it is almost certain that, as you read this sentence, in some places people are being killed and in others people are being tortured." This reflection is not the most cheerful one with which to embark on a new century, but it is all too realistic.
There have been many accounts of the horrors of particular regimes or episodes in the 20th century, of which the best known are the mass killings of Hitler, Stalin and-as more people are forcing themselves to admit-Mao in China, as well as, of course, Pol Pot in Cambodia. It is all too easy to concentrate on whichever of these episodes fits our political prejudices.
One virtue of Jonathan Glover's new book is that it is too wide ranging to allow the reader such an easy escape. Above all, he reminds us of unnecessary suffering and killing emanating not merely from these demonised regimes, but from what may be loosely called "our own side."
The author is not a pacifist. But he does make us realise that the horrifying trench warfare in the first world war was not an unavoidable by-product of the conflict, but the result of a cold-blooded indifference to the human consequences, by the officer class. One of the few to protest against so much killing for so little purpose was Winston Churchill, whose memorandum was greeted with a rebuke from that awful authoritarian, King George V.
Then there was the blockade of Germany, which continued until March 1919, months after the end of the fighting, and which led to many deaths from starvation. Again it was Churchill who dissented and wrote: "These bitter experiences stripped their conquerors in German eyes of all credentials except those of force." The year 1919 also saw General Dyer's massacre of 500-1,000 peaceful demonstrators at Amritsar in India. This was only the worst of the "fancy punishments" he and his fellow officers prescribed.
Yet another example was the continued mass bombing of civilians in German cities, by Air Marshall Arthur Harris, long after the Normandy landings when the second world war was clearly in its closing phase. Later in the century there was the massacre by US forces of civilians in the village of My Lai during the Vietnam war. This was not an isolated incident, but an all too likely outcome of the nature of that conflict.
Many of these episodes were accompanied by the "cold joke," better known as the sick joke. An early example was the graffiti scrawled for Louis XVI to see before his execution-"Louis takes a cold bath in the air." How many of us cannot recall milder examples of such jokes in the playground or school or even in our work places?
Unfortunately, Glover puts these shaming episodes "from our own side" fairly early on in the book. They would have had more impact if they had come near the end, just before the concluding chapters. In fact, the last historical episode analysed in detail is the Nazi Holocaust. Although there must be a new generation arising which still needs to be reminded of it, this lets the rest of us off far too easily.
Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century is a highly imperfect book. Yet it is a book which as many people as possible ought to read. I never know whether to blame authors or publishers for misleading titles. But the author does admit that it is far from a comprehensive moral history of the century. As he himself writes: "A more generous conception would also include changes in the family, in the way children are treated, and in the relations between men and women... It would also include attitudes to poverty, to sex, to animals, and to the environment." Indeed, even in relation to the main man-made disasters, there is now probably more revulsion than there would have been in earlier centuries.
Yet the literary imperfections pale into insignificance compared with the substance covered. It is an indispensable work of reference. For example, although I knew the substance of the material on the Holocaust, the gulag and other Stalinist atrocities, much of the material on Mao was new to me; and it did clarify the story of Rwanda, which has been treated so confusingly in the media. There is also a novel analysis of two diplomatic episodes. The ineffectual attempts by governments to stop a European war after the assassination of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo in 1914 are compared with the statesmanship shown by Khrushchev and Kennedy in handling the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The author attributes the improvement to the impact on Kennedy of the briefings he received on the results of atomic warfare as he entered the White House, and to the memories Khruschev had of the second world war.
But surely another factor was that the negotiations in 1962 were concentrated in Washington and Moscow, where there were clear lines of command. In 1914, not only was there a whole chain of countries linked in overlapping alliances, but in many of the key centres, including Berlin and Vienna, there was confusion and intrigue about who was in charge, which gave the military a chance to get into the saddle.
Not surprisingly, the most valuable passages are on ethics itself. The author does not blame the terrible events of the 20th century solely on the decline of moral consciousness. On the contrary, he points out how over-rigid moral systems can themselves be the cause of harm. "Those who led their countries into the first world war made an absolute of a morality of national honour, regardless of the human consequences of obeying such a morality." The US hawks of 1962 shared a similar absolutist view-in contrast to Jack Kennedy, who after his briefings remarked: "And we call ourselves the human race." A sense of moral identity is only part of what is required. Franz Stangal, doing his duty at the Treblinka concentration camp, did not lack a sense of moral identity. Nor did Himmler, when he said that SS men should not steal a single fur or watch from their victims. "When a moral code is severed from human responses or even hostile to them it is useless or worse." Glover speculates that many of the guilty men had a savage upbringing in the name of some rigid moral code. This was indeed true of Hitler and Stalin; and we might suspect it was true of Dyer and the first world war generals. It would be worthwhile investigating this empirically.
It is refreshing to see a philosopher hailing from Oxford avoiding the moral absolutism of so many other Oxford philosophers over several generations. Glover supports John Rawls's idea of reflective equilibrium, in which moral principles are modified in relation to people's feelings about humane and reasonable outcomes, and vice versa.
Human beings are creatures prone to group behaviour which can lead to great altruism and self-sacrifice towards fellow members, combined with great callousness towards outsiders. Glover does have quite a lot to say about tribalism in this book-and he also reproduces the well-known analysis of tit-for-tat as a solution to a repeated series of prisoners' dilemmas. Yet his remarks on the human animal are scattered throughout the book and will not add much for those who have already dipped into existing popular writing.
Glover concludes by saying that 20th century wars, massacre and genocide came from combining the psychology of human beings who have "a strong propensity both for getting trapped into conflict and also for cruelty and mass killing" with modern technology. His last words are: "It is to the psychology that we should now turn." I hope he will do so more completely in another book. As director of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King's College, London, and the author of books on philosophy and biology, he would be well placed to do so.
The author's website is www.samuelbrittan.co.uk
Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century
Jonathan Glover
Jonathan Cape 1999, ?18.99
