When not to fight

I read Rutger Bregman's Human Kind recently and I hated it. There are some interesting bits but large tracts are offensively stupid and purely, nakedly ideological, replete with the "noble savage" fallacy in extremis. I'll do a proper review eventually but the short version is : leave it on the shelf. It's awful.

But, one thing that does come across (that the author doesn't really intend) is just how difficult psychology is. All those popular studies : the prison experiment, the electric shocks, the tribal children's camp... all come with major caveats. It's not that they're generally wrong (except the prison one, which was a sham), it's that human beings are complicated. And the popular term "replication crisis" is, I think, a terrible way of looking at it. It implies we already know exactly how studies should be done and should be immediately be able to tell when a result is obviously incorrect, or at least suspicious. That we've already got a handle on the basic methodology and have just slipped up a bit.

I suggest that this isn't the case. I suggest that we don't know the best way to do psychology experiments. People are just too complicated for that, with simply too many variables to put into neat categories, in a way that's qualitatively different from the physical sciences. Trying to say it's all group conformity or obedience or sheep-like desire to fit in... nah. This is over-simplistic nonsense. Useful concepts to be sure, and applicable in the right situations... but not universally by any means. 

It's not that the studies aren't worth doing, it's that none of them are worth promoting as having some unimpeachable insight into the human condition. They simply don't. They give us clues at best, but no more than that. They don't give us answers in the same way that the experiments in natural sciences usually do.

And I also saw Netflix's fantastic documentary Ordinary Men the other day. This looks at the often-overlooked participation of the German police forces during the Holocaust. As you would suspect, it's not an easy watch, but it's an important one. The main point is that so many of those committing the atrocities were not evil monsters. Oh, they did evil, monstrous things, undeniably ! But they did it not for their own gratification or even because they wanted to. They didn't even do it because they had no choice, with the worst that befell anyone failing to kill their assigned victims being social ostracization. 

No, they did it, so the documentary claims, because they felt it was necessary. Most of them didn't want to do it at all. They got no sense of gratification or pleasure from it. They actively realised the horror and repugnance of what they were doing, looked the barbarity of it full in the face... and did it anyway. And that, in its own way, is far more terrifying than viewing them as demonic : no, they were just like you and me, so the theory goes, but under the right circumstances...

Of course the flip side of this is that just as genuine monsters are much rarer than we might think (if they weren't, we simply wouldn't have civilisation), so too are genuine heroes. By the same token, perhaps, ordinary people are equally capable of heroics. No need to look around for those with the rarest combination of courage, integrity and decency, because anyone is capable of extraordinary actions in the right conditions.

All that being true, with any conclusions on the human condition being provisional at best, this article from the Guardian cuts a little differently :

President Joe Biden began his remarks in Israel with this: “Hamas committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of Isis, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world. There is no rationalizing it, no excusing it. Period. The brutality we saw would have cut deep anywhere in the world, but it cuts deeper here in Israel. October 7, which was a … sacred Jewish holiday, became the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

“It has brought to the surface painful memories and scars left by millennia of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jewish people. The world watched then, it knew, and the world did nothing. We will not stand by and do nothing again. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”

With this, Biden reinforced the rhetorical framework that the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett expressed, in typically unashamed terms, in an interview on Sky News on 12 October: “We’re fighting Nazis.”... without the historical context of Israeli settler colonialism since the 1948 Nakba, we cannot explain how we got here, nor imagine different futures; Biden offered us, instead, the decontextualized image of “pure, unadulterated evil.”

Genuine monsters, I stress, do exist. But leaving aside the lunatics who instigated the Holocaust, those who "only" participated in it.... that's where human nature gets really scary. That's where we get deeply uncomfortable questions about exactly who we are as a species. If you accept the conclusion in the documentary (which accompanies a book of the same name), then the trick of making comparisons to the Nazis as unalloyed evil stands revealed. If your enemy is truly pitiless, sadistic, and beyond all redemption, then it becomes all too easy to justify any sort of response in order to stop them.

But if they're not, if even the Nazis who carried acts of what should be unthinkable evil were, in fact, actually relatively normal people in the wrong circumstances, then this is a reminder that there are limits to justifiable retaliation. That there are bounds which should not be overstepped. Not that there shouldn't be any response at all, that's stupid. Clearly, WWII had to be fought and the Nazis had to be stopped. This is self-evident. But was every Allied response justified ? Was the carpet-bombing of Dresden a sensible form of retaliation ?

To return to present times, in the Russia-Ukraine war, I believe, there is a really quite impressive case of black-and-white, with one side as clearly villainous and one as innocent as you could ever find. There, I think, there is a very clear victim to support and an adversary to challenge. If you don't stand up to abject, unfair hostility, if you turn the other cheek towards such pure malevolence, you're simply surrendering. To say the Ukrainians shouldn't fight back to reclaim lost territory is to surrender to bullies; to place the blame somehow on NATO is a shocking, deplorable case of cynicism overriding good sense and decency. To say the West shouldn't support the victim in case the bully does something even worse is the very worst sort of cowardice and outright stupidity. Well of course they will do something worse if you don't stand up to them ! It's an open, shameful invitation to let them do as they please.

But so far as I can tell the current Middle East crisis is wholly different. There, every political state involved seems to be awful. Not necessarily the same type or degree of awfulness – I make no comment on that score – but still awful. No side can be meaningfully said to be better than the other when both behave like this. In war, yes, you expect collateral damage... as a tragic side-effect. But Israel appears to be actively soliciting it.

The Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant said: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party, to take another example, called for “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth”. There are many other such expressions by Israeli politicians and senior army officers in the last few weeks. The fantasy of “fighting Nazis” drives such explicit language, because the image of Nazis is one of “pure, unadulterated evil”, which removes all laws and restrictions in the fight against it. Perpetrators of genocide always see their victims as evil and themselves as righteous. This is, indeed, how Nazis saw Jews.

Biden’s words constitute therefore a textbook use of the Holocaust not in order to stand with powerless people facing the prospect of genocidal violence, but to support and justify an extremely violent attack by a powerful state and, at the same time, distort this reality. But we see the reality in front of our eyes: since the start of Israeli mass violence on 7 October, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza has surpassed 4,650, a third of them children, with more than 15,000 injured and over a million people displaced.

Surely, all this violence in this case is just not right. And I emphasise the specifics because "both sidesism" is typically a fallacy, as it most certainly is in the Ukraine conflict. It's normally the sort of idiotically naïve pacifism/fascism that one expects from contemptible fuckwits like Jeremy Corbyn. I get that. But if both sides actually are awful... ?

The central issue is simple : the actions on each side are unjustified. You can't justify gunning down festival-goers and you can't justify cutting off food and water to an entire city in response. They're both shit. What was done to you in the past has no bearing on how you treat innocent civilians in the present. 

Sometimes, just sometimes, right is right and wrong is wrong. If one side is right and one is wrong, there's only one option who to support. But if both are wrong, why support either ? Why insist that one side has the right of it, that there must necessarily be heroes and villains when in fact there are neither ?  And even if you do find that overall one side must be supported, that doesn't mean you accept everything they do without question. Israel, just like any state, has the right to exist and to defend itself. It doesn't have the right to act with impunity or to commit war crimes. Nobody deserves that much leeway.