Violence, Morality, and Religion

Abstract

If the theory of evolution has taught us anything, it is that most species become extinct, and that there is no guarantee that this will not be as true of the human species as it has been of the overwhelming majority of other ones—from the dinosaurs to our closest cousins in the genus Homo, to Neanderthals and others. That is one reason it is important to ask: what are the main sources of risk in the contemporary world to our continued survival?We believe that the largest and most immediate risk today is the human propensity to engage in acts of violence, such as the wars and genocides by means of which we now have the power to destroy all human life, if not all life, on earth— particularly given that several of the nations currently in possession of thermonuclear and other weapons of mass destruction are led by rulers of questionable sanity, rationality, and morality. We include in this group not only the most obvious examples, the United States and North Korea (both of whose leaders have questioned the hitherto existing absolute prohibition on the first use of such weapons), but also Pakistan, India, Israel, and Russia—in all of which their leaders have made plain their willingness to commit military aggression, mass murder, violations of international law, and if necessary, war and genocide, in order to consolidate their own political power. We now have the power to destroy all humanThat is why we believe that the most important and critical task facing us today is to learn how to understand the causes and prevention of violence. But the moment we attempt to do that, we are faced with a paradox: the main institutions we have invented in our endeavor to prevent or at least minimize human violence have been morality and religion—that is, moral and religious value judgments, commandments, and belief systems—but the most deadly violence has always been committed in the name of morality and religion. That has been true from the dawn of human history, when the ancient Israelites were commanded by their God to slaughter every man, woman, and child of neighboring tribes, to the Crusades, pogroms, and religious wars of the Middle Ages and the early modern era. This extends to the contemporary world, in which the violence associated with traditional religions has been supplemented by that committed in the name of pseudo-secular “political religions,” such as nationalism and totalitarianism (culminating not only in the most extensive genocide ever committed but also in what has been called “the collective suicide of Europe”).How can we understand this? And more importantly, what can we do about it? We are doomed to self-extinction if the only means of preventing the violence we are capable of inventing is to simply stimulate it further. And yet, that pessimistic description does seem to fit every method we have devised for rescuing us, or enabling us to liberate ourselves, from our own species-destructive inclinations.This article will be devoted to explaining how we can escape from that trap by learning enough about the causes of violence to see how our traditional notions of morality and religion have stimulated rather than inhibited violence, and to showing how transcending those notions, to the degree and in the contexts in which we have done so, has enabled us to succeed in preventing violence.Public intellectuals, activists, academics, and spiritual leaders can have important roles to play in this analysis and struggle. The real transformation will have to be a creative one—a response by ordinary Americans and people around the world involved through the “praxis” and experience of healing, radical love, and tikkun olam—repair of the world. A movement is envisioned here that, without limiting itself to any one existing religion, would express and build on an inclusive spiritual vision that has been the common wisdom of humanity for much of recorded history.The senior author has engaged in this research by using prisons as his social-psychological laboratories, so to speak, in which to learn about the causes and prevention of violence. What he discovered, in the course of directing mental health programs in Massachusetts prisons and elsewhere, was that when he would ask violent offenders why they had assaulted or even killed someone, he would almost always get the same answer: “Because he (or she) disrespected me (or my mother, wife, friend, etc.).” In fact, they used that word so often that they abbreviated it into the slang term, “He dis’ed me.” It occurred to him that when people used a word so often that they abbreviated it, it told you something about how central it was in their moral and emotional vocabulary. From this (and multiple other), observations he hypothesized that a central cause of violence might be the feeling of being disrespected— or in other words, dishonored, disdained, disgraced, demeaned, shamed, insulted, humiliated, or subjected to any other of the many synonyms for what psychoanalysts call “narcissistic injuries,” such as being rejected, ridiculed, defeated, or treated with contempt as someone who is inferior or inadequate.But as soon as he thought he had discovered something original about the causes of violence, he was reminded that the Bible had gotten there long before he did. He had never understood until then what had caused the first recorded murder in the history of Western civilization. But then he realized that the first book of Genesis explains very clearly why Cain killed Abel: “God had respect unto Abel and his offering, but unto Cain and his offering, God had not respect.” In other words, God “dis’ed” Cain; or rather, Cain was dis’ed because of Abel, and he took his rage out on Abel in the same way that the murderers with whom he was working had done with their victims.Then he discovered that the same insight was later recorded by many of the greatest thinkers in our tradition, from Aristotle to Aquinas to Hegel—that assaults are motivated or caused by the feeling of being “slighted” by others and treated as insignificant or unimportant. Furthermore, evidence supporting this hypothesis has been published in our own day by researchers in every single branch of the human sciences—social, clinical, and experimental psychology, clinical psychoanalysis, forensic psychiatry, criminology, sociology, cultural anthropology, and even the research arms of law-enforcement agencies such as the FBI.Before the senior author, a psychiatrist, first entered a prison, he had been taught that the violent criminals he would encounter there had behaved as they had because they were simply amoral nihilists—that they had never developed a moral value system or a concept of moral rules and obligations. What he discovered instead, from the time he first began interrogating violent men, was that he had never met people who were so preoccupied with moral issues. They could hardly talk about anything else. They made it clear that they would willingly go to their own deaths in order to stand up for their version of what was right and wrong. And those were not just idle words, threats or boasts. They would actually behave accordingly, and provoke the guards or their fellow inmates to beat or kill them because of their fight to achieve what they perceived as justice. The only difference between their moral rhetoric and that of most non-criminals was that they perceived themselves to be the victims of injustice, rather than as the perpetrators of it.The ideas through which people perceive and think about their world involve an interpretation of their own situations—the causes and legitimacy that help explain and justify their actions. Their ways of thinking and judging are part of a social and cultural context that shapes behavior, and explains why people sometimes defy what others regard as legitimate authority. The “culture of violence” within prisons provides them with multiple justifications for violent action, and becomes the social resource through which they may express and act on the multitude of ideas and emotions that they are experiencing, including in this case ideas of social justice and the violent behaviors that flow from these concepts.That brings us to the moral emotion that these men almost always lacked the capacity for: guilt. That is, they were hypersensitive to being shamed by others, but pathologically incapable of feelings of guilt and remorse for having hurt someone else. This contrast is so sharp that it can be summarized in the formula: people feel shame when they perceive themselves as being victims of injustice which in turn stimulates hate toward others and self- indulging, self-aggrandizing egotism and egocentrism; but, they are likely to feel guilt when they perceive themselves as the perpetrators of injustice, which stimulates self- hate, and self-punishment, as well as self-sacrificing altruism. Freud said once that no one feels guiltier than the saints—and he was right. That is why they are saints: because they feel too guilty to harm others or fail to help those who are in need. But the senior author concluded that the opposite was true of a population that Freud never studied: no one feels more innocent than the criminals. That is why they are criminals: because they lack the capacity for the feelings of guilt and remorse that would stop the rest of us from committing serious violence toward someone else, no matter how deeply we felt he or she had shamed or insulted us.These considerations led the senior author to conclude (as many moral philosophers also have) that there is not just one morality, or one set of definitions as to what constitutes good or evil, justice or injustice. There are two different sets of moral value judgments and commandments, and they are diametrical opposites, for they are caused or motivated by two diametrically opposite, or antagonistic, moral emotions: shame and guilt. For shame-motivated ethical value systems and commandments, the worst evil is shame, and the highest good is pride, the opposite of shame. For guilt-motivated ethics, the worst evil is guilt or sin, the worst sin is pride (it is called the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins in the guilt-ethic of Christianity), and the highest good is the opposite of guilt, namely innocence. But that is a state that is achieved and maintained not by means of self-aggrandizement, but by the opposite: humility, self-effacement, unselfishness, all of which are perceived by the holders of a shame-ethic as self-humiliation.Nietzsche called shame-ethics “Master Morality” and guilt-ethics “Slave Morality.” Master Morality is the moral value system that justifies, and indeed commands, its followers to be the masters of slaves (or other “inferiors”—women, children, ethnic or religious groups, the weak, the poor, etc.). Slave Morality is the ethic that orders one to accept being a slave—“resist not evil,” “turn the other cheek,” “love and forgive those who harm you,” etc. Thus a central commandment of a guilt-ethic is “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” But an equally central commandment of a shame-ethic is “Thou Shalt Kill”—for by doing so you prove how tough, dominant, powerful, and courageous you are.That is why behavioral violence is most common and destructive among those who perceive themselves as being treated as (or worse yet, as actually being) inferior, weak, failures, rejected, ridiculed, etc. That is why the kinds of violence that are defined as criminal in our society, such as murder, are committed most commonly by those who are shamed by being assigned to an inferior status in our hierarchical social class and race groupings—namely, those who are poor, unemployed, uneducated, or members of minority groups that are subjected to systematic shaming and being treated as inferior.There is another form of violence that is the main cause of behavioral violence, however, that up to now has actually killed far more people than all the different forms of behavioral violence put together. That is what the Scandinavian social scientist Johan Galtung and the “liberation theologians” of Latin America have called “structural violence,” meaning the increased death rates among the poor in societies whose social and economic structures divide the population into rich and poor. The politicians and their supporters who maintain these structures are, of course, not considered criminals and are not subjected to cruel punishments, as the poor are when they commit their far less deadly forms of violence.The senior author was able to demonstrate empirically that the application of these social and psychological principles can enable us to prevent violence. For example, one of the most direct and effective means for overcoming shame and elevating self-esteem is through education, the acquisition of knowledge and skills that one can respect in oneself and that elicit respect from others. Thus it was no surprise when he asked what program in the prison mental health service that he directed had been most effective in preventing recidivism, or reoffending, after prisoners were discharged back into the community. He found that only one program had been successful in preventing a return to any prison in the country over a 25-year period: namely, the acquisition of a college degree while in prison. Over that entire length of time, more than 200 murderers and rapists had attained at least a B.A., and not one had been returned to prison. (The nationwide average for recidivism is 65% within three years of release from prison.)When he was able to engage in a more rigorously designed violence-prevention experiment with violent men in the jails of San Francisco, he and his colleagues found that an intensive, multi-dimensional group of well-designed educational and therapeutic programs was able to reduce the rate of violence within the jails from war-zone levels to zero for up to a year at a time; and to reduce the rate of violent re-offending by 83%, compared with an otherwise identical “control group” in an ordinary jail. In fact, this program was so successful that it received a major national prize for “innovations in American governance” from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in a competition among 800 nominees from around the country. It has been adapted for use in several other cities, states, and nations.One thing that is important to recognize here is that while the development of the capacity for feelings of guilt and remorse and the guilt-ethics that they motivate can reduce the rate of killing or harming others, this alone does not solve the problem of human violence. While guilt-feelings inhibit violence and the infliction of pain or punishment toward others, they stimulate violence and punishment toward the self, as in moral masochism, fears of success, and at the extreme, suicide. For example, while African-Americans in our racially discriminatory society are several times more likely than whites to commit homicides, whites are several times more likely to commit suicide than Black people are. And yet, this is the one form of violence that kills people just as effectively as the other one does. In fact, in America and all other developed nations, many more people kill themselves than kill others.The question of why people commit violence in different ways goes to the heart of the need for more attention to be directed at the possible forms that violent behavior and social change might take. The enormous differences between societies around the world in their rates of both individual and collective violence constitute repeated empirical demonstrations that violence can be prevented, and societies structured differently and more peacefully.The desire to wipe out or ward off shame can also motivate suicide, but when it does so, its meaning and purpose is not to punish oneself (which is what people do to reduce their guilt feelings). Rather, it is a last resort that is turned to when it is perceived as the only means by which to stop others from shaming oneself—as when a criminal or soldier has been disarmed and therefore cannot continue to ward off shame by killing others. Many prison suicides are of this nature, as were the ritual suicides of defeated Samurai aristocrats in feudal Japan who could avoid the shame of being killed in a shame-inducing way, like common soldiers, only by proving their courage by killing themselves. Antony and Cleopatra, likewise, killed themselves in order to avoid the shame of being paraded through the streets of Rome in Augustus’s victory celebration; as did Hitler, to avoid the shame of being prosecuted in an open court by the Allies who had defeated him (as he said, it was better to be a dead Achilles than a living dog).These examples raise the question: is collective military or political violence, from war to terrorism, caused by the same motive that causes individual/interpersonal violence, such as murder? We believe it is, but with this difference: interpersonal violence is caused by feeling that one has been shamed (e.g., disrespected) as an individual by another individual. Collective violence is caused by the feeling that the group with which one identifies oneself has been shamed, as a group, by another group, whether or not one has been shamed individually. For example, Hitler was elected to power on the campaign promise to “undo the shame of Versailles,” i.e., the shame and dishonor to which he felt the entire German nation had been subjected by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. That Hitler also felt shamed as an individual, by his poverty and academic failure as a youth, is true (as he himself illustrates repeatedly in his autobiography), but it was his obsession with what he called Germany’s shame that connected him with the millions of his countrymen who apparently felt the same way.Osama bin Laden, in fact, did not even suffer from poverty. As one of the richest men in the Middle East, he possessed a powerful bulwark against individual shame. His motive for organizing the suicidal/homicidal airplane crashes of 9/11 was, as he put it in his first public statement on the subject, payback for the “80 years of humiliation and contempt” to which he felt “the entire Islamic nation” had been subjected by the nations of the West (presumably referring to the humiliating defeat and dismemberment of the last of the great Islamic empires, the Ottoman). And indeed, there is a virtually unanimous consensus among students of terrorism that the desire to undo or prevent the collective shaming and humiliating of the group with which one identifies is the main emotional motive of that form of violence—whether the terrorist group is Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, a Japanese cult, or whatever.On the other hand, while individual violence or murder has been with us, relatively unchanged, since Cain and Abel, there is something unique and unprecedented about the suicide-bombings of today, which is one reason they are so shocking, incomprehensible, and terrifying. They appear to violate all previous principles of political and military violence in their apparent irrationality and self-destructiveness. Because suicide is an inextricable component of this form of violence, it cannot be deterred, as all previous violence had been assumed to be, by credible threats of retaliatory violence and punishment.Since violence, like all behavior, is ultimately a product of the mind, this uniquely modern form of violence must be a product of the modern mind. If all violence has the same affective cause—the wish to eliminate feelings of shame and humiliation—how is the cognitive cause of violence different now from what it was in the past? In other words, how is the modern mind different from the mind of the premodern world?That brings us to what we consider the main problem created by “modernity,” by which we mean the transition from the medieval worldview that was the dominant cognitive structure in Western civilization (or “Christendom”) from the end of the Roman Empire, to the modern scientific mentality that was created by the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. The medieval worldview was summarized in St. Augustine’s formula “Credo ut intelligam” (I believe in order to understand). That meant that if you wanted to understand why, how, and by whom we and the world were created, and how we should live, you had to begin by believing in the Revelation contained in the Bible, which contained explanations of all those matters. Indeed, as Lucien Febvre and other historians of mentalites have demonstrated, it was essentially impossible for virtually anyone in premodern Europe (up to the 16th century) not to believe in God and the Bible. However, with the Scientific Revolution, all those assumptions were challenged, and in effect reversed. As the first modern philosopher (or the first philosopher of modernity), Descartes, put it, “De omnibus dubitandum est” (Everything is doubtable; or, doubt everything). In other words, knowledge does not begin in faith, it begins in doubt. The very motto of science as we would summarize it is “take nothing on faith: believe only those hypotheses that have been confirmed by empirical evidence and data, or in other words, by experience. And believe in them even then only tentatively, provisionally, and temporarily, until they are refuted by discrepant data or a hypothesis with greater explanatory and predictive power.”This destruction of faith and its replacement by doubt led ineluctably to what Nietzsche famously called the “Death of God” (which entailed the death of the Devil as well). What is often overlooked in this scenario is an inextricably linked event that has been just as unsettling and disorienting as the Death of God (and the Devil), namely, the Death of Good and Evil, the abstractions of which God and the Devil are the personifications—in short, the Death of Morality. As Nietzsche said, he was describing not just the death of God, but also the advent of moral nihilism—the complete absence of any moral standards or beliefs.But people cannot live in a state of complete moral nihilism, that is, a complete vacuum in the sphere of our thinking that philosophers call “practical reason”—the sphere that asks and answers questions concerning how to live and what to do. As Kenneth Tynan put it, Hell is not the triumph of evil, it is the absence of any moral standards at all. For we cannot avoid making decisions and choosing between different alternatives and we need some coherent, organized cognitive mechanism for deciding what is better and what is worse. Until we have been able to evolve an internal behavioral self-guidance system that is more effective in preventing violence than our hitherto existing forms of morality are, we have an absolute need for one or another of these two moralities.This dilemma of modernity that had been created by the Scientific Revolution was illustrated with utmost clarity at the very beginning of that revolution by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who has been called the first modern personality. For in the play of that name Shakespeare shows how the coming to awareness of the subjectivity of moral value judgments, and the subsequent inability to think of them as objectively real, true, and knowable, absolutely paralyzes Hamlet and makes it impossible for him to act coherently or in an organized way. Hamlet describes the death of the belief that good and evil are objective realities that exist independently of our subjective thoughts and preferences when he says “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” His paralysis in the face of this collapse of belief in the validity and independent reality and existence of morality is simply unviable: it leads directly to his death and the deaths of those around him.John Donne, writing at almost exactly the same time, expressed the same thought: “The new philosophy” (meaning modern science) “calls all into doubt”—including the prohibitions against both parricide and regicide. The history of ideas from that time to the present can be understood only by recognizing that every one of the greatest thinkers and writers of the past four centuries has been wrestling, mostly unsuccessfully, with what we have called here the Death of Morality. For example, even Kant, who is usually thought of as the greatest defender of morality in the past two centuries, acknowledged that we simply cannot know whether good and evil exist. In the generation immediately following his, Georg Buchner, the inventor of modern tragedy, has his anti-hero Woyzeck exclaim “When God goes, everything goes.” By the time Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov, he describes Ivan’s Hamlet-like paralysis by having him protest repeatedly that without God, anything is possible, everything is permitted—which makes it virtually impossible for him to act at all. A generation or two after that, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, Wittgenstein, wrote that it is impossible for there to be ethical propositions, and that “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.”We could fill several volumes with quotations of this sort but we believe our point has been made: the greatest and most destructive hitherto unsolved dilemma of the modern era has been the loss of faith in morality—that is, the awareness that belief in the validity of any given moral value system can only be based on faith, not knowledge, since it is impossible to know what is good or evil, or to know why we should be good rather than evil. And yet, we live in a post-faith world, one in which the cognitive structure of the modern mind is constructed according to the scientific model of universal doubt. Hence we not only cannot know what is moral or immoral, we cannot even have faith in the answers we try to give to moral questions. We can meaningfully ask and answer questions only concerning what is, not what ought to be (as Hume famously observed)—in other words, questions and answers that can be framed and confirmed or disconfirmed in empirical terms by means of data and evidence, as matters of fact rather than value.Until we have learned how to do that in the sphere of practical reason, we are left with a cognitive vacuum that is unviable. Human nature hates a cognitive vacuum. And because of the absolute necessity of filling that vacuum after the death of God and religion had led to the death of morality as well, the nations who were undergoing that crisis (which initially included only those of Europe, since that is where the Scientific Revolution began) invented a whole series of pseudo-political, pseudo-secular religions disguised as politics, or in other words, political religions. The first of these ideologies, which was a product of the European Enlightenment of the 18th century, was created in its most complete form during the French Revolution, when the principals of that event expelled the Church from Notre Dame Cathedral and replaced it with virtually identical rituals and liturgies celebrating, worshipping, and even sacrificing themselves to, not God and religion, but the nation and the people.As Simon Schama explained, “Talleyrand was well aware of the need to provide some kind of inspirational revolutionary religion that could draw on the same emotive and even mystical passions on which the Catholic Church relied, to bind the faithful to the Revolution.”1 As Hans Kohn puts it, to many intellectuals and writers, “nationality appeared as ‘sacred,’ as the source of morality” 2—effectively putting the nation into the position previously occupied by God. Hegel was even more explicit and sweeping in his assertions that “The state is the march of God in the world . . . the State is the Divine idea as it exists on Earth . . . Man must therefore venerate the state as the divine on earth.” He referred to the state as “this actual God.” 3 Of course, this political religion called nationalism not only resurrected the God who had died in one’s own nation-state, it also resurrected the Devil in the form of other people’s states, particularly if they became rivals in the competition for hegemony and expansion, i.e., imperialism.As for totalitarianism (a term coined by Mussolini to describe his own regime in 1922), the Russian theologian and philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev4 identified Bolshevism as a political religion, a term that the British historian Michael Burleigh 5 also applied to Nazism. Both ideologies, of course, the Bolshevist and the fascist, also re-created the absolute certainty that comes with simple and clear dogmas and beliefs, with the Party and the Leader substituted for the Church and God as the authorities who were the source of absolute truths and moral commandments that could not be questioned, on pain of death.The nationalism that originated in the 18th century, and the imperialism of the 19th century, led directly to the First World War, which destroyed four of the greatest empires of that time and left an ideological vacuum that was immediately filled by a third political religion or ideology, totalitarianism (fascism, Nazism, and Bolshevism). The collapse of those religions disguised as politics with the defeat of fascism/Nazism in 1945 and the implosion of Bolshevism in 1989-91 left another ideological vacuum, which was soon filled by apocalyptic fundamentalism, which might best be described as a form of politics disguised as religion. That ideology too, like the others that had preceded it, was motivated on a cognitive level by the absolute necessity of filling the vacuum in practical reason created by the loss of faith in God and morality. Incidentally, each new ideology that has arisen since the birth of nationalism has not just replaced the preceding ideology, it has also incorporated it while adding something new. In other words, fundamentalism is also nationalistic, imperialistic, and to