The Psychology of Genocide: Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Rescuers (review)

With the findings of Christopher Browning’s study Ordinary Men and James Waller’s Becoming Evil it became clear that Holocaust and other genocide perpetrators had not been aberrant “monsters.” Nor had they suffered from uncommon or extreme mental deficiency. It also became apparent that their behavior had not been based on a predisposition of character. Instead it was established that a perpetrator’s conduct—as abominable as it might have been—was in greater part a response to an actual “cultural” setting: situation, opportunity, group expectation. Research into the nature of the human being has shown that “most evil is the product of rather ordinary people caught up in unusual circumstances” (p. 170). The question, however, remains: why do human beings inflict (or are they capable of inflicting) great pain and suffering on their fellows? Continued interest in the question of evil derives its motivation—it would seem—from the hope that “evil” eventually can be understood, and that one day there will be ways to prevent people from imposing severe pain and suffering on others.

Steven K. Baum’s new study is a good example. The author describes the respective characters of perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers, and through broad analysis seeks to identify those traits that distinguish rescuers from perpetrators, and specifically those that—could they be inculcated—would permit bystanders to become rescuers.

Taking his point of departure in Browning’s and Waller’s studies, and drawing from Solomon Asch’s, Stanley Milgram’s, and Philip G. Zimbardo’s experiments, Baum proposes to train and strengthen every individual’s “emotional self” in order to prepare all for a life of “compassion, conscience, consideration” (p. 222)—morally speaking, the good life. Baum’s purpose is “to examine the psychology of hate and the genocidal mind with regard to maturation” (p. 18). His simple premise is that “people are psychologically built the same, but mature at different rates”; assuming that “it is the immature and somewhat ill mind that hates,” Baum investigates “where all the hate comes from, why maturation differences occur, and what can be done about it” (p. 18).

Baum draws his own theoretical approach largely from the early 1970s research of Washington University’s Jane Loevinger. As Baum puts it, for Loevinger “all human beings progress through a series of stages or developmental milestones [in which] each stage consists of increasing levels of awareness, [with] the progression [moving] from impulsivity, self-protectiveness, and conformity, toward greater self-awareness and increased conscientiousness, culminating in enhanced individuality and autonomous functioning” (p. 98). Baum demonstrates that the emotional development or the maturation of self (he also speaks of “personal identity” as opposed to “social identity”) has less to do with a person’s education than with that person’s willingness to accept the Other as an equal human being. Baum leaves no doubt, however, that this emotional development—or progression of ego—is difficult to achieve and that indeed group expectations and situational opportunities frequently nullify compassion, consciousness, and consideration. While there are “those who are more autonomous and independent,” Baum writes, and those who are “more internally driven, [and] not so quick to follow” (p. 49), “most of us follow group norms” (p. 49) and some are even “prone to hate” (p. 25).

Hate, for Baum, is a direct result of the exclusive “us-them” opposition, and he suggests that its transformation into an inclusive “all” could serve as a solution to the problem: Within the inclusive “all” the autonomous and authentic individual, i.e., the emotionally developed self, no longer would need or want to seek group approval (either of himself as a human being or of his conduct and actions). This person’s developed individuality would issue in freedom (from other-determination) as well as in personal accountability. If, consequently, we were to summarize the concepts of freedom and accountability in the idea of “responsibility,” an emotionally developed personality would...