There is nothing inherently abnormal about people who carry out mass killings, according to Clark McCauley, Professor of Psychology at Bryn Mawr College. McCauley gave a lecture Thursday entitled “Why Not Kill Them All?: the Psychology of Genocide,” and students crammed into PAC 002, filling every chair in the room as well as aisle and floor space to hear the professor’s theories on what makes humans capable of genocide.
“People are brought in for a cause, and they’re put into small groups where a specific moral order is established,” McCauley said, pointing out that it is most often a group mentality that motivates people to carry out horrific orders.
“The average person killing Jews in Nazi Germany wasn’t doing it because he hated Jews,” he said. “He did it because he didn’t want to let his buddies down.”
McCauley also discussed the process of desensitizing feelings of disgust— the devaluation of human life, the diffusion of moral responsibility and the attributing of specific undesirable traits to every member of a group—all of which go into making a person capable of genocide.
“We have to understand how normal people, like you and me, are capable of killing by category,” McCauley said. “And you realize that there’s just nothing to it. It’s surprisingly ordinary people who are doing the killing.”
McCauley’s general definition of genocide is the “group killing of people [because of] who they are, instead of anything they’ve done.” He added that genocide could be the killing of anywhere between five and 5,000 people.
During his presentation, McCauley divided genocides into four categories, citing historical examples for each: those based on convenience, such as the expulsion of the Cherokee peoples in 1838; those based on revenge, such as Genghis Khan’s annihilation of all the inhabitants of Herat in 1220 A.D.; those based on fear, such as the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C.E.; and those based on purification, such as the Holocaust. McCauley cited fear as the one element that all genocides throughout history had in common.
After the lecture McCauley fielded questions from the audience. A debate arose between McCauley and professor of history Philip Pomper over the psychopathology of genocidal leaders like Stalin and Hitler.
“To say somebody’s crazy as an explanation [for genocide] is a way of not considering the situation,” McCauley said. “Once you start thinking that way, you lose any chance of finding a solution.”
“He and I are just on a different page,” Pomper said. “I don’t think that attributing a psychopathology to a leader is an attempt to explain away the problem. I think that you can have a pathological leader and still try to understand the specific historical circumstances that allowed that person to rise to power. But I also think reasonable people can disagree.”
Other audience opinions of the presentation were mixed.
“I thought it was really interesting,” said Rebecca Brigham ’05. “I wish he had had more time to get into some of the other aspects of his argument, but I thought he was excellent.”
“I didn’t think that highly of [McCauley’s lecture],” said Andreas Gustafsson, ’06. “I don’t think he made the critical jump from his theory that normal people commit genocide to an explanation of why normal people commit genocide.”
The lecture was organized by the Project for Global Change, directed by professor of government Martha Crenshaw. More information on the Project for Global Change and upcoming events can be found at www.wesleyan.edu/globalchange.
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