Nick Berg‘s executioners all too clearly enjoyed beheading him
By Theodore Dalrymple
(From The Telegraph, Filed: 13/05/2004)
One thing that unites the men who beheaded the American Nick Berg in Iraq, the soldiers who abused Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the Palestinians who have held on to Israeli body parts in Gaza City and the murderers of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan is that they all enjoyed what they did, and enjoyed it immensely.
There is almost no greater pleasure known to man than to commit great acts of cruelty in the belief that the cause of right and justice is being served. Anyone who has observed rioters will know that they are having a wonderful time: could there be a greater joy than vandalism with a social purpose?
I used to wonder how it was possible for ordinary men to commit evil acts, and to do so en masse. I was thinking of Nazi Germany at the time, but I might just as well have been thinking of the Soviet Union. More recently, we have the example of Rwanda, where perfectly ordinary people who had been living in apparent conditions of friendship with their neighbours suddenly turned on them and hacked them to death with machetes.
There are a few exceptional human beings who seem to delight in evil all their lives. It is as if there is some inherent or acquired defect in their brains that renders them unable to learn the decencies of life or conform themselves to the canons of civilised behaviour.
From the earliest age, they stand out by their capricious and cruel wilfulness. They delight in torturing animals, dousing them in kerosene and setting them alight, or putting them in the washing machine; they lie and cheat for preference, even when there is no advantage in doing so. They are indifferent to the opinions and sufferings of others, and never learn to modify their behaviour from their own experience.
They are what the 19th-century alienist J. C. Prichard called "morally insane‘‘: they are neither deluded nor hallucinated - they may even be of good intelligence - but they are incapable of internalising a moral code and of conforming their conduct to it.
Such people are comparatively rare. They might be called evil by nature, although whether someone who performs evil deeds because he is neurologically incapable of performing good ones can be blamed for his behaviour is a puzzle that I leave to the moral philosophers.
Such people are, in any case, few. In the course of my work, I meet them from time to time, and they make your blood run cold. But most evil is not committed by the morally insane, or psychopaths in the Hannibal Lecter mould: it is committed by ordinary people, the kind of people who pass you in the street every day.
My vision of humanity has darkened, not since I read about Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, which seemed to me exotic and distant, culturally and politically, but since I began to investigate the lives of ordinary British people in modern conditions. I have come to the conclusion that the default setting of man is to evil and that, if not all, then many or perhaps most men will commit evil if they can get away with it.
Where there is neither social nor legal pressure to behave decently, there will be a festival of evil. We have created a society in which often there is neither such pressure; as a consequence, I am confronted every day in my work by new evidence of man‘s propensity to evil, in the conduct of my patients or that of the people with whom they consort. The gratification that people derive from inflicting suffering on others is unmistakable. Furthermore, it is quite obvious that evil exerts a fascination and attraction for others who do not themselves indulge in it.
For example, it is clear that many young women prefer evil young men to decent ones. Indeed, they are attracted to men with evil written on their faces, as it often is. And the evil that these men do, the violence they commit, is often performed with a simulacrum of an excuse or moral pretext.
A man beats his girlfriend because he alleges that she is two-timing him, but really because there is no better way of keeping her in line, and because beating a defenceless woman is such fun. The sensation of a smashed glass meeting the face of a supposed or pretended enemy is balm to the soul of someone who feels himself to have been wronged all his life.
The experiments of the psychologist Stanley Milgram, published 30 years ago in a book entitled Obedience to Authority, showed how far ordinary people were prepared to inflict pain and even danger, in the form of a simulated electric shock, on a fellow citizen, merely at the behest of a stranger. They had no special reason to do so, beyond a desire to please the stranger and allegedly to further the cause of science.
Very few actually resisted; and if these ordinary people had had a cause for hatred, or had been persuaded that they had a cause for hatred (which often amounts to the same thing), of the person on whom they thought they were inflicting pain and suffering, such minimal resistance as they demonstrated would have evaporated. There is nothing they would not have done.
If the Kingdom of God is within you, so is the Kingdom of Evil. I know this from my experience of myself. When I was about nine, there were often ants‘ nests at the base of our house. I used to love pouring boiling water on the ants, seeing them transformed from living beings into little boiled black dots.
How easily I persuaded myself that, by killing them, I was defending our house, preventing it from being undermined! Yet even as I told myself this, I knew that it was the killing I loved, not the structure of our house.
Both self-examination and my experience of others tells me that evil lurks within all of us, waiting for its opportunity to spring. Civilisation may be a veneer, but it is the veneer that separates us from barbarism. Never forget Original Sin and its consequences.
Theodore Dalrymple is a prison doctor
