As I write these words, I am sitting on the deck overlooking acres of woodland behind my New England home. Two handsome red-tailed hawks have taken up residence in a tall tree, and, every once in a while, I see one swooping down to pick up some hapless mammal in its talons—a squirrel, a chipmunk, or a vole—carry it to its perch, tear the still-living creature to shreds, and gorge on its flesh. Closer to me, I see dragonflies flitting over the yard. It is a beautiful spectacle, but I know that these aerial acrobats are ferocious predators—tiny killing machines on the prowl for mosquitos and other insects to devour. And many of the mosquitos that the dragonflies eat are fat with blood drawn from the deer that roam the woods. Closer still, a team of tiny ants drags a writhing caterpillar across the decking boards by my feet. They will carry it to their nest, and consume it alive.
The natural world is anything but harmonious. It is wonderful and terrible, a place where life incessantly feeds upon life. Many animals depend on the flesh of others, and even the gentle herbivores dismember and devour plants. If plants could scream, their cries would be unrelenting. Some creatures have worked out cooperative relationships with their prey. Fruit-eaters are paid in calories for the job of spreading seeds. But for most of the rest, their existence demands destruction or exploitation. That is why Arthur Schopenhauer described nature as “a playground of tortured and anguish-ridden beings that endure only by eating one another, where consequently every vicious animal is the living grave of thousands of others, who only continue to exist by devouring each other … a chain of torturing deaths.” Or, as Philip Kitcher succinctly put it, “Suffering is not incidental to life but written into the script.”1 Violence is a condition of life.
Homo sapiens are no exception to this pattern. From deep in prehistory onward, we have taken the lives of other organisms for food, for protection, for materials such as animal hides and plant fibers for clothing, for wood, horn and bone to fashion tools and ornaments, and eventually for recreation, and we have ritually slaughtered them to please the bloodlust of our deities. In addition to all the killing, human beings have exploited the physiology and muscle power of nonhuman animals for thousands of years, using livestock as walking larders, producers of eggs and milk, pullers of the plow, and means of transportation.
We could not have gotten by without doing violence to other organisms. But it is equally true that we could not have gotten by as social animals without powerful restraints on violence against our own kind. For most social animals, striking the right balance between aggression and restraint does not present a problem because evolution has endowed them with a set of instincts to manage it. Chimpanzees are built not to kill other members of their troop and to relish the flesh of the colobus monkeys that they hunt. They do not have to wonder—and indeed are incapable of wondering—whether it is permissible to take the lives of others. They simply follow nature’s way. But we Homo sapiens are different. We are not as instinct-bound as even our closest primate relatives, and we are endowed with immensely greater behavioral flexibility than is available to other animals. We must make choices, and are driven to seek reasons to justify what we choose.
At some point in our species’ journey through time our ancestors were confronted with the conundrum of why it is allowable to do kill some living things but not others. They needed a rationalizing story—an explanation, however mythical, for the rules surrounding the act of killing. One such story, found among some foraging cultures today and which was probably common in our prehistoric, hunter-gatherer past, is that human hunters and their prey exist in a cooperative relationship. Animals present themselves to hunters because they want to killed. Killing an animal therefore fulfills its wishes, because the animal gives it is life rather than the hunter taking it.2 Religious studies scholar Graham Harvey writes,
In some places, one role and employment of shamans is the persuading of animals to allow themselves to be found by hunters and to give up their lives for the good of humans. That is, shamans persuade animals and humans that hunting and being hunted is sacrificial. Death is unwelcome and often meaningless. But sacrifice is sacramental, transcendent, above life. Therefore, shamans might learn how to find that which is hidden to other humans: animals at a distance. Once they know where suitable animals are, shamans often attempt to persuade the potential prey to meet the hunters and to give themselves up. Culturally appropriate forms of respect are offered, and further respectful acts are promised at and after death.3
In some versions, the souls of animals that are killed continue their existence in an afterlife and must be propitiated. In others, they are reincarnated as other animals in an endless cycle of death and rebirth.
Of course, every hunter really knows that animals try to avoid being killed and are terrified of those that seek to kill them. And every hunter knows and that an animal with a spear piercing its side suffers agonies before it dies. The idea that animals offer themselves as prey is an ideological construction to legitimate killing them. It is a system of belief with the function of benefiting one group—in this case, human communities—and the expense of another—in this case, the nonhuman animals that they kill and exploit. Although it may sound odd, beliefs like these have the function of oppressing animals. The term “oppression” might strike you as an inappropriate way to characterize our relationship with nonhuman organisms. Surely, you might think, it is a term that should only be applied to our relations with other human beings. But this way of thinking betrays a commitment to the hierarchical framework that I described in Chapter 9. The intuition that only humans can be oppressed rests on the deep and perhaps inescapable bias that we humans occupy a higher rank in the cosmic order than other sorts of living things.
At some point, perhaps with the advent of domestication, agriculture, and socially stratified societies—a different ideology of killing emerged, one that proved to be very powerful—so powerful, in fact, that it is still with us today. The idea of a natural hierarchy provided an elegant solution to the problem of interspecies violence. The legitimacy of doing violence to other living things came to be considered as a function of their rank on the Great Chain of Being. Antelopes may be killed and eaten because they are less than human, but killing and eating fellow community members is impermissible. Like the idea that animals offer themselves as prey, the Great Chain of Being is an ideology. It is a system of belief that was and is reproduced because it underwrites practices that systematically advantages human being by legitimating violence to other organisms.
This, I suggest, is why the idea of the Great Chain of Being became so widespread and why it has such a tenacious grip on the human imagination. Life feeds upon life, and the idea of a hierarchy of nature is a tool for legitimating those acts of violence that we depend upon to flourish and survive.
We are ultrasocial animals. There is no other primate—indeed, no other mammal—that is anywhere near as social as Homo sapiens are. And to thrive in the intensely social groups that we depend upon for our survival, we must have minds that are configured to be attuned to social interactions. Studies of the impact of solitary confinement on prisoners leave one in no doubt about its effects, which include “anxiety, withdrawal, hypersensitivity, ruminations, cognitive dysfunction, hallucinations, loss of control, irritability, aggression, rage, paranoia, hopelessness, a sense of impending emotional breakdown, self-mutilation, and suicidal ideation and behavior.”4 In fact, we are so strongly biased toward social interactions that we are inclined to see human beings that are not even there. “We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds;” David Hume observed, “and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good will to everything that hurts or pleases us.”5
Social animals must avoid lethal or near-lethal aggression against members of their communities because otherwise a communal is impossible. So, human ultrasociality constrains human-on-human violence. People the world over have a natural preference for smoothly flowing, cooperative behavior. “The basic tendency is for persons to get caught up in the mutual focus of attention,” writes sociologist Randall Collins, in his voluminous study of human violence, “and to become entrained in each other’s bodily rhythms and emotional tones.” Collins argues that
these processes are unconscious and automatic. They are also highly attractive; the most pleasurable kinds of human activity are where persons become caught in a pronounced micro-interactional rhythm: a smoothly flowing conversation to the beat of a common intonational punctuation; shared laughter; crowd enthusiasm; mutual sexual arousal. Ordinarily these processes constitute an interaction ritual bringing feelings of intersubjectivity and moral solidarity, at least for the present moment. Face-to-face conflict is difficult above all because it violates this shared consciousness and bodily-emotional entrainment.… There is a palpable barrier to getting into a violent confrontation. It goes against one’s physiological hard-wiring, the human propensity to become caught up in … rituals of solidarity.6
The extreme form of violent confrontation is physical violence, and its zenith is the act of killing. So, if Collins is right, the human preference for social solidarity must present a problem for motivating military combat. And it does. US Army historian S. L. A. Marshall made this very point in his immensely influential 1947 book Men against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command, which led to an overhaul of US military training. Marshall interviewed troops in the immediate aftermath of firefights and found that many infantrymen experienced difficulty firing their weapons. The problem was not mechanical. It was psychological. He claimed that these interviews convinced him soldiers all too often cannot bring themselves to use lethal force because “the average and normally healthy individual—the man who can endure the mental and physical stresses of combat—still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance to killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility.… At the vital point he becomes a conscientious objector, unknowing.”7 In Marshall’s view, a soldier’s psychological resistance to killing is the result of socialization:
He is what his home, his religion, his schooling, and the moral code and ideals of his society have made him. The Army cannot unmake him. It must reckon with the fact that he comes from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable. The fear of aggression has been expressed to him so strongly and absorbed by him so deeply and pervadingly—practically with his mother’s milk—that it is part of the normal man’s emotional make-up. This is his great handicap when he enters combat. It stays his trigger finger even though he is hardly conscious that it is a restraint upon him. Because it is an emotional rather than an intellectual handicap, it is not removable by intellectual reasoning, such as “Kill or be killed.”8
Marshall’s explanation of soldiers’ psychological resistance to killing accorded with the behaviorist orthodoxy of his day—the view that, apart from a few primitive reflexes, all human behavior is acquired by conditioning. But on the face of it, this explanation seems implausible. Children are rarely or ever taught not to kill others, and are certainly not rewarded for refraining from killing their playmates. And the evidence from developmental psychology points to infants being naturally cooperative and altruistic.9 Psychology professor and combat veteran David Grossman, who more than anyone else has brought Marshall’s ideas to a broader public, disagrees with Marshall’s explanation of why soldiers so often find it difficult to take the lives of others. He argues that the resistance to killing other people is innate. It is a resistance that is so great, Grossman asserts, “that it is often sufficient to overcome the cumulative influences of the instinct for self-protection, the coercive forces of leadership, the expectancy of peers, and the obligation to preserve the lives of comrades.”10
Although rich in insight, neither Marshall’s nor Grossman’s works are scholarly publications, and the evidence that they present is at best anecdotal. And Marshall’s claim about soldiers having difficulty firing has been strongly criticized. However, the broad contours of their thinking cohere well with the work of others. For example, Harry Holbert Turney-High, an anthropologist and expert on pre-state warfare, wrote about primitive humans’ “dread of taking enemy life, a feeling that if the life of a member of the we-group was precious, so was that of a member of the other-group. Fear of death-contamination has demanded expiation or purification among many folk.”11 The work of influential Austrian ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfelt provides another example. He argued that we Homo sapiens are fitted out with Tötungshemmungen—biologically based inhibitions against killing members of our species: “Human aggression is effectively held in check by a number of phylogenetic adaptations. In all cultures there is a marked inhibition against killing a fellow human being, and if it is desired to ignore it, as in war, for instance, special indoctrination is necessary if the sympathetic appeal of common humanity is to be disregarded. Sympathy as the subjective correlative of the inhibition on killing is felt in all cultures, and is everywhere released by the same signals. Thus inhibitions on aggression are innate in us.”12
Inhibitions on aggression are nicely described in a paper by psychologist Fiery Cushman and colleagues entitled “Simulating Murder,” which documents an experiment they conducted to determine whether the aversion to violence is entirely based on empathic concern for the victim or sometimes based on an aversion to the violent action itself. Subjects were asked to perform, and also to watch others perform, simulated violent acts. One was to take a hammer and forcefully whack the experimenter’s phony shin (the “shin” was really a plastic pipe in the experimenter’s empty pants leg). Another was to pick up a hefty rock and bring it down hard on a rubber hand protruding from an experimenter’s shirtsleeve. The third was to “shoot” the experimenter in the face with a realistic toy gun; the fourth was to “cut” the experimenter’s throat with a rubber knife, and the fifth was to smash a lifelike baby doll’s head against a table.
The psychologists monitored their subjects’ blood pressure and cardiac activity while these things were going on. They found that even though the participants knew full well that nobody was being hurt, they showed strong physiological signs of distress—especially when they performed the actions themselves rather than watching somebody else do them. The experiment demonstrated that it was the actions rather than their moral consequences that elicited aversion. Of course, this does not imply that our behavior is not influenced by worries about the harmful effects of what we might do, but it does imply that focusing on empathic concern does not tell us the whole story. In their conclusion, Cushman and his colleagues spell out that “a forceful, automatic aversive response to the surface properties of harmful actions may explain otherwise puzzling human behaviors. In battlefield behavior and hypothetical moral judgment, people resist doing direct harm despite explicit knowledge that it could save many lives. Similarly, in our study, people experienced a strong aversive response to performing pretend harmful actions despite the explicit knowledge that no harm would be caused. These cases highlight a dissociation between our explicit knowledge of the consequences of our actions and our automatic affective responses to actions.”13
These observations suggest that normal human beings are equipped with a psychological mechanism for regulating aggression that operates automatically, and is not subject to direct conscious control. It may be innate and genetically specified, it may be socially acquired, or it may be something that we are disposed to learn quickly and easily. The question of the origin of the mechanism is not important for this discussion. The point is that such a mechanism exists, and that it has the job of constraining interpersonal violence.
Several researchers have argued that overriding inhibitions against violence can be psychologically harmful. For instance, Grossman writes that “looking another human being in the eye, making an independent decision to kill him, and watching as he dies due to your action combine to form the most basic, important, primal, and potentially traumatic occurrence of war.”14 Psychologist Rachel McNair concurs. She argues that the act of killing often leads to severe traumatic stress, which she calls “perpetration-induced traumatic stress,” that can lead to mental disorder. This sort of trauma is nowadays often called “moral injury.” The idea is that killing in combat causes psychological harm because it violates deeply held moral beliefs and elicits immensely powerful feelings of guilt and shame.
The notion of moral injury is related to what genocide scholars sometimes call “perpetrator abhorrence,” “perpetrator disgust,” or “perpetrator trauma.”15 These are names for the abject horror that perpetrators sometimes feel about their own actions. Perpetrator abhorrence is linked to the moral injury thesis because the former is often interpreted as an effect of what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls “the impact of primeval moral drives.”16 According to this way of looking at the matter, genocidal killers have explicit ideological beliefs which coexist with and contradict their deeper, implicit belief that taking human life is wrong. Perpetrator abhorrence occurs when this deeper awareness bubbles to the surface, and causes them to recoil in horror from their own actions. Holocaust scholar Christopher Browning provides a vivid example of perpetrator abhorrence in the testimony of the pseudonymous Franz Kastenbaum, a German who took part in mass executions of Jews in Poland during World War II. Kastenbaum recalled,
The shooting of the men was so repugnant to me that I missed the fourth man. It was simply no longer possible for me to aim accurately. I suddenly felt nauseous and ran away from the shooting site. I have expressed myself incorrectly just now. It was not that I could no longer aim accurately, rather the fourth time I intentionally missed. I then ran into the woods, vomited, and sat down against a tree. To make sure that no one was nearby, I called loudly into the woods, because I wanted to be alone. Today I can say that my nerves were totally finished. I think that I remained alone in the woods for some two to three hours.17
Browning attributes these reactions to Kastenbaum’s struggle with his moral sensibilities. But others, such as political scientist Daniel Goldhagen, deny that morality plays any role at all in such reactions. Goldhagen argues that the feelings of horror that experienced by people like Kastenbaum are often better understood as “aesthetic revulsion at the ghastliness of the scene.” Being disturbed by “the exploded skulls, the flying blood and bone, the sight of so many freshly killed corpses of their own making” is quite different from being morally opposed to implementing atrocities.18 There is something to be said for Goldhagen’s objection. Perpetrators of atrocity who report being disturbed by the horrific acts that they performed or participated in very often do not describe suffering from feelings of guilt or remorse. Their reaction often consists of physical symptoms such as vomiting or trembling, dissociation, or feelings of horror—and horror is not a moral emotion. But saying that these responses are merely aesthetic does not explain very much. If people are intensely repelled by “the exploded skulls, the flying blood and bone, the sight of so many freshly killed corpses of their own making” there must be some reason why this is the case. There must be something about such scenes that triggers this response.
Goldhagen’s comment about freshly killed corpses of their own making points to something more than aesthetics being involved, as the cause of something has no bearing on its aesthetic properties. Further, his explanation ignores similar reactions to the act of killing, which precedes any repugnant effects.
Neither of the two explanations of perpetrator abhorrence—moral reservations or aesthetic repugnance—seems to be entirely satisfactory, even though both probably do play a role. Hannah Arendt alluded to a third way to make sense of perpetrator abhorrence. She did not describe the horror as merely aesthetic, and she did not attribute it to the Nazi killers’ moral conscience. Instead, she stated that in order to accomplish their genocidal goal, Nazis had to “overcome not so much their conscience but the animal pity by which all men are affected in the presence of physical suffering,” which she characterized as an “instinctive reaction.”19 I take her to mean that this is an automatic, premoral response to physical suffering, albeit one that can be disabled or suppressed, and can be at odds with a person’s moral convictions.
So far, we have been looking only at individual psychology. But certain cultural beliefs, practices, and institutions also provide compelling evidence about attitudes to killing. Their details vary from place to place and from time to time, but all of them are variations on the idea that the act of killing contaminates the killer, who is in danger of becoming ill, going insane, or harming his community unless he is purified. Turney-High pointed this out as early as 1949, but there has been relatively little serious consideration of its implications since then. The fact that these ideas and practices have been very widespread, and have been taken so seriously—even in highly militaristic cultures that glorify the warrior—says something about the anxieties that suffuse the act of killing.
The idea that killing makes the killer unclean goes back thousands of years to the ancient world. Biblical scholar Jason A. Riley remarks, “Postbattle purification rituals for human warriors, including those intended to purify warriors from defilement, are commonly attested throughout the ancient near east and beyond.”20 In the Old Testament, Moses requires warriors who had slaughtered Midianite men, women, and children to cleanse themselves: “Camp outside the camp seven days; whoever of you has killed any person or touched a corpse, purify yourselves and your captives on the third and on the seventh day. You shall purify every garment, every article of skin, everything made of goats’ hair, and every article of wood.”21 In a gloss of this passage, Susan Niditch writes, “The very act of killing in war renders the Israelite soldier unclean. He too must be purified before resuming his life as a whole member of the people of Israel. In this way, a late-Biblical ideology of war acknowledges the humanity of the enemy whose death tears the ordinary fabric of the Israelite universe even while insisting on the necessity of eliminating the impure ‘Other.’ ”22
Other ancient cultures had similar views. The Greeks believed that the act of homicide could produce a highly contagious kind of pollution called, in English, miasma (from the Greek miainein—“to pollute”), which could infect anyone in the killer’s proximity. This is why they held murder trials in the open air and required exiled murderers to plead their case from a boat to judges sitting on the shore. Anyone who was contaminated with miasma had undergo ritual purification “catharsis.” If they were not cleansed, or if the lustration was unsuccessful, they were in danger of going mad.23
I am not aware of any evidence that the Greeks thought that killing in battle attracted the dreaded miasma, but there is ample evidence that the Romans did. Romans held that returning soldiers needed to be spiritually cleansed, and they instituted a public ceremony for this purpose. On October 19, at the conclusion of the fighting season, the entire Roman army underwent “purification (or disinfection) from the taint of bloodshed.”24
The Roman idea that killing in combat stains the soul continued into the European middle ages. The philosopher Bernard Verkamp notes that medieval Christians “generally assumed that warriors returning from battle would or should be feeling guilty and ashamed for all the wartime killing they had done. Far from having such feelings dismissed as insignificant or irrelevant, returning warriors were encouraged to seek resolution of them through rituals of purification, expiation, and reconciliation. To accommodate these latter needs, religious authorities of the period not infrequently imposed various and sundry penances on returning warriors, depending on the kind of war they had been engaged in, the number of their killings, and the intention with which they had been carried out.”25 For example, the eleventh-century decree set out by Norman bishops specifying penances for knights who had fought with William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings required any knight who had killed an enemy combatant to do penance for a year, or for forty days if he did know whether the person survived the injuries that he inflicted on them. Those who lost track of how many people they killed had to do penance one day a week for the rest of their lives.26
Leaving Europe, there were similar beliefs among many indigenous American cultures. For example, Maricopa warriors returning home from military expeditions forced themselves to vomit because of having been exposed to “enemy sickness” which they needed to expel, and then spent twenty days undergoing purification.27 After battle, Mohave warriors isolated themselves in their houses to undergo purification rituals that involved dietary restrictions and daily bathing. Their families and captives were also ritually cleansed to prevent the spread of fatal illness.28 The Gila River Pima considered killing an enemy to be such a spiritually dangerous act that warriors withdrew from battle the moment they killed, to begin sixteen days of purification.29 Similar beliefs and practices were common in Africa. For instance, the Zulu believed that a man who had killed was in fatal danger of contracting iZembe, a disease that could result in insanity. He was required to undergo purification, and be subject to certain restrictions for the rest of his life.30 Thonga warriors believed that the vengeful spirits of those whom they had killed could make them ill or drive them mad, and that elaborate ritual procedures were required to protect them.31 These are just a few examples of very many that can be culled from the anthropological literature.
There is an obvious relationship between the resistance to killing in combat, the destructive psychological consequences of overriding inhibitions against killing, and cultural beliefs that killing contaminates and endangers the killer and their entire community. And all three of these factors make sense in light of the ultrasocial character of our species. However, all of this leaves us with an explanatory puzzle. If human beings have such a powerful aversion to acts of violence, then how does this square with the fact that we indulge in them so frequently?
Being the clever primates that we are, we are able to recognize that group-on-group violence often promises advantages—appropriating the resources of one’s neighbors, enslaving and exploiting them, securing territory, and so on. Consequently, our ancestors developed and refined cultural practices that selectively disable inhibitions against performing acts of violence. One is the use of disinhibiting, mind-altering drugs prior to combat.32 Another is the use of rituals, often involving rhythmic, dancing, drumming and chanting, to induce altered states of consciousness in the warrior.33 Yet another involves religious ideologies, such as the promise of an eternity in paradise. But the most effective methods for liberating lethal violence are those that create distance between the aggressors and their victims.34 Some distancing techniques create perceptual distance that shields the aggressor from the sights, sounds, and smells that would spark perpetrator abhorrence. One way to do this is by using long-range weapons. Progress in military technology, from the fourteenth-century longbow to today’s Hellfire missiles, have made killing easier and less traumatic for combatants. Another method is to insulate the killer’s sense organs from the stimuli that normally activate inhibitions. Chief among these is the sight of the human face—especially, the experience of looking into another person’s eyes. The human face is by far the richest source of social information and the most intimate channel of connection between people, so it is not surprising that faces are especially significant for us. Even tiny infants preferentially gaze at faces. Our brains are equipped with cognitive systems that are specialized for visually processing facial information. Unlike other animals, that avoid eye contact with one another, we seek out the eyes of others when interacting with them.35 When we gaze into a person’s eyes, we cannot help responding to that person as a human being. We cannot help but see them as human—to automatically regard the face’s bearer as one of our own kind.36 Hence, the sight of the human face is a very powerful inhibitor of aggression, and avoiding or obscuring victims’ faces can block this response. “The essence of the whole physical distance spectrum may simply revolve around the degree to which the killer can see the face of the victim,” Grossman explains. “The eyes are the windows of the soul, and if one does not have to look into the eyes while killing, it is much easier to deny the humanity of the victim.”37 This is exemplified by the practice of hooding or blindfolding a person during their execution. It was also a feature of the Holocaust. The mass shootings of Jews by German Einsatzgruppen and police battalions were psychologically devastating for many of the killers, resulting in what they called Seelenbelastung (“burdening of the soul”), as well as physical reactions such as vomiting, trembling, and severe psychosomatic symptoms.38 Some of these men refused to participate in the killing, and when an infuriated Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, decided to witness a mass execution at Minsk, he himself found it unbearable. According to SS general Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Himmler “was extremely nervous. He couldn’t stand still. His face was white as cheese, his eyes went wild and with each burst of gunfire he always looked at the ground.” On this occasion, two women were forced to lay down on the ground to be shot in the back of the head, but the shooters were so shaken that even at close range they missed and injured them. Himmler panicked and screamed, “Don’t torture these women! Fire! Hurry up and kill them!” Bach-Zelewski then said to him, “Look at the men, how deeply shaken they are! Such men are finished for the rest of their lives!”39
It was the horror of this form of killing that led Himmler to explore alternative methods of mass murder. Inspired by the techniques that were developed for killing disabled people, the Nazis developed other means for mass extermination, beginning with carbon monoxide vans and ending in the gas chambers. These methods relied on avoiding any encounter that might lead perpetrators to respond to their victims as human beings. Tzvetan Todorov observes that “all possible measures were taken in the concentration camps to ensure that face-to-face encounters did not occur, to prevent the executioner from meeting his victim’s gaze. Only an individual can look at us.… By avoiding his gaze, we can all the more easily ignore him as a person. In recognizing the other, even the most hardened individual risks moments of weakness.” Todorov continues, “The gas chambers were invented to avoid this kind of ‘human’ reaction, to which even Himmler and Eichmann were not immune, and to keep the members of the Einsatzkommandos, who shot prisoners by the thousands, from losing their minds. Once the machine had replaced the man, the executioner could avoid all contact with the victim.”40
In a similar vein, criminologist Nestar Russell discusses in detail how Nazi executioners managed to distance themselves from their victims. Bizarre as it might sound, senior Nazis, including Himmler and Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, spoke of the importance of exterminating Jews “humanely.” As Russell notes, “The Nazi regime’s pursuit of a method of killing capable of destroying large numbers of civilians gradually moved in a direction that allowed German perpetrators to emotionally distance themselves from their victims. By the time Crematorium II was completed at Auschwitz, the Germans most directly involved in the killing process need not touch, see, or hear their victims die.”41
However, physical distancing can only take one so far. Mass violence inevitably involves some measure of person-to-person contact—some awareness that one is extinguishing the lives of human beings. Psychological distancing then becomes a second line of defense against perpetrator abhorrence. We can see it at work in Himmler’s response to the horrific mass killing described above. After he regained his composure, Himmler gathered the men around him and made a speech, which Bach-Zelewski paraphrased:
They surely had noticed that even he was revolted by this bloody activity and had been aroused to the depth of his soul. But he too was obeying the highest law by doing his duty and he was acting from a deep understanding of the necessity of this operation. We should observe nature: everywhere there was war, not only among human beings, but also in the animal and plant worlds. Whatever did not want to fight was destroyed.… Primitive man said that the horse is good, but the bug is bad, or wheat is good but the thistle is bad. Humans characterize that which is useful to them as good, but that which is harmful as bad.
His final comment is especially significant. “Don’t bugs, rats and other vermin have a purpose in life to fulfill?” Himmler continued, “But we humans are correct when we defend ourselves against vermin.” This was not the only time that Himmler compared Jews to bugs. It was a popular Nazi trope. For instance, in a 1943 speech he said, “Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness, which now will soon have been dealt with. We shall soon be deloused. We have only 20,000 lice left and then the matter is finished within the whole of Germany.”42
Dehumanization is a powerful way of creating psychological distance. It does this by creating conceptual, rather than perceptual, distance. And it can motivate violence rather than simply disinhibit it. Describing Jews as vermin does not just render violence against them permissible. It encourages their extermination. Appallingly, Zyklon B—the poison gas used in the killing chambers of the camps—was originally developed as an agent for exterminating lice.