2 of 8
Rather than distinguishing between different kinds of harm and the consequences that follow from them, Waller jumps immediately to "extraordinary human evil," which, unlike evil in general, involves "the deliberate harm inflicted against a defenseless and helpless group targeted by a legitimating political, social, or religious authority." This definition also suffers from being too capacious. Under the spell of evil's seeming ubiquity, Waller intersperses throughout his text brief accounts of many of the major evils that have taken place in recent years, from Rwanda to Bosnia. But they serve mostly to underscore the point that, for example, violations of human rights in Latin America carried out by repressive dictators, as horrendous as they are, are not at the same level, morally speaking, as genocidal attempts to wipe out entire populations based on their religion or ethnicity.
There is a reason for Waller's inclusiveness; he has a thesis to advance. "My central argument," he writes, "is that it is ordinary individuals, like you and me, who commit extraordinary evil." Furthermore, "being aware of our own capacity for extraordinary evil—and the dispositional, situational, and social influences that foster it—is the best safeguard we can have against future genocide."
To demonstrate his thesis, Waller argues that true evil such as that exhibited by the Nazis cannot be explained as a large-scale manifestation of psychopathology. Were many of the leading Nazis madmen? Did their actions reveal not only familiar human motives but also a strain of mental aberration such as we are inclined to impute to the perpetrators of certain horrible crimes—a Jeffrey Dahmer, for instance? Waller answers no, and the way he makes his case says volumes about his approach throughout the book.
It turns out that Rorschach tests were administered to some of the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. Nearly everyone who studied the results of these tests disagreed about what they signified, including the two psychologists who administered them. In addition, only 19 individuals underwent the test—a limited basis for sweeping generalizations. Indeed, the psychologists who were given the data in 1947 never published their conclusions. Perhaps they found the sample too small and the technique too crude.
But Waller charges that, confronted with evidence that the Nazis were normal, the psychologists would not go on record with their findings. When another research team comes to the conclusion Waller prefers, that Nazi leaders had no tinge of madness about them, Waller cites their work favorably, even if the bulk of the Rorschachs this group studied were not of Germans but of Danes who collaborated with the Nazis. "As much as we may wish it to be true," Waller concludes, "the Nazis cannot so easily be explained away as disturbed, highly abnormal individuals."
To appreciate how absurd this conclusion is, consider the following thought experiment. Wanting to find out who is abnormal and who is not, you design a projective test meant to measure mental health. But one of your colleagues comes up with a better idea. "Let's not be satisfied with a measure of madness," he exclaims, "let's observe the real thing." This colleague then proposes that we see which of our fellow citizens would be willing to round up all the Jews in the society, send them on trains to camps, and kill them with gas. "Anyone willing to go that far," he concludes triumphantly, "surely would be mad," but, we can picture him adding, "this would never happen in real life." Now we know, of course, that it did. Despite all the evidence that anyone could ever want demonstrating that the Nazis were psychopaths, Waller proposes that a test meant to measure something is a better indicator than the thing itself, a sad commentary on the way some psychologists view the world.
share this page
RSS Feed
