A couple of days ago, I watched the National Geographic special entitled The Science of Evil. In it, they took a look at the scientific study of what makes people evil.
Evil is hard to define, but they defined it as (and I am paraphrasing because I cannot remember it) something like intentionally causing harm to others, being aware of it, and not caring or even taking enjoyment in it. As far as that goes, I can go along with it.
One of the case studies was the Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Dr. Philip Zimbardo in 1971. If you’re not aware of the study, then what happened was that a group of students volunteered to be part of an experiment. The basement of the Psychology Department at Stanford University was transformed into a prison. Some of the students were assigned to be guards, the others were assigned to be prisoners. The experiment was to be conducted over 2 weeks, and the researchers wanted to see the effects of prison life on people.
The results were shocking.
The experiment had to be shut down in only five days. During that time, the prison guards transformed from ordinary people into sadistic overlords, humiliating their prisoners and forcing them to do acts of sexual innuendo (if this sounds a lot like Abu Ghraib, it should), among other things. The guards became power hungry and cruel. It showcased how ordinary people can be transformed into behaving in nasty manners.
Another angle the special explored were refugee camps in Africa. They interviewed the UN director of distributing food in Sudan, who in turn interviewed survivors of a civil war outbreak. The women report seeing men with guns killing members of their families, or raping women in front of their husbands, and forcing sons into their militaries. It’s extremely tragic… and evil.
National Geographic was looking into the science of evil. Why are some people so evil?
They didn’t really answer the question, but there were some things that they came away with:
- They looked at the neurobiology of our brains when faced with moral dilemmas. Suppose that you are a villager hiding in a hut with your baby in your arms, along with several other people. Militia men from the outside are walking around, looking for survivors. If they hear you, they will kill you and all of the others with you. Your baby begins to cry. Is it right for you to smother your own baby and kill it so that you and the others will live? Or do you allow your baby to cry and risk (and probably allow) the soldiers hearing it, alerting them to your presence and thus your likely death?
When they hook people up to MRI machines and scan their brains when they ask this question, two areas in the brain light up – the pre-frontal cortex (which is part of our neocortex, the thinking part of our brain), and a part of the brain associated with emotion, which is associated with our limbic systems (the non-thinking, or reacting part of our brain). When people consider this question, both parts of their brains light up and depending on which one receives more stimulating blood flow, that influences their decision (the more emotional parts of the brain tend to lead to more no, it’s not okay to smother your baby answers).
- More unnerving was the Stanford prison experiment, and by extension, Abu Ghraib. The fact is that any of us, in the right circumstances, might just be capable of evil acts. Indeed, the militia men over in Sudan were ordinary people committing terrible acts. But why do they do this? Science does not yet have the answer.
I supplemented this documentary with some research of my own. I’ve written in other posts that one of the chemicals responsible for the level of goodness we feel when we are charitable is oxytocin. It’s a chemical that leads us to bond with each other, and humans are social creatures. That’s why we live in groups (like our relatives, the great apes). However, not everyone produces this chemical in their brains. These types of people are sociopaths; they don’t have the same responses to social stimuli that regular people have. There are other people with neurological disorders but that doesn’t really answer the question of why so many people are evil. Sociopaths are “only” 5% of the population.
I stumbled across the phrase “the banality of evil.” According to Wikipedia, the writer of the thesis, Hannah Arendt, describes the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.
Explaining this phenomenon, Edward S. Herman has emphasized the importance of "normalizing the unthinkable." According to him, "doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on ‘normalization.’ This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as ‘the way things are done.’"
This position has met with some criticism from others: people do evil things for a variety of reasons, such as some people choosing not to commit evil, or people doing certain things when under intense pressure, or succumbing to strong leadership.
Religious thinkers throughout time have posited their own questions to why evil exists. For some Christians, evil exists because humanity is estranged from God, the source of all goodness. Outside of God, all of us are susceptible to doing evil things as the Stanford prison experiment proves. And as long as we are in these sin-weakened bodies, we will never be able to overcome it on this side of the grave.
It’s an idea worth considering.
A couple of weeks ago, I read a story about a man in New York city who set an elderly woman on fire. He poured gasoline on her in an elevator, lit a match and walked out. She died of smoke inhalation. His lawyer agreed that it was a heinous action, but the man was also suffering from a mental disorder (he lived in the same building as the woman, did some odd jobs for her and said she owed him $2000). At least if the man is mentally insane, that partially rationalizes (but doesn’t excuse) his actions. But at least he wasn’t completely evil. Can you imagine if he did this on purpose? It would be the epitome of evil.
I will get harsh here for a minute in order to make you think. Burning somebody on purpose is exactly what some Christians believe that God will do to unbelievers. Remember, the “banality of evil” is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as ‘the way things are done.’ If God can do <insert any action X> even when it is unbelievably cruel and evil, this normalizes the action.
That’s why I am cautious of religious speakers who on the one hand claim that God is the source of all good morality, but at the same time rationalize the act of burning somebody alive as necessary, or holy (everything God does is holy), or good (everything God does is good). If you can rationalize evil acts (burning someone alive) because of an ideology (God must punish sin in an inhumane manner), then how good are you, really, at defining what is good and moral? It is pretty clear to me that morality precludes acts that are clearly evil. On the one hand God is the source of all goodness and in him there is no evil. But on the other hand, he is planning to burn people alive (this is an active verb; no human is going to willingly jump into a lake of fire, someone will have to push them in and keep them there). This is a contradiction.
In the end, the reason for why evil exists still isn’t solved by science. No doubt it has to do some with neurobiology and with social factors. Hopefully one day we can stamp it out completely.
Read Full Post »
