But the argument I make in my New Yorker article is that it’s incomplete. A lot of the cruelty we do to one another, the real savage, rotten terrible things we do to one another, are in fact because we recognize the humanity of the other person.
We see other people as blameworthy, as morally responsible, as themselves cruel, as not giving us what we deserve, as taking more than they deserve. And so we treat them horribly precisely because we see them as moral human beings. [...]
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. I disagree that those things are “required.” I think a lot of mass killings unfold the way you described it: People do it because they don’t believe they’re killing people. This is what some call instrumental violence, where there’s some end they want to achieve, and people are in the way, so they don’t think of them as people. [...]
But our desire to do well socially can have an ugly side. If you can earn respect by helping people, that’s great. If you can earn respect by physically dominating people with aggression and violence, that’s destructive. So a lot depends on our social environment and whether it incentivizes good or bad behavior. [...]
Again, I think the banal answer is that we’re swayed by social circumstances in ways that might be good or bad. You and I would be completely different people if we lived in a maximum security prison, because we’d have to adapt. There are powerful individual differences that matter, though. People can transcend their conditions, but it’s rarer than we’d like to believe.
No comments:
Post a Comment