Science of Good and Evil

by Michael Shermer

  Explaining Evil

  In the 1961 Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief orchestrators of the Nazi “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” Hannah Arendt, covering the trial for the New Yorker, penned a phrase that has become infamous in the lexicon of social commentary: “the banality of evil.” Expecting to see the raw viciousness of evil in the face of Eichmann—seated in a bulletproof glass box like a caged predatory beast—Arendt instead gazed upon a sad and pathetic-looking man who recounted in cold language and with dry statistics the collection, transportation, selection, and extermination of millions of human beings. Most surprising of all, Eichmann appeared to be a relatively normal human being—not a monster, not mentally deranged, not so different from many paper-pushing bureaucrats who go about their daily tasks like automata.

  Indeed, a glance at Eichmann’s working life shows a person who could share a smoke and a brandy with colleagues after a hard day at the office. Consider Eichmann’s description at the end of the infamous Wannsee Conference held on January 20, 1942, to plan for the “Endlösung der Judenfrage”:

  I remember that at the end of this Wannsee conference, Heydrich, Müller, and my humble self settled down comfortably by the fireplace, and that then for the first time I saw Heydrich smoke a cigar or a cigarette, and I was thinking: today Heydrich is smoking, something I have not seen before. And he drinks cognac—since I had not seen Heydrich take any alcoholic drink in years. After this Wannsee Conference we were sitting together peacefully, and not in order to talk shop, but in order to relax after the long hours of strain.15

  What “evil” describes here is the banality of Heydrich and Eichmann’s bureaucratic duties, which included the processing not just of paper but also of people. This is what I call the “evil of banality.”16

  Since 1945, in fact, the ultimate test of any moral theory is Hitler and the Holocaust. If ever there were an embodiment of evil behavior, it is surely Adolf Hitler, and if ever there were an act that should be labeled evil, it is surely the Holocaust. The images in figure 9 of Adolf Hitler alongside his SS henchman Heinrich Himmler, and the photograph of burning bodies in an open pit outside Crematoria 5 at Auschwitz-Birkenau, surely represent nothing if not an evil act.

  Yet even here I would go so far as to say that calling Adolf Hitler evil moves us no closer to an understanding of the causes of what he did. What he did may be worse than almost anything anyone ever did to anyone else in history, but it is all still within the realm of human possibilities. The Holocaust may be the supreme act of inhumanity (indeed, the Nuremberg Trials established the legal precedence of convicting individuals for their acts of inhumanity), but we must always keep in mind that these inhuman acts were committed by humans, inhuman acts within our behavioral repertoire. Explaining the Holocaust, in fact, is intimately linked with explaining Hitler, both of which have become something of a scholarly and publishing industry. “The shapes we project onto the inky Rorschach of Hitler’s psyche are often cultural self-portraits in the negative. What we talk about when we talk about Hitler is also who we are and who we are not,” author Ron Rosenbaum writes.17

  The explanations for Hitler, and by inference for the Holocaust (as in Milton Himmelfarb’s catchy idiom, “Nc Hitler, No Holocaust”), have ranged from the ridiculous (Hitler’s grandfather was Jewish) and the absurd (the “one ball” theory that Hitler had only one testicle) to the metaphysical (Hitler was evil). Some insist the explanation has been found (John Lukacs places the crystallization of Hitler’s anti-Semitic personality as early as 1919), that it can be but has not yet been found (Yehuda Bauer: “Hitler is explicable in principle, but that does not mean that he has been explained”), that it cannot be found (Emil Fackenheim: “The closer one gets to explicability the more one realizes nothing can make Hitler explicable”), or that it should not be found (Claude Lanzmann: “There is even a book written … about Hitler’s childhood, an attempt at explanation which is for me obscenity as such”). The Hitler of the Holocaust ranges wildly between intentional and functional evil. Lucy Dawidowicz’s Hitler is a sole conductor who orchestrated the Holocaust with evil intent, deciding on his war against the Jews as early as November 1918 while still in the military hospital recovering from a gas attack. By contrast, Christopher Browning’s Hitler stumbles his way hesitatingly into the Holocaust, with “a sense that in the end he was scared of what he was doing. Now I interpret that as he didn’t think it was wrong, but he was aware that he was now doing something that had never been done before.”18

  Figure 9. Hitler, Himmler, and the Holocaust as the Embodiment of Pure Evil

  Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler, architects of the Final Solution. (Photograph by Estelle Bechhoefer. Courtesy of U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

  A secret photograph of the burning of bodies in an open pit after gassing. When the crematoria were not working, or there were too many bodies for the capacity of the crematoria, the Nazis resorted to burning bodies in large communal ditches. (Courtesy of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel)

  The problem scholars and historians have had in explaining Hitler and the Holocaust is the same one that plagues explanations of evil—that is the myth of pure evil. As Rosenbaum opines: “The search for Hitler has apprehended not one coherent, consensus image of Hitler but rather many different Hitlers, competing Hitlers, conflicting embodiments of competing visions, Hitlers who might not recognize each other well enough to say ‘Heil’ if they came face to face in Hell.”19 If Hitler can escape explanation in this sense, can the Holocaust? What about evil itself? We agree on the basic facts about the Holocaust, but interpretations about why it happened and what it means quickly become entangled in contradictory premises about human history and human nature. For Claude Lanzmann, the Holocaust “is a product of the whole story of the Western world since the very beginning.”20 But what does this tell us? If everything is the cause, then nothing is the cause.

  These are not explanations as such. They are more like opinion editorials. A scientific approach to explaining evil can be found in social psychologist Roy Baumeister’s thoroughly researched treatise on evil. Baumeister demonstrates that although for most people killing one human being is repulsive, killing millions can become routine: “The essential shock of banality is the disproportion between the person and the crime. The mind reels with the enormity of what this person has done, and so the mind expects to reel with the force of the perpetrator’s presence and personality. When it does not, it is surprised.”21 The explanation for the surprise can be found by contrasting the victim’s perspective with that of the perpetrator. For example, Maximillian Grabner, head of the Political Department at Auschwitz and associate of the camp commandant Rudolph Höss, explained the crime of the Holocaust from the perpetrator’s perspective: “I only took part in this crime because there was nothing I could do to change anything. The blame for this crime lay with National Socialism. I myself was never a National Socialist. Nevertheless, I still had to join the party … . I only took part in the murder … out of consideration for my family. I was never an anti-Semite and would still claim today that every person has the right to live.”22 This is the evil of banality in its purest state.

  In taking a broader perspective on the perpetrator’s evil, Baumeister targets specific bad acts for scientific examination, including wife beatings, gang violence, drive-by shootings, rape, and other examples of what he calls the “breakdown of self-control.” In an interesting twist on how most of us think about evil and violence, Baumeister suggests that “you do not have to give people reasons to be violent, because they already have plenty of reasons. All you have to do is take away their reasons to restrain themselves.”23 Most of us restrain ourselves most of the time, but there are circumstances when any of us has the potential to express extreme anger and violence. Are we all, then, evil—or at least potentially evil? No, not quite, We all have the potential to behave in ways that others might consider to be bad, cruel, mean, or violent. Baumeister makes this point in
exploring seven individual myths about evil:

  1. Evil is always intentional (from the victims’ perspective; perpetrators always have a justification).

  2. Evil is motivated by pleasure.

  3. The victim of evil is innocent and good.

  4. Evil is conducted by people completely different from us, wholly other.

  5. Evil is the original sin, built into our natures.

  6. Evil is the opposite not only of good but of order, peace, and stability.

  7. Evil people are selfish egotists driven to improve their self-esteem by evil acts.24

  It is important to note that in no way does debunking the myth of pure evil ignore the fact that human behaviors range broadly, or that in some cases a person may have serious mental problems or fall well away from the mean of normal human behavior toward genuinely wicked or sadistic actions. But while some may call Adolf Hitler a madman or a psychopath, I doubt that anyone would allow him to plea “not guilty by reason of insanity” for his crimes against humanity.

  A deeper problem caused by the myth of pure evil, says Baumeister, is that it “conceals the reciprocal causality of violence.” That is, as in divorces and most other human interactions involving conflict and resolution, there are two sides to almost every story. It turns out, for example, that research on perpetrators shows that they have, in their minds anyway, perfectly legitimate reasons for the violence. Ironically, Baumeister concludes, the myth of evil itself may lead to greater violence: “The myth encourages people to believe that they are good and will remain good no matter what, even if they perpetrate severe harm on their opponents. Thus, the myth of pure evil confers a kind of moral immunity on people who believe in it … . Belief in the myth is itself one recipe for evil, because it allows people to justify violent and oppressive actions. It allows evil to masquerade as good.”25

  September 11, 2001, comes to mind here. United States President George W. Bush described what happened that day as an act of pure evil. Yet millions of people around the world celebrate that day as a triumphant victory over what they perceive to be an evil American culture. What we are witnessing here is not a conceptual difference in understanding the true nature of evil. Nor is it simply a matter of who is in the right. It is, at least on one important level, a difference of perspective. To achieve true understanding and enlightenment it might help to understand what the other side was thinking. In a less emotionally charged example, if you lived in seventeenth-century Europe and you really believed that torturing religious heretics and burning women as witches would save their souls and restore peace to your community, then from that perspective the Spanish Inquisition and the European witch craze were supreme acts of morality. Similarly—and it seems almost blasphemous to suggest it—if you lived in the twenty-first century Muslim Middle East and you truly believed that killing American citizens was God’s will to save your people and restore peace to your community, then from that perspective what could serve as a more visually striking statement than bringing down the twin symbols of your enemy? If there is a moral module in the brain (and I suspect there is something that at least corresponds to the concept of such a module in the brain, even if it is splayed out over a large portion of the cortex or consists of lots of smaller modules interconnected), then I have little doubt that Osama bin Laden and Muhammad Ata’s moral modules were fully lit up on September 11.

  This is not to argue that morality is reduced to one’s perspective, or that events like the Holocaust do not represent an act of evil (in its adjectival form). But if we are to understand why the Holocaust happened, we must scientifically investigate the reasons behind such acts.

  Fuzzy Logic, Fuzzy Evil

  If we are not going to talk about evil as a metaphysical entity, then how shall we talk about it? One answer is to study evil as a scientist would, beginning with proper descriptive terms and employing fuzzy logic.26 In fuzzy logic, shades of gray rule the universe, despite our heroic efforts over at least the past two and a half thousand years to dichotomize the world into Platonic categories. Aristotle said A is A, and that binary logic dictates a single overarching law: A or not-A. Either something is A or it is not A. It cannot be both. The sky is blue or it is not blue. It cannot be both blue and not blue. But what color is the sky at sunrise and sunset? What color is it overhead versus on the horizon? What color is it at 150,000 feet? And how is blue defined? What shade of blue was chosen as the defining essence of “blueness”? In point of fact, in the real world something can be A and not A. The sky can be blue and not blue. Thinking like a scientist, in statistical terms, we can assign a probability to the blueness of the sky. The sky is fuzzy blue. Directly overhead we might call it .9 blue. At a forty-five-degree angle from directly overhead we might assign it a fuzziness of .7 blue. On the horizon it might be a .5 blue.27

  Fuzzy logic also allows for subtle nuances and shades of gray in the real-life complexities of ethical dilemmas.28 The social psychologist Carol Tavris provides an apt example of fuzzy thinking in the moral realm in a 1998 Los Angeles Times op-ed on the Clinton morality debacle, with a title question that answers itself—“All Bad or All Good? Neither.” Tavris explains that the scientific evidence points to the fact that “people’s reasoning about moral dilemmas, like their moral behavior itself, is specific to given situations.”29 The false choice of either all bad or all good does not depict the subtleties and nuances of human behavior.

  Consider Lawrence Kohlberg’s famous stage theory of moral reasoning, for example, which suggests that, as people grow up, they pass through largely fixed rungs on a moral ladder:

  1. Obedience and Punishment

  2. Individualism, Instrumentalism, and Exchange

  3. Good boy/girl

  4. Law and Order

  5. Social Contract

  6. Principled Conscience30

  Morality, says Kohlberg, develops within an individual, beginning with parental fear of punishment, moving to selfish hedonism, changing to conformity and loyalty to peers, developing into social law and order, rising to social contract reasoning, and finally reaching the highest rung of Gandhiesque moral principles. Research subsequent to Kohlberg’s shows, however, that these stages are not as fixed and universal as they once appeared. One anthropologist, for example, found that these stages do not always apply to people in non-Western cultures. Moral development varies widely across the globe.31 Two extensive studies on Kohlberg’s theory by psychologists of religion found that specific cultural and religious values held by an individual influence where he or she may fall in the stage sequence.32 In other words, the stages are not fixed developmental sequences so much as they are values that are context dependent. One study discovered that people make a distinction between moral and religious values in the various stages (since not all values in religion are related to morality), and another study reported that when the individual’s religion emphasized principle-based moral decisions, they were more inclined to reach the “highest” rung of the moral ladder.33 One psychologist even found a slight negative correlation between Kohlberg’s stages and both intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity, meaning that whether one is motivated to be moral by intrinsic principles or by extrinsic rewards of one’s religion depends on the context and circumstances of the moral issue; the stages of moral development were irrelevant.34 And social psychologist Carol Gilligan noted that women’s moral development differs from that of men. Women tend to emphasize care and responsibility in moral choices, whereas Kohlberg emphasized male “justice orientation” in his research.35

  Humans can be morally principled in one circumstance, hedonistic in another, fear punishment in one context, exert our loyalty to friends in a different context. Referencing Clinton but generalizing to us all, Carol Tavris concludes that “the assumption that a moral failing in one domain reveals something profoundly important about a person’s entire character, or predicts his or her behavior in other situations, is wrong.”36 One bad act does not an immoral person make. Perhaps this
is what Jesus meant when he defied the Old Testament law that required the death penalty for adultery, by challenging a woman’s accusers: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” This may also represent the fundamental difference between Old Testament and New Testament morality: inflexible moral principles versus contextual moral guidelines—a stricter, draconian God versus a kinder, gentler God. As we shall see in the second half of this book, a fuzzy provisional moral system is another step in the contextualization of moral rules and behavior, where moral principles are ranked in terms of their fuzzy values, which can change under changing circumstances, yet still retain their core meaning. A case study on how fuzzy logic can be applied to the study of the origins of our moral and immoral nature can be found in the Yanomamö peoples of Amazonia, variously described by their ethnographers as either erotic or fierce.