Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing

Nazi Germany, Bosnia, and Rwanda: for all the evil done by whole groups of people to other groups of people throughout recorded history, the 20th century saw some truly horrifying episodes. These episodes have provoked a wide range of scholarship on collective evildoing that tries to answer the question, “How could whole societies of people do these terrible things?” Simple answers have been elusive, with no one model able to account for the wide range of circumstances surrounding different instances of genocide and the multiple levels of causation. Arne Johan Vetlesen demonstrates this in Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing by examining the limitations of previous theories in the light of actual incidents of genocide and then integrating some aspects of these theories into a broader view of collective evildoing. Vetlesen, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, Norway, is the author of 13 books, primarily on philosophy and ethics, and he brings his considerable knowledge of scholarship on questions of morality to bear on a topic as horrifying as it is bewildering.

In the introduction, Vetlesen defines “evil” as intentionally inflicting pain on another human being against his or her will, causing serious and foreseeable harm. This seems to leave a few things out. (Is negligent homicide not evil? Tell that to Mothers Against Drunk Driving.) But Vetlesen's point isn't really to define evil, a category so broad that a comprehensive definition may not really be particularly useful. He has a narrower range of evil in mind: genocide and ethnic cleansing.

In the first three chapters of the book, Vetlesen reviews and critiques three models of evildoing, which he describes as sociological (Zygmunt Bauman), philosophical (Hannah Arendt), and psychological (C. Fred Alford). Bauman, in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) argued that the Holocaust was a natural extension of the dehumanizing bureaucracy of modern society in which otherwise normal individuals are capable of committing astounding atrocities against others once a sense of personal responsibility is removed. Vetlesen describes the consistency of this theory with the results of Stanley Milgram's famous study from the early 1970s in which college student participants delivered what they thought to be painful electric shocks to persons who they thought were other college students (actually confederates of the investigators, yelping in false pain in response to nonexistent shocks) simply because an “authority figure” in a white lab coat with a clipboard told them to do so. Could this be why so many Germans participated in the Nazi plot to kill all of Europe's Jews? Vetlesen thoroughly and carefully points out how this theory, while offering much, ultimately fails to account for the scope and variety of atrocities committed in the Holocaust.

Hannah Arendt, known in academia for philosophical writings on totalitarian societies, is known more widely for her book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann (Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil; 1965). Eichmann, who was in charge of implementing the Nazi's Final Solution, set goals for the number of Jews to be killed by certain dates and wrote memos to his superiors boasting of having exceeded these goals. Arendt attended his trial in Jerusalem for war crimes. Expecting evil, Arendt saw Eichmann as a detail‐oriented technocrat, interested more in his career than in anti‐Semitism, who was able to mastermind the killing of six million Jews by doing the necessary paperwork. Vetlesen, while showing great respect for Arendt's contributions to academic philosophy, considers this view of Eichmann too one‐dimensional and points out that his actions in the Holocaust were a failure of emotional connectedness rather than a thoughtless desire to please his superiors.

Having discussed a view from sociology and philosophy, Vetlesen turns to what he describes as a psychological theory in the work of C. Fred Alford. Although Alford's work draws heavily on the writings of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and Heinz Kohut, his theories are more philosophical than psychological. When discussing sadism, for instance, Alford theorizes that the sadist is attempting to protect himself from the awareness of his existential vulnerability by projecting it onto another person where it can be controlled. Vetlesen quotes Alford as saying that sadism is distinguished from aggression by the sadist's identification with his victim, rather than by the sexualization of dominance and destruction. The forensic mental health professional who has even a nodding acquaintance with actual sadists may be a bit skeptical of this existential view and may find more purely psychological answers in works such as Otto Kernberg's Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions (1992). But Vetlesen's interest is in the application of object relations theory to collective evildoing, and his discussion of the role of envy and the paranoid‐schizoid position (as conceptualized by Klein) in the racism of genocide is excellent.

Vetlesen continues the discussion and expands on the specifics of the mechanisms of genocide in Chapter 4, where he explicitly describes the ethnic cleansing of non‐Serbs by radical (and to some extent, nonradical) Serbians in Bosnia. Some chilling parallels with the Nazi Holocaust are noted, such as the notion that the identification of historical wrong done to the perpetrators allows them to see themselves as the “real victims” (the Treaty of Versailles for the Nazis and the 1389 Battle of Kosovo for the Serbs) and formal pronouncements of the racist ideology of the perpetrators in which the destruction of the feared group is deemed necessary for the survival of the perpetrators' society (the Nazis' Wannsee Conference in January 1942 in which the Final Solution was endorsed and the so‐called Serbian Ram Plan, later referred to as the Brana Plan dating from 1991, which said the Muslim communities must be attacked at their weakest point, targeting women and children, to create the maximum panic). Vetlesen emphasizes the characteristic proximity of the Serbian perpetrators to their victims, who were typically their neighbors in very diverse, multicultural communities in the former Yugoslavia.

Especially chilling is Vetlesen's analysis of the program of systematic mass rape used to drive non‐Serbs out of areas that then could be claimed as part of an ethnically pure, greater Serbian homeland. Previously, widespread “wartime” rape was seen as a sort of side effect of an angry male invading force. Vetlesen cites sources indicating that in Bosnia‐Herzegovina and Croatia, some elements of the Yugoslav Army, Bosnian Serb forces, and the irregular Serbian militia (known as Chetniks) engaged in a process in which the irregulars would enter a village, rape several women of various ages in public, and then leave, allowing the news of the atrocities to spread throughout the area. Regular Serbian armed forces would then arrive and offer safe passage out of the area, warning of an imminent return of the perpetrators, which would result in mass migrations, leaving the abandoned villages to the Serbs. Where Serbian forces maintained concentration camps of non‐Serb prisoners, some females were raped until they were pregnant, then held beyond the time an abortion could be safely performed, and released, part of the Serbian bent logic being that a child fathered by a Serbian male would be born all‐Serb. Vetlesen approaches these topics carefully but thoroughly, always exploring the philosophical implications of the material but not flinching at the harsh realities.

In Chapter 5, Vetlesen introduces a third party to the perpetrator‐victim analysis: the bystander. In discussing responses to collective evil, he describes several types of bystanders, acknowledging a continuum of differences in proximity to the evildoing and pre‐existing relations with either the perpetrators or victims. He cites Keith Tester's thesis that the line between perpetrator and bystander becomes blurred when a bystander has knowledge of the atrocities and some capability of intervening, yet declines to do so. The actions and inactions of the international community in response to the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda are used to demonstrate this particularly sticky thicket of responsibility. It is here that Vetlesen takes his clearest stand, saying that leading Western diplomats, politicians, and military officers paid lip service to values of neutrality and balance instead of responding to the “unequivocal moral imperative” to intervene: “you do not negotiate with genocide because genocide is evil at its evilest” (p 235). A heretofore philosophical discussion moves smoothly into a description of specific political circumstances and policy decisions made by then‐President Clinton regarding Bosnia in the early 1990s, such as how the failed intervention in Somalia made intervention by U.S. military forces in Bosnia difficult if not impossible. It is Vetlesen's position that it is the responsibility of intellectuals to remain alert to the emergence of hate speech wherever it may occur and to sound the alarm so that bystanders may act to stop or prevent collective evil.

Vetlesen concludes in his final chapter with a “a political postscript” of his musings on globalization as a collective activity that may or may not be evil. It is the burden of the capitalists pursuing globalization to engage in a way that is not tantamount to the global production of injustice. It is here that he points out the irony that the intellectual relativism of Clinton which allowed the Bosnian genocide to be portrayed as a “civil war” between two parties whose claims must be balanced has given way to the post‐September 11 militant activism of President Bush. Vetlesen agrees that such terrorism as seen in the attacks of September 11 is evil, but he remains concerned that the military option will not address the structural injustice and constant humiliation that makes such terrorism popular in the Middle East. He is even‐handed in his analysis, pointing out that liberalism's emphasis on the autonomy of the individual provides no answer to how to tolerate the fact of being vulnerable to evil without engaging in evil.

Evil and Human Agency is published as part of the Cambridge Cultural Social Studies series, which includes 78 titles, published beginning in 1995, that address topics in Sociology, Political Science, and Philosophy and provide general cultural commentary. This book is written for an academic audience interested in philosophical scholarship, but may be read by the educated forensic mental health professional as an intellectually stimulating diversion from the one‐on‐one evil of daily practice. It's a bit like sitting in on a graduate course in the Philosophy of Ethics. Vetlesen guides the reader through a survey of the scholarship related to each topic, citing and briefly describing dozens of sources from Socrates to Augustine to Heidegger to Goldhagen. The tone can be very academic, but Vetlesen also writes with moral urgency. This is a comprehensive exploration of a particular type of evil, a topic about which the author cares deeply enough to treat fairly.

• American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law