tragic situation. But here, as elsewhere, the space between individuals is in no sense merely bequeathed: it is also negotiated. The point of this discussion has not been to dispute the very viability of the notion of evil, to label it “just another cultural construction,” or (for instance) to deny the possibility of a secular model. Rather, I’ve sought to show that if evil is to remain a viable notion, with adequate conceptual purchase and explanatory power, then it has to avoid exclusively individualised appeal to the monstrously “other,” or to the psychologically immutable. It has to allow that what we talk about when we talk about evil can also be a symptom of social relations. In this sense, evil should not be approached as a reified “given,” inherent in (warped) nature. It might, as I’ve suggested here, be more fruitfully treated as a symptom of lack, inaction, the absence of something necessary to the conditions and the worth of human life. That this lack might be an aspect of social contexts beyond those where immense atrocities have transpired is both possible, and – as Geras shows – likely. We will not be envious of those who have found themselves bystanders amid acts of humanitarian catastrophe. But neither should we regard their situation as being somehow categorically “other” from our own.

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Notes 1. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1999), 139. 2. Simone Weil, quoted in Stephen Spender, “History and Reality,” in his Dolphins (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), 28. 3. For a helpful discussion of the sources and contours of this debate, see Bob Brecher, “Understanding the Holocaust: The Uniqueness Debate,” Radical Philosophy 96 (1999): 17-28. 4. Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), 2. 5. Alain Badiou, Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 62-3. 6. The first quoted phrase is borrowed - though its sense is different there - from the title of an article on related themes: Alan Norrie, “Albert Speer, Guilt, and the Space Between,” in Punishment and Political Theory, edited by Matt Matravers, 133-151. (Oxford: Hart, 1999). 7. Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 68ff. 8. Ibid., 69. 9. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989), 65. 10. See Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, second edition (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1980). 11. For one influential, if contested, account of the sociological background to the bystanderism which facilitated the Nazi Holocaust, see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 12. Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), xiii. 13. See Marcus Roberts, Analytical Marxism: A Critique (London: Verso, 1996), 23. 14. Thus the claim that moral agency is relational can be separated from the quite distinct, particularist claim that we owe more, in some deep sense, to those most proximate to us than we do to strangers (which, for what it’s worth, strikes me as much more problematic). 15. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Social Structures and their Threats to Moral Agency,” Philosophy 74 (1999): 311-329, 314. 16. Ibid., passim. 17. One among the raft of reasons why it’s worthless is borne out in the many accounts, by survivors and others, of the typical profile of SS officers and others putting Nazi policy into practice. According to these, only a small minority of the SS - perhaps, ten percent - might be

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___________________________________________________________ considered “abnormal,” psychopathic or sadistic. See, for discussions of these accounts, Todorov, op. cit., 121ff, and Bauman, op. cit, especially chapter 7 (the figure of ten per cent is cited by Bauman, 19). As Primo Levi, himself of course a survivor of Auschwitz, puts it: “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men”; Levi, The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1965), 214. 18. The relationship between free will and responsibility, on the one hand, and the “natural” on the other, is of course a complex feature of discussions of radical evil since Kant – and arguably, an unresolved one. On this, see Richard J. Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), especially chapter 1. 19. Antony Duff, Intention, Agency and Criminal Liability (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 113. 20. Aurelius Augustine, City of God, translated by Marcus Dods (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), Book 11, 365. 21. Ibid, Book 14, 458; translation slightly adapted. 22. Norman Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust (London: Verso, 1998). 23. Ibid., 28. 24. Ibid., 59. 25. MacIntyre, 327. 26. Ibid., 315. 27. Norrie, “Justice and Relationality”, Alethia 3.1 (April 2000): 2-5, 3. 28. Ibid., 5. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. For a more extended setting-out of this position, see Norrie, Punishment, Responsibility, and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Select Bibliography Augustine, Aurelius. City of God, translated by Marcus Dods. New York: The Modern Library, 2000. Badiou, Alain. Ethics, translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Bernstein, Richard J. Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Brecher, Bob. “Understanding the Holocaust: The Uniqueness Debate.” Radical Philosophy 96 (1999): 17-28. Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics, second edition. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1980.

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___________________________________________________________ . States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Duff, Antony. Intention, Agency and Criminal Liability. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Elster, Jon. Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Geras, Norman. The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust. London: Verso, 1998. Glover, Jonathan. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved, translated by Raymond Rosenthal. London: Abacus, 1989. Levi, Primo. The Reawakening, translated by Stuart Woolf. New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1965. MacIntyre, Alasdair. “Social Structures and their Threats to Moral Agency.” Philosophy 74 (1999): 311-329. Norrie, Alan. “Albert Speer, Guilt, and the Space Between,” in Punishment and Political Theory, edited by Matt Matravers, 133151. Oxford: Hart, 1999.  . “Justice and Relationality.” Alethia 3.1 (April 2000): 2-5.  . Punishment, Responsibility, and Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Roberts, Marcus. Analytical Marxism: A Critique. London: Verso, 1996. Spender, Stephen. Dolphins. London: Faber & Faber, 1993. Todorov, Tzvetan. Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1999.

Harm and Transgression in International Criminal Justice Stephen Riley Abstract Responding to the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War, Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers attempted to analyse the grounds on which criminal responsibility could be attributed. The responsibility of both high-profile Nazis and complicit members of the German populace are subject to doubt on the basis of the qualitative and contextual difference of these crimes to “normal” crimes. This chapter seeks to analyse and dissolve the “aporia” or helplessness that the authors posit by considering the most basic process of international criminal justice: the designation of harm as transgression. Key Words: aporia, closure, crime, harm, justice, judgement, justice, transgression. 1.

Introduction It is my intention to revisit two key texts in the evolution of international criminal justice as a field of socio-legal enquiry, namely Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Karl Jaspers’ The Question of German Guilt.1 Both are works of testimony bearing witness to collective post-conflict trauma and what has been termed “transitional justice.”2 Both posit an aporia, a helplessness, in the face of some forms of criminality; I will seek to explore and dissolve this aporia. The authors suggest that, if the atrocities of the Second World War have an enduring meaning, it is that individuals acting in a collectivity are capable of acts of destruction that resemble, but are qualitatively different to, conventional crimes. The Second World War was distinctive in engendering collective actions and omissions to further abhorrent ends that the individual agents responsible would not otherwise pursue. For Jaspers this legacy, unaddressed, threatened to poison political consciousness in Germany and beyond; arguably Arendt’s entire corpus is driven by the exploration of this phenomenon. These texts are valuable in positing a number of serious tensions and even contradictions at the heart of international criminal justice. By “international criminal justice” I mean to designate a social, legal, and in part political activity where both judgement and closure are sought after periods of widespread criminality.3 It can be thought to centre around three distinctive phenomena: agency, and patterns of agency, designated as distinctive forms of transgression (“international crimes”); different teleological priorities to those of domestic criminal justice (“closure”); and, in contemporary international bodies, a distinctive deontological

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___________________________________________________________ commitment (a hybrid form of due process informed by human rights law). Concerned with adequate responses to the Second World War, Arendt and Jaspers, in different ways, address the same problem. In sum, that the designation of some acts as “crimes” is inadequate in terms of both existing legal/judicial provisions and in terms of the qualitative difference of these acts to domestic (that is, non-international) crimes. At the same time, without particularised (judicial) judgement there is no justice. Arendt sees in Adolf Eichmann’s trial closure without satisfactory judgement; conversely, the judgement of the Allied powers on post-war Germany, for Jaspers, brought no closure. Both authors, I would argue, imply that international criminal justice’s primary function – the designation of some forms of agency as “crimes” – is necessary but impossible.4 The implication of their testimony is that international criminal justice inevitably ends in aporia: that is, a helplessness, an inability to judge.5 I intend to argue against this conclusion. I will, however, defend, in broad terms, the methodology of both authors. They ask, through phenomenological attention to the livedexperience of perpetrators, “what does it mean to understand something as criminal in circumstances of mass participation?” This question is not always intelligible in terms of positive (existing) law, where individual agency and intent are the extent of judicial concern. In fact, this question requires attention to the interrelation between harm, on the one hand, and social, legal, and moral norms, on the other. In other words, in what circumstances harm can be understood as a transgression? These two terms, I would argue, are the basic phenomenological components of international criminal justice and it is with these two terms in mind that I consider the texts. However, before approaching the texts in detail it is necessary to clear the ground with a discussion of language and anachronism in this context. 2.

“Crime” and Anachronism The authors address what we would now call genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. They have been most recently codified in the International Criminal Court (ICC) Statute (although clearly these kinds of acts long predate their codification).6 Arendt and Jaspers’ central concern is genocide. However, to use the term “genocide” is anachronistic in the context of the Holocaust, not least because the authors of the Holocaust were prosecuted for crimes against humanity.7 “Genocide” was not coined until 1944 and did not become a crime until 1948.8 Nonetheless it is not contentious to suggest that these actions appear, at least, to amount to some kind of crime.

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___________________________________________________________ What underlying qualities of “crime” were present? Harm was intentionally inflicted upon individuals against their will. What else? There were environmental conditions that engendered widespread harming: a governmental apparatus that explicitly and implicitly authorised harm. But this authorisation of harm is very different to the environmental conditions that are said to be creative of crime in the domestic context (exclusion/ poor socialisation/ pathology, and so on). The fundamentally “criminogenic” environment of the Third Reich, for Arendt and Jaspers, entails that attribution of criminality to particular individuals is, from the outset, problematised (see below).9 This, I will argue, can be unpacked into two questions. First, the question of harm: although individuals may be responsible for significant amounts of harm (however removed), does that necessarily entail that they have committed a crime of some sort? Second, a question of transgression: if the authorship of harm (or complicity with harm through omission) is not clearly a transgression of laws, social norms, or the agent’s own moral intuitions, can it still be designated a transgression without appeal to transcendent values?10 With these questions posed we can approach the works themselves. 3.

Arendt and Eichmann Adolf Eichmann – it was not disputed by the defence – organised and oversaw mass transportation of Jews throughout Europe to concentration and death camps. Arendt’s understanding of Eichmann’s acts is that they arose as a direct consequence of a totalitarian political system.11 Eichmann’s guilt, and the guilt of others like him, was diffused by the mass control, participation, and organisation that characterises totalitarianism.12 In other terms, Eichmann is representative of a bureaucratic caste whose poorly formed, but not exceptional, moral consciousness was conducive to the creation and propagation of “the final solution to the Jewish Problem.” It was his administrative zeal in achieving this goal that was on trial on Jerusalem, and it is this very zeal that was his greatest defence. His all-consuming motive, it seemed to Arendt, was to do his job well, not to see the “final solution to the Jewish problem.” His guilt for crimes against humanity depended upon this attitude. Summarising the charges facing Eichmann in Jerusalem Arendt wrote, That there were no voices from the outside to arouse his conscience was one of Eichmann’s points, and it was the task of the prosecution to prove that this was not so, that there were voices he could have listened to, and that,

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___________________________________________________________ anyhow, he had done his work with a zeal far beyond the call of duty.13 Arendt suggests that Eichmann represents a “new criminal.”14 A criminal that, if they can be said to be responsible for harm at all, is responsible at a very far remove. Nonetheless Arendt, defends the conviction and execution of Eichmann on two related grounds. First, a natural law argument that “moral order” or “natural harmony” demands retribution.15 Second, and with particular reference to the crime of genocide, that a proportional or symmetrical response to complicity with genocide requires ridding the earth of someone who was not prepared to “share the earth [with a group he considered inferior].”16 The clear contradiction here lies in the fact that the justice of the punishment is derived from its proportionality to “genocide.” Eichmann, found guilty of crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish People, was not charged with or found guilty of genocide, nor, Arendt herself maintains, did Eichmann clearly have the mens rea, the intention, required for genocide.17 In the final analysis it is precisely this, the “banality” (the wilful and complacent ignorance) of someone who knowingly but not intentionally participated in the Final Solution, that creates an aporia, an inability to judge.18 Appeal to a “natural symmetry” cannot overcome the incommensurability between the unthinking bureaucrat of totalitarianism and the deliberate intent required for criminality. This difficulty, this lack of grounds for judging, suggests to Arendt the need for an international court that is capable of “representing” all humanity.19 If this new type of criminal, a product of totalitarianism, was neither transgressing the values of the society around him nor his own limited moral intuition, the superior authority of an international court, through speaking for humanity as a whole could allow just prosecution and sentencing on the basis of its “universal” foundation.20 Arendt’s aspiration is partially fulfilled, not least because the now existing ICC can appeal to “international values” as a foundation. International criminal fora have, since the Second World War, evolved a baseline of values from which widespread harm can be judged. This baseline of values is a combination of positive law and evolving norms: principally treaty law, customary international law, and related jurisprudence, but also, and indispensably, human rights law and theory, the nebulous “values of the international community,” and the attempts of judges to cohere positive law with those values.21 This allows the attribution of a transgression even where mens rea is uncertain.22 Or, in other words, in contemporary international law there are no cases that are undecidable. Whether this allows judgement at the expense of closure is another, crucial, debate. But, in sum, international criminal justice is not

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___________________________________________________________ stultified by either the existence of highly criminogenic environments or by the forms of consciousness that accompanies them. 4.

Jaspers and German Guilt Karl Jaspers offers an analytical account of guilt in the aftermath (1947) of WWII. In essence, he argues that most Germans carried some form of guilt in post-war Germany: implicitly in the sense of “original sin” (that is, humanity’s shared guilt for the existence of evil), but explicitly due to the collective omission that was necessary for the Third Reich to thrive.23 His schema of four forms of guilt – criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical – allows him not only to discuss when and how judgement should be made (usually in criminal and political contexts), but also when it is not appropriate (he does not entertain the notion of “collective” guilt.)24 Jaspers outlines the way these forms of guilt should be judged and in what ways, if any, they can be mitigated. In contrast to Arendt, Jaspers is less interested in problematising prosecutions than in exploring the scope of ‘metaphysical’ guilt.25 This is the belief that we should experience shame in the face of our own inaction when others – regardless of their status – are threatened. This, like moral guilt, cannot be judged by others, only the individuals in whom it is experienced. It is metaphysical guilt, unacknowledged in post-war Germany, that for Jaspers creates an ongoing threat. And it is this drive towards “consciousness of infraction through omission” that leads him to contradiction. He states at different points that moral and metaphysical guilt both can, and cannot, be judged by others.26 In other terms, omissions that resulted in neither criminal nor political harm but are bound up with an environment of harm both cannot, and should, be judged. It is interesting to note that Jaspers defended the Nuremberg trials (and asserted, à la Arendt, that Eichmann should have been tried in an international court) but does not see justiciable guilt amongst those that refused to be active (“to be counted”) during the Third Reich. Jaspers’ analysis is characterised by an aporia where the guilt of omission should be judged by others but cannot be.27 This has a number of implications in terms of contemporary prosecutions. Firstly, we cannot but agree with Jaspers that collective guilt is imprecise and unhelpful. Specifically, “sins” of omission are a recurring feature of criminogenic environments but are usually impossible to prosecute. Secondly, the absence of a legal prohibition at the time of a “crime’s” commission does not mean that no transgression has taken place. For Jaspers there has been a transgression in the theological sense (that is, sin). This is not sustainable without the theological underpinnings that Jaspers can appeal to, but it is intelligible in terms of designating acts as criminal that were hitherto not prohibited, or were simply considered

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___________________________________________________________ factors exacerbating or aggravating crime. Contemporary treaty law and jurisprudence, in response to the narrowness of internationally acknowledged crimes, has expanded upon the crimes that Jaspers is concerned with, and extended them to encompass some peripheral or “collateral” damage that previously fell outside the notion of international crime.28 The kind of legacy that Jaspers is concerned with – guilt and shame/the need for collective reckoning/the need for collective closure – is more clearly the province of truth commissions, and Jaspers is an early voice emphasising, rightly, that prosecution is not the same thing as simply eliciting truth.29 However, as Lyotard suggests with reference to Jaspers’ guilt question, to find judgement difficult should not necessarily be to excuse.30 Jaspers’ scepticism over the legal judgement of “small-fry” participants, his favouring of collective reckoning and renewed selfconsciousness, comes perilously close to excusing. 5.

Harm What, if anything, is the role of the victim in Arendt’s and Jaspers’ accounts, and how does the victim contribute to our understanding of the problems surrounding international criminal justice? There is a temptation to assume that an appeal to a victim or victims can overcome problems surrounding prosecution. The existence of victims of abhorrent crimes surely provides a compelling ground for the prosecution of those crimes. Further, the existence of both victims and witnesses to crimes overcomes both evidential and ethical-legal problems: if it can be shown that there are victims of particularly abhorrent actions, there must exist some kind of imperative on “us” (a detaining state/the international community/humanity as a whole, and so on) to act. I would not deny that this approach is appealing, but it does not overcome the aporias that our authors suggest. It is the very fact that certain types of individuals, implicated in distinctive acts or omissions, have inflicted harm upon others that stultifies law, not the survival of victims; it is responsibility per se that that is problematised, not the grounds of responsibility for any particular action. It is important to address these criticisms in their fullness, so I will seek to show not only that the meaning of harm is unstable, but also that the homogenising language of “the victim” is problematic. The question of the grounds of criminality cannot be separated, analytically, from the victim and the harm(s) that they have sustained. The question of harm – “is complicity with harm always a crime?” – can be answered simply with a fact/value distinction: it is not always the case that causing harm is a crime but we can move relatively easily to a prescriptive position where in most instances it should be criminalised. But this does

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___________________________________________________________ not translate instantly into grounds for prosecution. Where does Eichmann’s relationship with harm lie? It lies in facilitating the displacement, concentration and extermination of European Jews. It is not a problem that Eichmann did not directly participate in killing: it is coherent to attribute responsibility for organising, instigating or commissioning crime. However, whose harm is significant here? Each and every death? Was the death itself the significant harm or does the notion of harm go wider than this to exacerbating factors surrounding the crimes? Within a massive network of harm like the Holocaust, it is difficult to decide on which of many possible evidentiary grounds an individual like Eichmann should be prosecuted. Not least because a systematic crime like genocide premises jurisdiction on identifying a relationship between intent and a common characteristic of victims (that is, as members of a distinctive group, not individuals in their particularity.) Although the basis of crime is harm, it is, then, necessary to designate what harm(s) will form the basis of prosecution. This in itself is not a simple, or even a just, process. The designation of discrete – in this context, often “exemplary” – instances of harm as the basis of prosecution does not do justice to the breadth of harms that feature in these crimes. As the diversity of victim experiences featuring in the Eichmann trial demonstrates, we can (and perhaps should) extend the notion of harm to experiences pre-dating and post-dating a “crime” proper. In fact, there is perhaps something unnecessarily physical about concentrating on “harm” itself: we might favour a term that more easily encompasses damage beyond the physical. In sum, an appeal to harm does not instantly answer the question of how harm translates into a fair basis for the prosecution of those involved in extreme crimes. The victim is largely absent in Jaspers’ account: his “question of guilt” addresses the nature of responsibility for crimes, not the scope of the crimes themselves. Arendt, on the other hand, uses her account of Eichmann’s trial to give a wide-ranging picture of the Holocaust. The personal testimonies that the trial elicits are contextualised within the sweep of the Nazi destruction of European Jewry and portraits of the individuals who instigated it. The testimonies offered at the trial are powerful ones, attesting to the Holocaust’s multitude of cruelties, much of which Eichmann facilitated. However, there is a telling point at which Arendt argues that there are too many victims at the trial, too many stories, too much evidence. Why too many victims? Because the witnesses were offering testimony over and above what was necessary for a prosecution, raising Arendt’s suspicion of a show-trial: a prosecution useful for bringing closure to Israel but not for accurate and objective judgement. Any trial that seeks to bring closure to a community or state as a whole runs the risk of treating the defendant purely instrumentally, as a means to

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___________________________________________________________ an end. However, the justification of any international trial is often framed in terms of its utility for victims.31 Is this sufficient justification for a trial? What of “closure” (catharsis) for the victims in the Eichmann trial? It may well have been cathartic to appear in front of the Court and to have offered testimony, particularly as the trial was lacking in attention to the evidentiary rules that would usually curtail testimony. But we can also assume that in many cases appearance before the Court was traumatic. We cannot assume that appearance is likely to bring closure to victims. Victims, with ostensibly “nothing to lose” may well lose the one thing they do possess: their status as (legally significant) victims, in the event that the defendant is not found guilty. In sum, there are no guarantees that closure will be achieved through judgement, and pursuing closure as an unalloyed goal threatens to turn trials into, at best, truth-eliciting processes, and at worst, show-trials. Does a trial consider the harm that a perpetrator themselves may have experienced? It is a cliché to suggest that perpetrators may themselves be victims. This is not clearly the case with Eichmann but is certainly obvious in subsequent cases involving coercion, conscription or a history of trauma.32 Surrounding many of these types of crimes is the assertion by the aggressors that they too were victims; that they no longer wanted to be victims; that if they had not become aggressors they would have become victims. Some of these claims can be dismissed as evasion; some demand to be taken seriously if we are to understand certain types of conflict. But these claims compel us to re-think the “victim” as no longer a neutral term but one that is constructed and negotiated within different contexts.33 From the foregoing discussion of the victim I wish to draw out two key points that inform my attempt to unpack the aporias of international criminal justice. First, harm is not negated by a trial: harm may long outstrip the “crime” per se; the trial may amplify rather than negate harm. And second, that we cannot appeal to the notion of the “victim” as a stable point on which justice can ground itself. While the witness or victim-witness can offer testimony to a trial chamber, if we are to understand “victim” in its fullness, we cannot deny the possibility that the accused may themselves be victims. In response to this heightened contradiction – the need to judge (legally) and the (moral and conceptual) barriers to judgement and closure – we should consider the fact that there is equivocation here between the specific and general. Eichmann cannot be judged because he is representative of a dominant form of consciousness; German guilt is diffused among many so we cannot easily attribute guilt to individuals. On the other hand, the specific facts of Eichmann’s case clearly implicate him in some form of crime; Jaspers can readily attribute criminal and political

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___________________________________________________________ guilt. So, too, with victims. To generalise about victims is to see general grounds for prosecution but to attempt to attribute guilt to particular individuals requires a more bounded form of enquiry, the type of enquiry found in prosecutions. Legal investigation, in avoiding generality, restores specificity to victimhood.34 Not only that, it must see the individual, whether criminal or victim, as a rights-bearer. In treating the individual as a juridical subject, a court or tribunal restores the status of the individual as rights-holder. In contemporary international bodies, this is consciously pursued: they are explicitly animated by human rights principles and standards. This not only revives the formal equality that may have been negated by a particular criminal regime but also offers the closest thing to “restorative justice” possible in an international forum. In a domestic restorative model the individual has their status as fully rights-bearing individual restored through the process of participation in a trial and through the censuring of the individual who negated that status through their crime. This kind of model finds little equivalence when the state in which the crime arose is implicated in the crime; it is not clear what the individual is being “restored” to. However, international fora can at least assert the human rights-bearing status of the individual explicitly, and through the fair functioning of the court. In this sense it does not necessarily achieve individual closure but does represent a symbolic reassertion of the rule of law. Finally, what does this discussion of harm imply in terms of methodological practice? Firstly, there is no clear distinction between judgement and closure goals. A trial may or may not afford closure for a victim, but through judgement it may well have the by-product of some form of social restoration. The existence of human rights driven prosecutions negates the negation of the victim (as merely the member of out-group and so on) in its reassertion of the formal equality of law: closure does not necessarily have to be founded on a finding of guilt. Secondly, attention to the victim emphasises the danger of generalisation about any individual in these kinds of circumstances. Not only does it threaten to reduce the perpetrator to a representative of a class whose actions are in turn attributable to structural social forces, but in generalisation about the victim we threaten to mirror the logic of the oppressor: the victim as merely representative of a class or group. In this sense overcoming the aporia is a much a question of methodological alignment as it is a legal one. It demands resisting the temptation to privilege “the victim.”

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___________________________________________________________ 6.

Transgression The status of the acts that these authors address is unclear if we attempt to treat them a priori as crimes. Although there are very clearly victims here, the need to identify justiciable guilt, as well as the absence in some circumstances of a proscribing state or states, renders “crime” problematic. Recall the question of transgression: if the authorship of harm (or complicity with harm through omission) is not clearly a transgression of laws, social norms, or the agent’s own moral intuitions, can it still be designated a transgression without appeal to transcendent values? Appeal to social norms is problematic in our cases, because, for a number of reasons, the perpetrator may not be aware of any proscribing norm. From this perspective Arendt is correct in an important sense: the context in which Eichmann committed his acts was crucially different to that in which “crimes” as we would normally understand the term were committed. Whose norms, then, could be appealed to in prosecution? The norms of “humanity” alone would appear to be an empty gesture that could potentially, and retroactively, be appealed to any circumstances. If we consider it important that “justice” is not visited upon people in the same way that a totalitarian regime would visit justice (with an arbitrary “proportionality” and without reference to precedent, only will), then nonretroactivity is important. There was the Nuremberg precedent for Eichmann’s prosecution but on what basis did this ground its authority? In the sense that it represented the will of the Allies it is not clear that a true “authority” is being asserted.35 What other foundations can be appealed to in order to legitimate prosecutions? Answering this question requires identifying the basic interrelation between action, judgement, and norms. Transgression is at the interface of actions and the judgement of those actions. Although there could be said to be some “perennial” forms of transgression, the formation and designation of a transgression is a social process. However, transgression retains its connotations as violation of divinely ordained or otherwise unassailable tradition or group norms.36 It is for this reason that transgression remains a useful term in this context. The creation of “transgressions” surrounding genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes has a useful double meaning. It is the creation, like the creation of any crime, of an authorised designation of action as violating a norm (it is a designation “performed” in sentencing where the sentence reflects the magnitude of the transgression); it is also the designation of acts as being of such a magnitude as to warrant international condemnation in an international court. The latter sense overlaps with natural or perennial transgressions: there are of such a magnitude as to demand response from an authority other than the state. It is this creation of transgression that marks a difference between international criminal trials and truth commissions. Although truth

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___________________________________________________________ commissions can achieve a form of retribution through the lustration and shaming of individuals, they do not create transgressions in the foregoing sense. By prioritising closure, with judgement as a by-product, truth commissions play a restorative role, but they do not communicate an authorised designation of transgression. On the other hand, truth commissions are capable of arousing shame in guilty individuals, and this is often considered to be an adequate substitute for retribution. Why is this drive for shame not sufficient as a response to international crimes? The question of why shame and punishment can or should be distinguished recalls the role of the victim. Shame is often shared by both victim and perpetrator: it is a grim irony of the concentration camps that it was its victims that were left with enduring shame after their liberation rather than, or in addition to, those administering them.37 To seek to elicit shame from the perpetrator clearly overlaps with the motive of retribution: to bring to full realisation the responsibility that the perpetrator should feel. But, whereas the shame of both the victim and the perpetrator shares the characteristic of the revelation of vulnerability, punitive retribution, as a proportional communication of censure (and as an assertion of the authority of law), reasserts that individuals should not be vulnerable. Through the reassertion of the juridical status of the individual – both victim and perpetrator – punishment ends the vulnerability of the individual and asserts the rule of law as a guarantee of non-vulnerability. The foregoing analysis of transgression can be enriched with consideration of how it is that international crimes evolve through jurisprudence, through the interpretative role of judges, and particularly the role of human rights. While the realpolitik that surrounds prosecution of international crimes is inescapable, the appeal to the formal equality of human rights and responses to their violation is, nevertheless, a point from which international prosecutions with their unique formations of transgression can begin to mirror domestic prosecutions and their foundation in the social contract. Domestic prosecution can invoke the reciprocity of social goods and social order; international bodies do not play the same reciprocal role. But they can appeal to value and the formalism of rights as simultaneously a “lowest-common-denominator” – nearly all states at least pay lip service to the need for procedural fairness – and a “highest-common-denominator” – as a set of norms that the international community is aspiring to. Whether or not international criminal justice overlaps with the “cosmopolitan” ideal of offering full personality to individuals in the international arena, we can agree that it represents a point at which formal equality, evolving norms, and political interests often intersect in a positive way.38 In conclusion, transgression is at the interface of harm, norms, censure, and the grounds on which international criminal justice can

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___________________________________________________________ legitimately function and evolve, that is, human rights. Particular patterns of acts are designated as transgressions of international norms which transcend the state but are nonetheless bound up with legal legitimacy per se (formal equality); the extent of the transgression is designated not only by the crime under which acts are prosecuted (which includes reference to the harm suffered by victims), but also by a sentence (which seeks to achieve proportionality). To this extent we can retain the notion of “crime” as it applies to the kind of acts we are considering, but also acknowledge that the formation and designation of this crime depends upon the interplay of harm, evolving norms, and human rights. 7.

Methodological Implications These two texts remain illuminating not least because they approach their subjects in different but related ways. Arendt’s is an “external” point of view, attempting to make sense of an alien phenomenon. Jaspers’ is an “internal” point of view, trying to make sense of the breadth of “our guilt.” What unites both is a concern with judgement and closure. Is judgement possible in all circumstances? Does this always lead to closure? Closure for whom? Individuals or a collectivity? These remain central questions for international criminal justice. Rather than attempt to answer them here, I will concentrate on what methodological lessons can be drawn from these texts. There are implications both for legal scholars and the social sciences. Social scientific approaches to international criminal justice would do well to take as their starting-point the phenomenological position that Arendt and Jaspers begin from. Taking exclusively subjective factors – intent, motive, need and so on – or exclusively objective factors – politics, nationalism, inequality, and so on – as axiomatic in this area is inevitably to render descent into widespread criminality deterministic. Arendt and Jaspers avoid this crude determinism. Arendt used the phrase “humble listening” to describe her approach.39 In essence this required approaching the phenomenon without the assumption that particular traditions of thought would be adequate to understand these acts. Without the need to appeal to manifest and objective values that had somehow been ignored, Arendt and Jaspers concerned themselves with the “lifeworld” of a populace that had been altered by the structures of totalitarianism, allowing the existence of banal bureaucrats like Eichmann or the complicity Jaspers finds in Germany as whole. Both, then, investigated the “life-world” or “lived-experience” of those complicit with these acts.40 However, it is clear to me that this approach must be augmented with attention to legal practices aiming to “do justice” in a criminal forum. Without this awareness we are likely to fall into the paradoxes outlined above: the criminal who commits no crime; the “small

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___________________________________________________________ players” whose guilt both should and cannot be judged. It is one of the clearest implications of both authors’ works that international criminal justice requires attention to both lived experience and the constructive practices of law. In the light of this, the aporias that Jaspers and Arendt set up are crucially ambiguous, not only because they do not fully explore the constructive practices of law, but because they equivocate between universality and particularity. On the one hand, there is a (social scientific) concern with generality and the structures of mass responsibility; on the other hand, it is not clear how this can be reconciled with the particularity of the victim and perpetrator without bounded and authorised legal investigation. For law to function in these circumstances it needs to consider the crucial, but all too often ignored, differences between the foundations of domestic and international prosecutions; for social science to capture the demands of justice it needs to acknowledge the possibilities and boundaries of law. 8.

Conclusion Arendt and Jaspers, successfully in my opinion, identify the tensions that surround international criminal justice. I have attempted to outline some of the ways in which “crime” can be analytically sustained in these contexts, as well as some of the norms and principles that have emerged since the creation of these texts. International criminal justice, of course, continues to face considerable problems. The “values of the international community” are far from stable; the role of international judges in developing norms through the implementation of international law is crucial but unpredictable. That these norms are explored and criticised is all the more pressing in the international context. The normal, domestic, foundation of criminal justice – a social-contract-presuming community – is missing, making the nature of international criminal justice open to wide debate. Nonetheless, both the legal and conceptual problems that Arendt and Jaspers identified are no longer insurmountable. Through the suffusion of human rights principles into the international arena, the absent social contract finds some parallel, and the difficulties surrounding the creation of transgressions from a multiplicity of harms in the international arena are being eroded.41

Notes 1. Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage, translated by Ashton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001 (1947)), [hereafter, German Guilt]. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1992 (1963)) [hereafter, Eichmann].

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___________________________________________________________ 2. For an overview of transitional justice see Neil J. Kritz, ed., Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995). 3. Judgement is, in the main, the judgement of a legal body, but could also encompass the “lustration” (the “ritual sacrifice”) of guilty individuals, often the result of truth commissions. Closure may be “catharsis” for individual victims or some kind of collective catharsis. 4. For Arendt at least, the ends of criminal justice justify the means (see her defence of the conviction of Eichmann); it is the identification of “criminal responsibility” that poses a problem. 5. “Aporia” is the Greek term designating a helplessness or “not knowing where to turn,” and was often the end-point of Socratic interrogation in Plato’s dialogues. See Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 6. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998). 7. “Holocaust” itself was not used until the 1950s. 8. See Raphael Lemkin, edited by Jacobs, Raphael Lemkin's Thoughts on Nazi Genocide: Not Guilty? (Lewiston, Lampeter: E. Mellen Press, 1992). 9. See Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Pimlico, 2001), for an overview of the various factors that gave rise to and sustained the genocide (including economics, bureaucracy and ideology). For an account of “conventional” criminality under, and immediately following, the Third Reich see Evans, Richard J., ed., The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in German History (London: Routledge, 1988). 10. Transgress: “to break … to go beyond” (OED). See Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003). Also Keith Doubt, “What is Evil in War Crimes?: The Ethical Requirement of Burial and its Transgression During the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Conference Paper Prepared for the Institute for the Research of Crimes Against Humanity and International Law (22-24 September, 2000). 11. Eichmann, 289. 12. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966). 13. Eichmann, 126. 14. Ibid., 274. 15. Ibid., 277. 16. Ibid., 279. 17. Ibid., 21, 17, 91. Eichmann was prosecuted under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law (1950). See also the definition of genocide in the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), which centralises intent.

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___________________________________________________________ 18. Eichmann, 48. Elsewhere Arendt identifies a different kind of aporia, one concerning the judgement of “radical evil”: “men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and … unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable.” The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). It is not clear that Eichmann represents the kind of “radical evil” considered here. 19. Eichmann, 270. 20. Ibid., 26, 116, 47, 270. 21. See Ronald Dworkin, “The Judge’s New Role: Should Personal Convictions Count?” Journal of International Criminal Justice 1 (April 2003): 4, on the “creative” role of judges in the international arena. 22. This is most clearly manifest in the issue of there being no defence of “superior orders” in international law (ICC Statute, Article 33). Soldiers can be held responsible for war crimes even though they may have been ordered to commit them by a superior (carrying out orders being the essence of military ethics) within a theatre of war (a highly identity-eroding environment). 23. German Guilt, 21f. 24. Ibid., 34. 25. Ibid., 45f. 26. Ibid., 33 and 34. 27. See Eichmann 269-270. Lyotard’s criticism of Jaspers: “… politically, ‘accepting guilt’ means nothing.” J-F Lyotard, (infra), 134. 28. For example, rape only became a war crime under the ICC Statute (Article 8 (2bxxii)). 29. German Guilt, 78f. 30. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Political Writings, translated by Readings/Geiman (London: UCL Press, 1993), 130. 31. This is clear in international bodies’ decisions to prosecute only “big fish” not “small fry,” “in the interests of justice” (ICC Statute, Article 53 (2c)). It is more useful (and arguably more just) to, given limited resources, prosecute those who have higher/command responsibility. 32. Characteristics found in a number of defendants at the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. 33. See Slavoj Žižek, The Metastasis of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 2001). 34. The input of expert witnesses is necessary in some international trials to augment judges’ knowledge. 35. Though a treaty-based tribunal (and in that sense lawcreating), the Nuremberg Charter treats its jurisdiction over not previously existing crimes as self-evident (Article 6). On the ways in which the authority of law arises through a “mystification” that hides force and

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___________________________________________________________ violence see Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” Cardoza Law Review 11 (1990): 919. 36. Recent scholarship has discussed the violation of burial norms as a transgression from a natural law that is bound up with the earliest semblances of humanity (Doubt, supra n. 10). 37. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, translated by Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999). 38. David Hirsh, Law Against Genocide: Cosmopolitan Trials, (London: The Glasshouse Press, 2003). 39. Bernard Bergen, The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and “The Final Solution” (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Pub. Inc., 1998), 30. 40. Both authors were part of a tradition, emerging from Husserl but shaped in particular by Heidegger, of exploring how knowledge is conditioned by the consciousness and “life-world” of the individual. That is, the exploration of the cognitively shaped “phenomena” of the world, or phenomenology. 41. My thanks are due to Prof. Peter Rowe, Dr. David Seymour, Steve Dempster, Sue Parkin, Ruth Tomson, and Dewi Williams for constructive comments on earlier drafts. I am grateful for discussions and questions on the first version of this paper, presented at the 5th Global Conference on Evil and Human Wickedness (Prague, 2004). This work is derived in part from my doctoral research, funded by the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Board.

Select Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, translated by Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. ——. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin, 1992 (1963). ——. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Allen and Unwin, 1966. Bergen, Bernard. The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and “The Final Solution.” Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias, translated by Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. ——. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’” Cardoza Law Review 11 (1990): 919-1045. International Committee of the Red Cross (Knut Dörmann), Elements of War Crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

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___________________________________________________________ Doubt, Keith. “What is Evil in War Crimes?: The Ethical Requirement of Burial and its Transgression During the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Conference Paper Prepared for the Institute for the Research of Crimes Against Humanity and International Law. 2224 September, 2000. Dworkin, Ronald. “The Judge’s New Role: Should Personal Convictions Count?” Journal of International Criminal Justice 1 (April 2003): 4-12. Evans, Richard J., ed. The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in German History. London: Routledge, 1988. Glover, Jonathan. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. London: Pimlico, 2001. Hirsh, David. Law Against Genocide: Cosmopolitan Trials. London: The Glasshouse Press, 2003. Jaspers, Karl. The Question of German Guilt, translated by Ashton. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001 (1947). Jenks, Chris. Transgression. London: Routledge, 2003. Kritz, Neil J., ed. Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. Political Writings, translated by Readings/ Geiman. London: UCL Press, 1993. Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth. Freedom and Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Žižek, Slavoj. The Metastasis of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality. London: Verso, 2001. The London Charter of the International Military Tribunal (“The Nuremberg Charter”), 1945. U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998. U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 183/9.

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Individual and Collective Responsibility for Wrongs of the Past William Andrew Myers Abstract Old atrocities such as the institution of slavery, forced removals of peoples from ancestral lands, and genocide pose special problems of rectification, particularly when original perpetrators and their direct victims are no longer living. Controversies over reparations to descendents of slaves in the United States have focused in part on the concept of inherited collective guilt. I argue that our legal and moral response to our communal history can be clarified by distinguishing between collective guilt and collective responsibility. While long dead individuals bear the guilt for the wrongs they perpetrated directly or participated in, what we today possess is not their guilt for the atrocities of slavery but rather the responsibility for rectifying present unjust social arrangements and conditions their actions helped create. In the framework that I propose, there is a collective responsibility to rectify present unfair social arrangements that have resulted from wrongs of the past. That responsibility springs from membership in a society with specific ideals and commitments, not from any literal inheritance, and it pertains to all members of the society, not just descendents of slave owners, and not just governments. While I will focus on American slavery as a context, I believe the principles I am using here apply broadly to other societies facing long past atrocities. Key Words: reparations, slavery, collective guilt, collective responsibility. 1.

Introduction According to the idea of inherited collective guilt, descendants of the perpetrators of atrocities such as American slavery inherit the culpability of their ancestors, just as descendants of the original victims inherit their ancestors’ standing as victims. Even though the Federal Government may stand as surrogate for the descendants of slaveholders in responding to claims for reparations, the guiding concept is ongoing national culpability for the sins of the past. There are three elements in inherited collective guilt. First, the concept of guilt itself is widely ambiguous, and we shall have to specify the sense in which it pertains to our argument about reparations. Next, the sense in which guilt can be collective is essential to our topic. And finally, we shall have to examine how guilt might be inherited. My intent here is to show that, on the basis of the concept of inherited collective guilt most plausibly relevant to the issue of reparations, there is no application of the

260 Individual and Collective Responsibility for Wrongs of the Past ___________________________________________________________ concept that will satisfactorily justify reparations to descendants of slaves in the United States. But that is far from the end of the story. To be a polity committed to social justice entails that the legacy of wrongs of the past be addressed as a fundamental part of national and local political life. Contested issues of present group membership – who counts as a victim and who counts as responsible for reparation – can be avoided by showing that collective responsibility springs from the nature of the present political community and its voluntarily undertaken commitments to justice, rather than from inherited guilt.1 2.

What Is Guilt? We have (at least) three systems of guilt, religious, moral, and legal, which are logically independent but functionally may overlap and mutually influence each other.2 In different contexts one may be guilty of a sin (a transgression of divine law); guilty of violating the moral norms of one’s society; or guilty of violating the society’s legal code. Depending on particularities of context, the act of telling a lie could fall under any of several descriptions, and perhaps more than one simultaneously. Deliberately misleading someone by telling a lie might constitute a sin, viewed from a religious perspective; it might violate a moral standard in a society that maintains an ethical norm of truth telling as a value; and told under oath in a legal proceeding, the lie might be a crime, the crime of perjury. There are numerous permutations of these three categories, and much potential overlap. What they have in common is the sense of transgression, of violation of norms, however those norms come to be and however they function in a given society. Context makes all the difference pragmatically in determining the kind of guilt that corresponds to a wrong. For our purposes here two distinctions are most important: legal guilt versus moral blameworthiness, and feelings of guilt versus factual culpability. First, as H. D. Lewis notes, “It is possible to be legally guilty and morally innocent, and vice versa.”3 He argues that the occasional correspondence of law and morality is too adventitious to allow an analogy between legal responsibility and ethical responsibility. The legal and moral spheres operate differently (though, again, they can influence each other). Second, we must distinguish between guilt as an inner feeling and guilt as one’s factual culpability for wrongdoing. There is no necessary connection between feeling guilty and being guilty. By being guilty I mean having been a causal agent in an act or acts of wrongdoing for which one would normally be held legally or morally responsible. If one is guilty, there are facts about the person and the context of that person’s actions that constitute the guilt. Note the language used to report trial

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___________________________________________________________ verdicts: we speak of someone being found guilty at trial. Guilt is treated as a fact independent of judicial process, though the process is intended to assess culpability and subsequent punishment. People do get away with crimes. But they remain guilty. Their guilt is a fact about them, though they may go to great lengths to conceal the fact. In the ideal case, to be found guilty through due process of law reveals publicly that one is culpable, and therefore punishable. Feeling guilty, on the other hand, is an inner psychological phenomenon that may or may not be tied to factual guilt. Some sensitive souls feel the burden of their actions excessively, even neurotically, and they may suffer inner pangs of guilt so strongly that they are driven to confess crimes they did not commit. On the other hand, the mark of a sociopath is that he or she fails to feel any remorse or guilt for their actual wrongs. One point at which feelings of remorse, feeling guilty, do increasingly enter into criminal justice procedures is in the sentencing phase of trials, where often the attitude of a convicted person weighs on the determination of the sentence. Juries, too, often look for signs of remorse in their deliberations as to the degree of culpability a defendant should be found guilty of. But the point for our topic is that humans’ inner lives are often and in various ways at odds with external reality, and perceptions of one’s own culpability often bear scant relation to the facts. Clearly it is factual guilt and not psychological feelings of guilt that pertain to the issue of reparations. I hope I am not belabouring the obvious when I say that any program of compensation for the wrongs of the past must be based on facts, so far as they can be determined, rather than simply the feelings people may have. Feelings do indeed enter in to the picture once we understand the facts, in the form of collective will to repair the wrongs identified. But we will examine that application of feelings below. At this point we should observe that when and where slavery was practiced in the United States and the colonies that preceded its establishment, its practice was sanctioned by the laws then in force. However morally atrocious we today and many in the past have found the institution of slavery, it was not actually illegal until after the Civil War.4 No legal sanctions ever applied to slave holders at the time when slavery was a legal and economic system. Established by custom and law in the origins of the United States, keeping people as chattel property was not criminal for some three centuries. There was of course illegal slavery after 1865, and slavery continues in many places today, including the United States. But it is now a crime, and when detected can be prosecuted. Thus any guilt attaching to the practice of slavery prior to 1865 will not be legal guilt, but moral guilt.5

262 Individual and Collective Responsibility for Wrongs of the Past ___________________________________________________________ 3.

Can Guilt Be Collective? Notwithstanding the fact noted above that the kind of guilt pertinent to the issue of slavery is moral, not strictly legal, it is still true that our ethical understanding of culpability owes much to the legal tradition and vice versa. Thus it is relevant to look at legal standards as an indicator of the pragmatic ways concepts of guilt operate in U.S. society. First, as a practical matter, the norms of culpability in the West militate against virtually any practical application of the idea of collective guilt. In both criminal and tort law we rely on the paradigm of identifiable individuals as subject to prosecution or suit. As Alison Dundes Renteln comments in her survey of legal aspects of race and ethnicity in the U.S., “Ordinarily, only those who themselves suffer the injury have standing to sue for damages. It is often difficult to prove that those related to the victims also suffer the injury.”6 This individualism in the law extends to the treatment of collectives such as corporations and states, which are treated as (fictional) individuals.7 The laws pertaining to conspiracy are an exception to this norm, as all members of a conspiracy can be held accountable for the actions of some of its members if those actions flow from the conspiracy; but even then different blame may attach to individual members depending on their actual degree of participation.8 The Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II attempted to set a standard of culpability explicitly counter to ideas of collective guilt. The trials (and corresponding trials of Japanese military leaders) explicitly held individuals accountable for their actions, thereby rejecting the idea of German collective guilt.9 Such a process does not completely ignore the widespread complicity that made Hitler’s aggressive wars and the programs of mass murder possible, but it does focus on the worst of the perpetrators with a view to judging their culpability for their actions. The idea that national leaders can be brought to book by an international tribunal was and is controversial, but the principle of individual legal responsibility that has come to be called the Nuremberg Idea has carried over to other legal structures, most recently the establishment of the International Criminal Court at The Hague.10 There are practical obstacles to the Nuremberg Idea, as Richard Falk points out, in that holding national leaders legally accountable to the international community under international law challenges the concepts of national sovereignty and diplomatic immunity, which nations are unwilling to give up for obvious reasons of self interest.11 Nevertheless, Falk notes, “It seems evident that individual accountability for crimes of state is an integral part of any adequate conception of a just world order.”12 Collective guilt and collective responsibility both have a large literature in philosophy and the social sciences. To clarify the concepts relevant to controversies about reparations for slavery it will perhaps

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___________________________________________________________ suffice to examine the arguments of two opposing writers, H. D. Lewis and George P. Fletcher. Lewis, in papers spanning several decades, consistently opposes the idea that guilt can be collective at all. He treats guilt as responsibility, literally “liability to answer,” and he regards it as an “especially certain” ethical principle “that no one can be responsible, in the properly ethical sense, for the conduct of another.”13 Lewis relies on a strongly individualistic conception of moral will. He bluntly dismisses environmental influence as an excuse for bad behaviour: [A]nyone who holds that the individual is never free to choose his action in a way not determined by factors outside himself should surrender the idea of properly moral responsibility . . .14 Lewis later adapted the early paper cited here to address collective responsibility for the My Lai Massacre.15 There he reiterates the individualist theme against those who would pin responsibility for the atrocities committed by some soldiers on the society that sent them to war in the first place: If blame is in order at all we tend to shift it from those directly involved to their superiors, and from them to the politicians, and from them to the present state of the community, to “us all,” or indeed to the state of the world at the present time and the course of history. The buck is no longer being passed; . . . it has just disappeared into a morass of hypostatised abstractions.16 Thus for Lewis the idea of collective responsibility, by which he means collective guilt (answerability for misdeeds rather than responsibility for bringing about or having brought about some state of affairs), undermines criminal justice, violates the conception of free will on which our system of moral praise and censure depends, and intolerably diffuses the essential concept of moral responsibility. “Where all are responsible no one is responsible,” he says.17 But what if a case can be made for collective responsibility (and guilt) that is compatible with Western norms of individual responsibility in law and ethics? Fletcher provides a plausible account. Starting from the idea that some actions are collective, Fletcher infers that there are collective crimes; and if there are collective crimes, then there must be collective guilt for those crimes.18 Analysing the plot of Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain,19 Fletcher comments,

264 Individual and Collective Responsibility for Wrongs of the Past ___________________________________________________________ [The characters] acted as a group in the same sense that their intentions, attitudes, and actions were all self consciously interdependent. The group consciousness deprives them of their ordinary capacities for compassion.20 Applying the idea of group consciousness to events in Nazi Germany, Fletcher says the same dynamic of conformist behaviour undermines citizens’ ordinary capacity to make independent moral judgments “in situations in which self-correction would not normally be difficult . . .”21 When the actions of such groups, made up of like-minded members who fail to exercise their capacity for second-order moral judgment, result in harm to others, the crime is a group crime (no matter who actually does the dirty work). And such collective crimes entail collective guilt for those crimes, according to Fletcher.22 Setting aside for the moment Fletcher’s arguments for the position that nations can be collectively guilty in the above sense, we can see at this point that if he is correct there are situations in which we can rightly judge that guilt is collective. But the circumstances in which collective guilt is an applicable framework are limited. Collective guilt arises when people acting in and as a group commit a wrong. The members of a mob who participate in a lynching are guilty of the murder, as are those who may not have been present but conspired to arouse the mob. And if the killing was the result of policy decisions by an organisation, such as the Ku Klux Klan, its members too may be said to share in the guilt for the atrocity. Even so, we do normally make individual distinctions in degree of culpability for a group crime, holding individuals responsible for their actual degree of participation. The key to Fletcher’s illustrations and my example of a lynch mob is that the guilty parties acted or failed to act in a shared community of mind and attitude. The culpability of the collective in such cases arises out of actual contemporaneous behaviours, and individuals’ responsibility for harms done is based on their actions within and on behalf of the group. Thus I am inclined to agree with Fletcher that some actions, indeed some crimes, are collective. I do not accept the inference he draws from this, that the fact of a crime’s being collective should mitigate the culpability of individuals who took part in it, but that issue need not be resolved for our topic here.23 While Lewis ignores pertinent aspects of group human action and intention, I think he is correct that normatively our concepts of guilt and culpability pertain to individuals, and also correct that both criminal justice and morality require such a normatively individualist framework. To remove collective guilt from contexts in which members of a group are actual participants in

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___________________________________________________________ a wrong is to dilute the idea of individual culpability, which no system of justice can do without. 4.

Can Guilt Be Inherited? Consider a hypothetical case in which a man commits a serious crime, but is not discovered to be the perpetrator until after his death. While his son, upon discovering that his father committed a serious crime, may feel remorse for his father’s action and may undertake some form of restitution to the victim or victim’s family, that undertaking would be supererogatory, not required by duty. If the son were prosecuted for the crime his father committed we would likely regard that as a legal miscarriage of justice as well as ethically unfair. The normatively individual nature of the concept of guilt in present day law and ethics speaks against guilt as inheritable. But collective guilt might work differently. Fletcher notes a number of contexts in which collective inheritance of liability, he thinks, is unproblematic. He mentions reparations for slavery and compensation for appropriation for aboriginal lands as examples of “collective debt deriving from the behaviour of past generations. . . .”24 [T]he collective inheritance of the debt is no more problematic than the principle of state succession in international law. If the states are responsible for the debts incurred by prior regimes, then the same principles apply to alleged duties to make compensation for past acts of wrongdoing.25 But this point begs the question, for it is precisely the inheritance of liability that is at issue in the two examples Fletcher cites. Fletcher’s main argument for the inheritance of collective guilt (and its congeners, collective responsibility and collective liability) is based on what he labels a Romantic concept of the nation. On this concept, in contrast to a liberal (individualist) concept of the nation, there are times when the unity of a people is experienced in such a way that it can make perfect sense to speak of the nation as an actor. In times like the American Civil War and just after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S., Fletcher says, The contours of the nation become high-profile – they stand out relative to subgroups like religions, political parties, and other organisations – when, because of their historical situation, people become particularly

266 Individual and Collective Responsibility for Wrongs of the Past ___________________________________________________________ conscious of their language, their historical legacy, and their belonging to a particular experiment in culture and government.26 On Fletcher’s view, what “nation” denotes is a collective that extends through time and across generations. It includes the dead and the yet unborn with the present living. And such entities are capable of acting and being acted upon (for example, by being attacked by a foreign enemy) as well as incurring debts that extend across generations until they are discharged. Fletcher criticises Karl Jaspers’ 1947 treatment of German guilt for World War II and the Holocaust for too hastily rejecting the idea of inherited guilt. Jaspers had argued that there are four kinds of guilt, criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical.27 The last of these pertains to collectives such as a nation: There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge.28 But Jaspers holds that a nation as such cannot be metaphysically guilty. States (that is, governments) can be guilty of crimes perpetrated in the name of the state, but despite sanctioning this limited form of collective guilt Jaspers is clear that guilt normatively pertains to individuals. He objects to traditional uses of the concept of collective guilt because it has so often been used to sanction pogroms and the like. “The mentality which considers, characterises and judges people collectively is very widespread. . . . For centuries this mentality has fostered hatred among nations and communities.” He continues, There is no such thing as a people as a whole. All lines that we may draw to define it are crossed by facts. Language, nationality, culture, common fate – all this does not coincide but is overlapping. . . .One cannot make an individual out of a people.29 Nevertheless, Jaspers does characterise metaphysical guilt as arising from human solidarity, and Fletcher rightly notes, “The problem is where the duty of solidarity stops.”30 The central question of inheritance is whether there is a valid conception of the nation such that later generations can be said to inherit guilt for acts of their ancestors, particularly those acts sanctioned by the aegis of the state and its laws. Fletcher opts for a

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___________________________________________________________ conception of the nation as an actual entity whose individual members across time are united in a shared enterprise, a conception in which all can be implicated in the actions of some. But there are important objections to such an idea of the nation. First, the solidarity implicit in the Romantic conception of the nation as depicted by Fletcher and his sources is adventitious. True, there may be nations the majority of whose citizens do feel themselves continuously to be in solidarity with their fellow citizens. I submit that such nations are rare, and the solidarity of the present is highly likely to change. Furthermore, such feelings are notoriously fickle and subject to manipulation for political ends. A charismatic leader may appeal to feelings of national solidarity to meet some emergency or, more often the case, to support military or expansionist aims, or to prop up the regime itself. Second, even if the majority of citizens feel themselves to be in solidarity with others, such feelings are an unreliable guide to facts, such as the fact (if it is one) of inheritable guilt for actions of the past. Again, we may feel guilty for what transpired during the time of slavery, but feeling guilty does not make us guilty in fact. Third, in the particular case of the United States two of the three markers of national solidarity noted by Fletcher, language and historical legacy, only count as unifiers under the fiction that the United States is defined by its heritage as founded by English-speakers, or the only slightly less durable fantasy of the United States as a “melting pot” of peoples. Fletcher’s third marker, “belonging to a particular experiment in culture and government,” is more plausible, but on my reading will not do much to support his conception of the nation as unified actor. More important, however, is the fact that at this time in the history of the United States, diversity and awareness of diversity are more prominent than unity, and this is true both at the level of feelings and at the level of facts. Even in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, public expressions of national solidarity in the face of a common enemy rang hollow to many who disagreed with the government’s responses and particularly with the military incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq. On a personal note, I believe this to be the most divisive time I can recall in our national life, not excepting the era of the Vietnam War.31 But fourth, because of recent patterns of migration of peoples, political and religious as well as economic refugees, many modern societies are increasing in their ethnic and cultural diversity. The United States in particular is changing in makeup dramatically. New waves of immigration are creating diversities of language and culture unheard of in the past. To take only one example, in one county near my home in Minnesota, a state in a region commonly thought to be ethnically

268 Individual and Collective Responsibility for Wrongs of the Past ___________________________________________________________ homogeneous, fifty-five native languages are spoken. The residents of that county have come, many of them very recently, from every inhabited continent. These people come with very different experiences of political life and citizenship, and the religions represented range from mainstream Christian denominations to Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Animism.32 And this is in only one suburban county in the centre of North America. Residents of many localities can tell a similar story. The resulting mix means that customs, beliefs, religious practices, and the fund of cultural wisdom varies widely in the community. It also means that solidarity, felt nationhood, is empirically a much more fragile concept than Fletcher needs it to be to ground his idea of collective guilt. 5.

The Problem with Inheritance Even if Fletcher were able to establish a strong concept of the nation as a unified actor, that sense of the nation would scarcely pertain to the history of the slave system in North America. The problem with the idea of the nation as a unified actor over time is that it glosses over morally relevant details and makes it more difficult than it should be to focus on the actual nature of the atrocity of slavery. But rejecting “the nation” as the entity responsible (and culpable) for the institution of slavery sends us back to problematic issues of inherited guilt based on descendants of perpetrators and victims. In this framework the insoluble difficulty is the diffusion of the actual perpetrator and victim classes and their descendants. Over the more than three centuries in North America slavery worked differently in different places and involved enormous numbers of individuals, African, European, Caribbean, and American, operating under a multitude of different governments and legal systems.33 We can of course identify specific slaveholding individuals, including eight of the first twelve presidents of the United States, as well as numerous members of the U.S. Congress and Supreme Court during the antebellum period.34 But while there are clear cases of individual descendents of slave holders and of individual descendents of slaves, specifying present day boundaries of the two relevant classes is quite inexact. Hence some proponents of reparations have focused on state and Federal governments as surrogates for the perpetrator class, since slavery was sanctioned by state laws and the U.S. Constitution until 1865. But answering the question of who exactly is entitled to stand surrogate for the class of victims would require extensive and careful genealogical research, hampered unfortunately by incomplete early documentation. One way to avoid the genealogical problem is proposed by Marc Galanter, who notes that “biological descent is not the relevant test.” Our frame of reference, he argues, should rather be the continuing legacy of

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___________________________________________________________ slavery and the racism that accompanied it and continues to this day. For Galanter, the relevant continuities are social rather than genetic. It is the inheritance of advantage or disadvantage (including advantaged/disadvantaged social identities) that should count, not the inheritance of protoplasm.35 Fletcher’s conception of collective guilt serves as a useful supplement to Lewis’s individualism; but his Romantic concept of the nation fails to establish the conditions for collective guilt to be inherited. And even if there are cases in which the guilt of a collective could be handed down (Fletcher refers to inherited liability of corporations) those cases cannot include the guilt of a nation as a whole for slavery. Inherited guilt is simply the wrong framework for thinking about reparations for slavery. 6.

Culpability Versus Responsibility A better framework for thinking about reparations for past wrongs is collective responsibility, rather than inherited collective guilt. This framework has the advantage that it places the onus for righting the residual wrongs of slavery and racism on all members of present day communities, regardless of their origins, in an attempt to unify in a common cause, rather than further divide, the society. The collective responsibility framework relies on the idea that to be a cohesive society at all requires various shared commitments on the part of its members. Thomas McCarthy, in an essay comparing the legacy of slavery in the United States to the issue of reparations for Holocaust victims and survivors in Germany, asks, “What does the politics of memory mean, for instance, to the large numbers of recent immigrants whose cultural memories take them back to other worlds?”36 He argues in response that “the responsibility to come to terms with the past of slavery and segregation is borne by the political community as a whole, regardless of ancestry.” In support of this idea of collective responsibility, McCarthy notes that “the horrors perpetrated were generally state sanctioned and frequently state implemented, that is to say, were corporate evils for which there is corporate responsibility”; naturalised citizens joining a political community “to share in the inherited benefits of a continuing enterprise must also share in its inherited liabilities”; and that those becoming citizens now become members of the “same community of fate to which all of our futures are tied.”37 That is to say, all of us in the U.S., including recent immigrants, live with the racialised polarities that are the most persistent legacy of slavery, and to the extent that this legacy continues to

270 Individual and Collective Responsibility for Wrongs of the Past ___________________________________________________________ institutionalise forms of inequality and unfairness that are at odds with our putative self understanding as a would-be just society, all of us are implicated in the communal task of reparation and repair. Given the criticism levelled earlier at Fletcher’s idea of the nation as moral actor, I will make two points distinguishing national collective responsibility as I conceive of it from his view. First, the commitment to collective responsibility for the legacy of slavery will come about when and as citizens voluntarily choose programs of repair and insist that they be national priorities. Where it is easy for individuals to say, I am not guilty for the crimes of the past, it should also be possible for citizens to see the continuing damage that is the legacy of slavery in the present, and to want to be part of the effort to do something about it. Here is where feelings properly enter in, not feelings of guilt but something like moral sentiments as discussed by eighteenth-century ethicists like David Hume and Adam Smith. For the will to create a just society comes ultimately from citizens’ shared value commitments. Programs of repair, real reparation, that address racism and the inherited disadvantages that endemic racism brings with it, can only spring from people’s voluntary acceptance of shared responsibility, motivated by ideas of justice and the common good. Second, in contrast to Fletcher’s fictitious unity of the nation over time, the unity that would make it possible for the nation voluntarily to take on the burdens of collective responsibility for the legacy of slavery is a political unity, and thus dependent on the right kind of leadership to bring it into existence. Even so, it will be transient. But in place of a fantasy nation expunging its inherited guilt for a contested past I prefer the pragmatic reality of a nation constantly renegotiating its sense of itself and voluntarily undertaking shared tasks. The ideals to which political communities commit themselves vary of course, and actual societies include some with commitments to racist, anti-egalitarian, and xenophobic principles. But contemporary Western democracies define themselves in part by commitments to ideals of justice; to be a member of such a society, regardless of one’s origins, is to share in the collective responsibility for ensuring that all members of the society are treated fairly. In reality, some individual citizens violate this responsibility; political leaders self-interestedly act unjustly; and practical policies, laws, and institutions may miscarry. But in a Western democracy the collective responsibility for the ideal of a just society has to remain normative if the society is to maintain its communal identity. McCarthy’s topic is the politics of memory, and he offers the following vision of a U.S. society that deals effectively with the legacy of slavery and segregation:

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___________________________________________________________ An inclusionary politics of memory would today have to be conceived as a multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural dialogue aiming not at unanimity but at mutual comprehension, mutual recognition, and mutual respect. Anglo-assimilationism is in its death throes; the idea of a mosaic of self-enclosed subcultures is a non-starter; what is left to us, it seems, are versions of an interactive and accommodative diversity of forms of life, with an overarching democratic political culture that leaves room for ongoing contestation, critique, and reinterpretation of its basic principles and values.38 I would add that the overarching democratic political culture to which McCarthy refers must include the shared commitment I have referred to, commitment to the ideal of a society whose practices and institutions are effectively aimed at maximizing the good of all of its members. In practice, different societies have different aspirations. But I would like to suggest that some ideas seem so basic that they function as norms by which we measure actual societies, including our own, to determine their ability to secure the basic goods for which human beings come together in societies in the first place. In the West, general ideals taken as normative typically include individual liberty, equal rights, equal access to opportunities and other goods, security in one’s person and property, rule of law as against the arbitrary rule of persons in power, and fair procedures for adjudicating wrongs when they occur. This very incomplete list simply attempts to indicate the kind of general ideals to which members of a specific society may be asked to commit, minimally as an expectation of participation in the polity. Thus, we would rightly suspect the competence of a judge who did not believe in the presumption of innocence in criminal trials, or the motives of a politician whose behaviour indicated a lack of commitment to rule of law. It is this shared commitment to an ideal of a just society, in my view, that generates the collective responsibility to rectify the residual effects of slavery and its aftermath in post-bellum America. 7.

Reparation and Repair The fact that persistent economic inequalities based on race continue to the present day has led reparations advocates to treat the issue as one of legal claims for delayed compensation, demanding payment – plus interest – for the unpaid labour of slaves. Calculations of the value of that uncompensated labour are said to range from 2.5 trillion to 8.3 trillion USD.39 This approach differs from other attempts to rectify old wrongs, such as the token government payments to World War II era Japanese-

272 Individual and Collective Responsibility for Wrongs of the Past ___________________________________________________________ American internees and their survivors, German payments to survivors and descendants of Nazi slave labour camps, and New Zealand’s compensation to Maori tribal peoples for the confiscation of their lands. One empirical problem with calculations of lost pay is that they seem to rely on the assumption that the rice plantation slavery of the lowland and coastal South in the late eighteenth century and the later cotton plantation system of the interior during the nineteenth century, which were indeed appalling, were typical of the whole of North American Slavery. But Ira Berlin, in his important book, Generations of Captivity, identifies five distinct eras of slavery that were different from each other in many ways. His research shows that the horrible conditions of plantation servitude were not universal, and that in some eras and some locations, especially cities, some slaves were paid for their labour, could travel freely, marry, and enjoyed considerable autonomy as tradesmen.40 I mention this not to imply that any form of slavery is benign or innocuous but to raise the point that the history of the forms slavery has taken in North America is complex, and calculations of monetary compensation based on one form or region invite unnecessary controversy over economic assumptions and historical accuracy. In recent suits descendants of slaves have attempted to win compensation from corporations that have had continuous existence since the time of slavery and which profited from the institution. Thus Lloyd’s of London and other insurance companies have been named as plaintiffs, on grounds that they insured the lives of slaves for their owners, and various railroads and tobacco companies on grounds that they were originally built by uncompensated slave labour. In a recent decision dismissing a group of these suits U.S. District Judge Charles Norgle argued, among other things, that present descendants of slaves do not have standing under U.S. law to receive compensation as they are not the individuals directly harmed by the actions of the plaintiffs, and that they cannot show that the present defendants are responsible for harms to the ancestors of the present plaintiffs.41 Judge Norgle’s thorough review of the legal traditions and case law in dismissing these suits does not bode well for the success of such litigation in the future. Another approach to reparation is legislative. U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr. of Michigan has introduced and reintroduced a bill since 1989 to create a commission to study reparation proposals for African Americans and “to make recommendations to Congress on appropriate remedies to redress the harm inflicted on living African Americans.”42 Though so far Conyers’ efforts have failed to result in Congressional approval, his approach seems more promising than the route of litigation, first because a commission such as he proposes could be part of a process to unify the country around present injustices that are the legacy of

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___________________________________________________________ slavery, and second because even if litigation is successful at winning compensation for some, the basic conditions of a divided society will remain unchanged. The political culture of the United States today seems increasingly fractured. Media pundits speak of “fault lines” and point to the controversy about gay marriage as a recently opened one, as though the political and cultural landscape is an earthquake zone. In so far as there is little unity around fundamental issues – society’s obligations to the poor, sick, and elderly; government’s role in protection of consumers and the environment from the predations of large corporations; the very balance between liberty and security – the metaphor seems apt. Fault lines are a cogent replacement for the metaphor of “culture wars” between liberals and conservatives of decades duration. In this climate of conflict optimism about the work of reform of racism is probably unwarranted. Nevertheless, increasingly polyglot communities enriched by the influx of immigrants with different cultural memories and, importantly, a strong stake in the adopted homeland as an egalitarian society may in time help to suppress the more overt expressions of racism that continue to find acceptance among some Americans. Still, the news media, with its endemic bias toward regarding conflict rather than amity as newsworthy, exaggerates the divisions that make the political work of reparation more difficult. The national will to correct the residual institutionalised legacy of slavery may be long in coming. Suits for monetary compensation – unlikely as they are to prevail in court – may yet have the benefit of drawing attention to the specific geography of inequality, as well as shining light on the elements of society whose present prosperity is founded on the oppression of generations past.43 Even if one of these suits should be successful in winning compensation for descendants of slaves, that result, though perhaps beneficial for the plaintiffs, would very likely leave the rest of society unchanged: just as divided and just as tolerant of inequality based on ethnicity. The real work of reform will take place elsewhere than the courts, and will require more imaginative political leadership than we are accustomed to. 8.

Conclusion It is an irreducible part of the human tragedy that some wrongs ultimately cannot be repaired. Yet justice requires us to do what we can to create the institutions and political means to rectify the residual effects of injustices of the past. I have argued that the conceptual framework of inherited collective guilt is the wrong orientation from which to view the issue of reparations for slavery, and that true reparation, that is, rectification, will only result from a nationally shared commitment to take

274 Individual and Collective Responsibility for Wrongs of the Past ___________________________________________________________ on collective responsibility for repairing the legacy of slavery. Nothing I have said here is intended to undercut or diminish the importance of the work of repairing the ongoing damage of slavery in American society. Rather, this paper attempts to reframe reparation as a shared national task of repair in which all of us are implicated.44 Committing ourselves to creating a truly just society requires all of us to face the present legacy of slavery squarely, identifying clearly and publicly the disparities of privilege and disadvantage resulting from endemic racism. While there may be some good to come of reparations lawsuits and legislation, I believe they miss the main point, which is that institutionalised inequalities and a pervasive, not very subtle racist mentality remain fully functional in American life. The wrongs we need to address, and can address, are the wrongs of the present. And until these facts are addressed effectively, the ideal of the just society will continue to elude us.

Notes 1. I have benefited from comments and queries on earlier drafts of this paper by colleagues at The College of St. Catherine and at the Fifth Annual Conference on Evil and Human Wickedness held in Prague in March 2004. 2. Other systems in which something like guilt operates include customs such as “good manners” maintained within a social class and playing games, in each of which rule breaking may lead to sanctions. But guilt may be the wrong term for the onus pertaining to violations within such systems. 3. H. D. Lewis, “The Non-Moral Notion of Collective Responsibility,” Individual and Collective Responsibility; The Massacre at My Lai, ed. Peter A. French (Cambridge, MA.: Schenkman, 1972), 125. 4. All slaves in the British Empire had been freed by 1838 after a period of gradual emancipation established by law. The picture in the U.S. is more complex, as in the antebellum period individual states chose at different times whether or not to outlaw slavery, and the politics of the choice often reflected considerations of economics and regional solidarity, rather than moral sensibilities. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was a politically mandated attempt to ameliorate sectional tensions while preventing the spread of slavery into territories in which it did not yet exist - the compromise was to allow slavery to continue to flourish where it already existed. Only in 1865 did slavery become illegal everywhere in the U.S. 5. For some people morality is inseparable from religion. Here I assume a secular perspective according to which morality, while it may overlap religious teaching, is independent of particular religions and ultimately grounded in natural (and universal) features of human life. Thus

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___________________________________________________________ I think the atrocity of slavery is an atrocity because it violates fundamental human autonomy, and hence basic morality, not because it is counter to divine law or religious custom. 6. Alison Dundes Renteln, “Race and Ethnicity,” The Oxford Companion to American Law, ed. Kermit L. Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2002), 687. 7. “The state is a collective reduced to a person, a sovereign, a single entity that can take its place alongside the other sovereigns in the law of nations.” George P. Fletcher, “The Storrs Lectures: Liberals and Romantics at War: The Problem of Collective Guilt,” Yale Law Journal (May 2002), 1513. 8. Ibid. 9. At the International Conference on Military Trials held in London in 1945 which laid the groundwork for the trials of the German war criminals at Nuremberg, the Soviet representative, General Nikitchenko, proposed trying organizations such as the Gestapo for crimes perpetrated by its members, thus establishing the collective guilt of groups rather than trying individuals. His proposal did not prevail. The U.S. Department of State document “Minutes from the International Conference on Military Trials” is excerpted in Peter A. French, ed., Individual and Collective Responsibility; The Massacre at My Lai (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1972), 177-187. 10. Richard Falk, “Accountability and the Legacy of Nuremberg,” in War Crimes and Collective Wrongdoing, ed. Alexander Jokiü (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 117 ff. 11. Ibid., 131. 12. Ibid., ital. in orig. 13. H. D. Lewis, “Collective Responsibility” (1948) in Collective Responsibility; Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics, ed. Larry May and Stacey Hoffman (Savage, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991), 17. 14. Ibid., 32. 15. In March, 1968, a company of U.S. soldiers entered a group of hamlets in Vietnam called My Lai 4 and undertook the murder by gunfire of all of the inhabitants they could capture, nearly all of whom were elderly or mothers and their children. The My Lai Massacre, as it came to be called, and its aftermath raised numerous fundamental questions about guilt and collective responsibility in wartime which remain highly pertinent more than three decades later. 16. Ibid., 137. 17. Ibid., 143. Ital. in orig. 18. Fletcher, 1526.

276 Individual and Collective Responsibility for Wrongs of the Past ___________________________________________________________ 19. Philip Roth, The Human Stain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). 20. Fletcher, 1527. 21. Ibid., 1529. 22. Ibid., 1529. 23. Ibid., 1542-43. Fletcher’s belief that the occurrence of collective guilt in the sense he develops it mitigates the culpability of individual participants in a group crime is, I think, a non sequitur. For however virulent the atmosphere of hatred in which one lives and works, we are still held accountable for our individual responses to incitements to commit harms. Obviously, this topic could carry us far beyond the boundaries of our present topic. 24. Ibid., 1536. 25. Ibid., 1536-37. 26. Ibid., 1534. 27. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans E. B. Ashton (New York: Capricorn, 1961), 31. 28. Ibid., 32. 29. Ibid., 41. 30. Fletcher, 1532. 31. My recollections go back to the Korean War era, when indeed there seemed to be a much stronger sense of national unity in the country. But my point is that such periods of solidarity of feeling are transient and unreliable, and that we do not enjoy much solidarity today. 32. Joseph Schur, Director of Planning, Community Services Division, Dakota County, Minnesota, personal conversation. 33. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). 34. Ibid., 13-14. 35. Marc Galanter, “Righting Old Wrongs,” in Breaking the Cycles of Hatred, Martha Minow, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 113. 36. Thomas McCarthy, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the USA; On the Politics of the Memory of Slavery,” Political Theory 30.5 (October 2002): 636. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 637. 39. Stephen Kershnar, “Reparations for Slavery and Justice,” University of Memphis Law Review (Winter 2003): 278. 40. Berlin, op cit. 41. In Re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, 304 F. Supp. 2d. 1027; 2004 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 872.

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___________________________________________________________ 42. Conyers, John, Jr., “Major Issues – Reparations,” http://www. house.gov/conyers/news_reparations.html (19 Feb. 2004). 43. Recently Illinois joined California as the second state to require that insurance companies doing business in the state post records on a state web site detailing policies written in the nineteenth century on the lives of slaves. Chuck Haga, “Insurance Records Reveal Stories of Human ‘Property,’” Minneapolis Star Tribune, 19 August 2004, sec. A, p. 7. 44. It may be objected to this proposal that it leaves present day victims of racism in the position of having to contribute to their own restitution. But the objection misses the point of my orientation to voluntary collective responsibility: in addressing systemic, endemic social inequalities, the victims of those inequalities have an essential role to play in providing the specifics of the harms done.

Select Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility.” In Collective Responsibility, edited by Larry May and Stacey Hoffman, 273-283. Savage, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991. Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Conyers, John, Jr., “Major Issues – Reparations,” http://www.house.gov/conyers/news_reparations.html (19 Feb. 2004). Falk, Richard. “Accountability for War Crimes and the Legacy of Nuremberg.” In War Crimes and Collective Wrongdoing, edited by Aleksandar Jokiü, 113-136. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Fletcher, George P. “The Storrs Lectures: Liberals and Romantics at War: The Problem of Collective Guilt.” Yale Law Journal (May 2002): 1501-1573. French, Peter A., ed. Individual and Collective Responsibility; The Massacre at My Lai. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1972. Galanter, Marc. “Righting Old Wrongs.” In Breaking the Cycles of Hatred, edited by Martha Minow, 107-131. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. In Re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation. U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, 304 F. Supp. 2d. 1027; 2004 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 872. Jaspers, Karl. The Question of German Guilt, translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Capricorn,1961. Kershnar, Stephen. “Reparations for Slavery and Justice.” University of Memphis Law Review 33 (Winter 2003): 277-306.

278 Individual and Collective Responsibility for Wrongs of the Past ___________________________________________________________ Lewis, H. D. “Collective Responsibility.” In Collective Responsibility, edited by Larry May and Stacey Hoffman, 17-33. Savage, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991. ——. “The Non-Moral Notion of Collective Responsibility.” In Individual and Collective Responsibility; the Massacre at My Lai, edited by Peter A. French, 121-144. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1972. McCarthy, Thomas. “Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the USA; On the Politics of the Memory of Slavery.” Political Theory 30.5 (October 2002): 623-648. Renteln, Alison Dundes. “Race and Ethnicity,” The Oxford Companion to American Law, edited by Kermit L. Hall, 682-688. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Notes on Contributors Margaret Sönser Breen is Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Connecticut. She specialises in lesbian and gay literature and gender studies. Recent edited collections include Truth, Reconciliation, and Evil, published by Rodopi in 2004, and, with Warren J. Blumenfeld, Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies, published by Ashgate in 2005. Mark Burgess is a Senior Lecturer of Psychology at Liverpool Hope University, where he specialises in Political Psychology, particularly moral development and social identity. Gideon Calder teaches ethics and social theory at the University of Wales, Newport, and his main research interests lie in the intersections between these two fields. Topics of recent articles have included sexual consent, commodification and the body, and the ethical significance of distinctions between “nature” and “culture.” He has written two books on the philosophy of Richard Rorty – the second to be published in late 2005. He is also editor of the journal Res Publica. Dr. Wayne Cristaudo is Senior Lecturer in European Studies in the School of Humanities, University of Adelaide. He is the author of three books: Metaphysics of Science and Freedom: From Descartes to Kant to Hegel (Aldershot: Gower, 1991); with Bob Catley, This Great Beast: Progress and the Modern State (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997); and, with Peter Poiana, Great Ideas of Great Literary Texts (Boston: University of America Press, 2003). He has also published articles and chapters on Kant, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and Franz Rosenzweig (forthcoming). Presently he is completing a book entitled Power: Love and Evil and researching a book on Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Haijing Dai is a doctoral student in the joint PhD program of social work and sociology at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she specialises in cultural sociology, historical change, and community development. Her main research interest focuses on modern and postsocialist China. Frank Faulkner is a former member of the British Army. He currently lectures in Alternative Conflict Resolution at the School of Law at the University of Derby in the United Kingdom. He is a graduate of the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom.

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____________________________________________________________ Neil Ferguson is a Senior Lecturer of Psychology at Liverpool Hope University, where he specialises in Political Psychology, particularly moral development and social identity. Graeme R. Goldsworthy is a former British Army Officer who has been mine clearing and coordinating humanitarian mine action programmes in S.E. Asia, Africa and Central America since 1993. He is a graduate of the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom. Karen D. Hoffman is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. Specialising in ethics, her primary research interests are the subjects of forgiveness, evil, and despair, particularly as presented in the works of Soren Kierkegaard. Ian Hollywood was enrolled in the Master’s Program in Psychology at Liverpool Hope University when the interviews were conducted and analysed. He now works with disadvantaged youth and is pursuing his interest in researching peaceful resolutions to violent conflicts. Elizabeth McCarthy teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature in Trinity College Dublin, and is currently completing a PhD in English literature. Her thesis maps the socio-cultural contexts of sexual violence and serial murder in the media and arts. She is a member of the steering group for the annual Interdisciplinary Conference on Perspectives in Evil and Human Wickedness. She has published work on the role of violence in the vampire myth and is presently working on a number of projects, including an investigation of sexuality and violence in nineteenth-century medicine and twentieth-century war narratives, as well as a study of madness, violence, and creativity in the early twentiethcentury literature and the visual arts. She lives in Dublin. Diana Medlicott is currently Reader in Crime and Penology and Professor of Teaching and Learning Development at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University, U.K. Her penology research interests include suicidal prisoners, prisoners and self-identity, and violence in prison. Her teaching and learning research focuses on the contemporary problem of student retention and withdrawal in a mass system devoted to widening participation. William Andrew Myers is Professor of Philosophy and Endowed Professor of Humanities at The College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota. His research interests are in the history of philosophy, ethical

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____________________________________________________________ and political theory, the ethics of peace and war, philosophy of art, and semiotics. He is a founding member of the International Society for universalism, a worldwide group of philosophers and other thinkers seeking through dialogue to find common ground among different cultures, ideologies, and religions. In 1995 he edited a special issue on universalist ethics for the journal Dialogue and Universalism. He is currently working on a project on Hannah Arendt and the moral psychology of perpetrators of gross harm. Annette Pankratz teaches English Literature and Culture at the universities of Passau and Bochum, Germany. She has published on Restoration culture and on contemporary British drama. Samuel H. Pillsbury is a professor at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, California, where he teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, and American legal history. He is the author of numerous publications, including Judging Evil: Rethinking the Laws of Murder and Manslaughter, published by NYU Press. He writes primarily in the areas of criminal law, criminal justice policy, and emotion and the law. Vera Profit is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Notre Dame. Her publications reflect her interest in both French and German literature of the twentieth century. These include a study of the bilingual poet Iwan Goll: Interpretations of Iwan Goll’s Late Poetry with a Comprehensive and Annotated Bibliography of the Writings by and about Iwan Goll. Her most recent monographs concern Karl Krolow: Ein Porträt meiner Selbst: Karl Krolow’s Autobiographical Poems (1945-1958) and their French Sources, as well as Menschlich: Gespräche mit Karl Krolow. Also fascinated by psychology, she is currently engaged in yet another book-length study, provisionally entitled Toward a Psychological and Literary Definition of Evil: Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Oscar Wilde, and Max Frisch. Stephen Riley is completing doctoral research at Lancaster University Law School, U.K. His doctoral thesis, “A Phenomenology of International Criminal Justice,” is part of ongoing research into international law, legal philosophy, and twentieth-century continental philosophy. Ted Turnau is a lecturer in cultural and religious studies at the AngloAmerican College in Prague, Czech Republic, and a visiting professor at the Centre for Media Studies at the Social Sciences Faculty of Charles University.