The Big Read: The science behind savagery

21 August 2014 - 02:01 By Ian Robertson, ©The Daily Telegraph
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FINAL MOMENTS: Islamic State militants take aim at captured Iraqi soldiers. File photo
FINAL MOMENTS: Islamic State militants take aim at captured Iraqi soldiers. File photo
Image: YOUTUBE

As Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria butcher thousands of "infidels" and carry off their women and children into slavery, many in the West are inclined to see this barbarity as unique to Islamic fundamentalism.

But, after overrunning a Bosnian town on July 11 1995, Bosnian Serb forces, ostensibly Christian, cold-bloodedly massacred 8000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica.

The Hutu genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda . the Khmer Rouge's mass-murder of Cambodian city-dwellers . the Nazi genocide of Jews, Gypsies and the disabled - the list of savagery is as long as it is profoundly depressing.

What, then, are the origins of savagery if they cannot be ascribed to a single religion or ideology?

1.Savagery begets savagery

The first part of an answer may be horribly simple: savagery begets savagery. Callousness, aggression and lack of empathy are common responses by people who have been harshly treated themselves. In the Nazi concentration camps, for instance, many of the cruellest guards were themselves prisoners: the notorious kapos.

Sexually abused children, particularly males, are more likely to become sexual abusers themselves as adults, although the majority do not. Victims, in other words, often respond to trauma by becoming victimisers.

2.Submersion in the group

But victim becoming victimiser is not the only explanation for savagery. When the state breaks down, and with it law and order, and civic society, there is only one recourse for survival: the group. Whether defined by religion, race, politics, tribe or clan survival depends on the mutual security offered by the group. War binds people together in groups and this bonding assuages some of the fear and distress the individual feels when the state breaks down. The group also offers self-esteem to people who feel humiliated by their loss of place and status in a relatively ordered society.

When this happens, individual and group identities partially merge, and the person's actions become as much a manifestation of the group as of the individual will. People can then do terrible things: individual conscience has little place in an embattled, warring group because the individual and group selves are one for as long as the external threat continues. Groups are much more capable of savagery than any individual.

You can see it in the faces of the young male Islamic State militants as they race by on their trucks, black flags waving, broad smiles on their faces, clenched fists aloft, fresh from the slaughter of infidels. What you can see is a biochemical high from a combination of the bonding hormone oxytocin and the dominance hormone testosterone. Much more than cocaine or alcohol, these natural drugs lift mood, induce optimism and energise aggressive action.

Because the individual identity has been largely submerged in the group identity the individual will be much more willing to sacrifice himself in battle or as a suicide bomber.

Why? Because if I am submerged in the group I live on in the group even if the individual "me", dies.

When people bond they develop a greater tendency to demonise and dehumanise out-groups. That is the paradox of selfless giving to your in-group - it makes it easier for you to anaesthetise your empathy for out-groups and see them as objects.

3.The out-group as objects

But here is one daunting fact as we contemplate the Sunni-Shia carnage in Iraq and Syria: in-group tribalism is strengthened - and loathing for the out-group correspondingly increased - when religion defines the groups. Even when aggression against the other group is self-destructive, as we see across the Middle East, religion-based groups advocate harsher aggression against their opponents thannon-religiously defined groups.

4.Revenge

Revenge, strongly emphasised in Arab culture, might play a part in perpetuating the savagery. Of course, vengeful retaliation for savagery begets more savagery in a never-ending cycle.

Although revenge is a powerful motivator, it is also a deceiver, because the evidence is that taking revenge on someone, far from quelling the distress and anger which prompted it, perpetuates and magnifies the emotional turbulence.

5.Leaders

People will do savage things if their leaders tell them it is acceptable to do so, particularly if they have given themselves to the group self. The Rwandan genocide was switched on by a series of radio broadcasts made by a small group of leaders to a population which, by radio , was turned into savage murderers of former friends and neighbours who were in the out-group.

The soldiers of the Soviet Red Army committed mass rape as they invaded Germany in 1945 because senior commanders had advocated it.

Islamic State fighters are slaughtering unarmed Christians and Yazidis because their leaders have told them that that is the right thing to do.

Leaders at many levels, from the tribal to the national, are responsible for this savagery, and so leaders can eventually stop it - just as they chose to do in Rwanda, after international pressure.

But the trouble is when leaders choose to encourage savagery, not quell it, there is nothing hard-wired in humans that would enable them to stand against it.

  • Robertson is Professor of Psychology at Trinity College, Dublin, and was the founding director of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience
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