Becoming
Humane - Being Humane Evolution of the
Humane - Globalisation of Peace - World in
Balance The
Real Causes of War beyond the Multicausal
Approach Psychology
can be regarded as very subversive when it enters the arena
of power politics, Carl Rogers, 1977 (pdf) "How exactly
does it happen that normal human beings, all endowed with
a conscience, an awareness of their individual
responsibility for their judgment and choice of truth
over untruth, reason over irrationality, justice over
injustice and morality over sin, - manage to justify in
their own eyes even the most inhuman atrocities and acts
of self and others mass-destruction?" My own 30-years
long systematic effort to find good answers to questions
such as "By virtue of what mechanisms do we turn human
'others' into enemies?", begun with a war trauma. I
managed to recover out of it only when I found the answer
to the question "what causes wars" that I felt was true,
based on what I realized were the real causes, unlike my
earlier conventional conceptions about the causes of wars
that suddenly seemed completely inadequate. Since then I
adopted the "Direct Causation Approach" that requires
focusing on the direct-physical causes of a
life-threatening condition inside the human organism.
Following that
approach, I begun focusing on the inner-psychological
space in which ideas governing war-oriented thinking and
motivation existed. The result has been a detailed
description of the mental mechanisms operating in
war-oriented normal people I called Theory of
Dehumanization. To the best of my belief and as far as my
experimentation and experience have confirmed it
deciphers the code of human politically-ideologically
motivated destructive intergroup behavior. Its
applications make healing possible. My message to the
community of scholars working on psychological
interpretation of war is therefore the need to keep the
Direct-Causation Approach in view if they intend to
become a "helping profession" in a reality of politically
motivated destructiveness rather than only understand and
explain it. The first part of this essay will make the
argument for following the Direct Causation approach. The
second part will present the process and results of my
own taking it -- the Theory of Dehumanization and its
applications. In July 1970, on
the Syrian front, the army ambulance I navigated to a UN
outpost was hit and all my companions were torn to
pieces. Traumatized, I could not erase the sensory
experience of those moments from my inner vision, as if
it were happening in the present and projected on my
mind's screen again and again. I wanted to get over it,
but I became convinced--perhaps obsessed--by the thought
that I would not be able to go on living without coming
to understand, but really understand, why it had
happened. I could not find
the real causes in anything I had learned about the
causes of war. My conceptual maps pointed in directions
that stroke me as erroneous and irrelevant. Historical
causes, economic causes, complex causes: two peoples
clashing over the same territory, the Arab belligerence,
occupation of that Syrian territory by my country Israel,
all those together... None of them directly caused the
very real effect I experienced that afternoon. In
addition, all those causes and myriad others seemed
arbitrary, chosen arbitrarily, each an effect in an
endless chain of earlier events, earlier
"causes". In my first new
realization, the missile reached us at the end of a chain
of causation beginning in Biblical times with the
conquest of the Land of Canaan by the Hebrews--actually
much earlier--propelled through endless links of causes
turned effects turned causes, down to the causes for
emergence of modern science that enabled some distant
people to devise the chemical reaction and construct the
technology that caused the explosive material in the
missile to turn my companions into bloody
splinters. I got over my
trauma when the real cause, so it felt, presented itself
to my awareness. The real cause was the obvious one: the
Syrian gunner on the other side wanted to hit us, his
target, aimed well and pulled the trigger. Had he not
wanted to hit us at that moment, he would not have
to. Why do I call that
the "Real" cause? Because if there is any link in the
chain of causation leading to war that is not abstract,
that we can not just conceptualize but touch in order to
break that chain, the living human link is the only one
touchable. In the most real, concrete and functional
sense, we could not have wars if people did not fight
willingly being convinced that they should. The 9/11
terrorists did it in full consciousness, feeling
justified in face of their conscience, morality, history,
religion, society. Otherwise, they would not have done
it, would they? -- If all other contributing factors
remained equal but people would just not conceive
shooting and bombing and burning and killing as an option
to solve their problems with other people, there could be
no war. Thus, by only describing events taking place in
the nonverbal world, we arrive at an awareness that is
very uncommon in our and other cultures: the real causes
of wars are not abstract but living people. Economic,
Political, or Historical Causes are abstract constructs.
In reality, all we can ever observe is some people
sending other people to war because of what they, inside
their skulls, conceptualize as their "Economic Interests"
or whatever, usually their concepts about the malice of
and danger imminent in the "enemy". As long as we do not
act consistently upon that simple truth, we could see or
experience endless horrors and suffering, unable to touch
their real causes. This
down-to-persons awareness of causation brought me to the
realization that if anyone wanted to heal infectious
societal diseases such as wars, they would need to
investigate human thinking that causes it directly. Then
I begun to learn all I could from reliable scientific
sources about the processes by which warring people
perceive and construct their political realities. Very
soon I learned that this field was completely dominated
by the multiple causation approach. It meant, that if my
realization that the relevant causes for making a
difference are the direct ones was valid -- that
multiple-causation approach was in itself the cause why
research in the area is bound to be ineffective.
In the 1958 seminal
work of Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, the
multiple causation approach was postulated very
emphatically, "as forcefully as possible": Are discrimination
and prejudice facts of the social structure or of the
personality structure? The answer we have given is both.
.. And we emphasize once again, as forcefully as
possible, that a multiple approach is required. ...help
comes from Historical, Sociocultural, and Situational
analysis, as well as from analysis in terms of
Socialization, Personality Dynamics, Phenomenology, and
finally, but not least important, in terms of actual
Group Differences. To understand prejudice and its
conditions the results of investigations at all these
levels must be kept in mind... there is no other way. (p.
476.) Let there be no
doubt, that what Allport refers to as "discrimination"
and "prejudice", is the same state of mind as
war-orientation (in the same year federal troops were
sent to protect black students in the newly integrated
schools and the governor of Arkansas declared "This is
now an occupied territory"). But Allport was very
optimistic about the future of "the infant science of
human conflict" which was, he felt at the time,
"thriving". Nearly half-century later that science was
still following the multiple-causation approach but the
mood has been pessimistic all around. Neil Kressel, one
of the leading American scholars in the field of
Political Psychology wrote in the last decade of the 20th
century "There probably remains some residual frustration
and disillusionment growing out of the field's collective
inability to make much difference in the world"). Worse,
"..no straightforward and consensual psychological
science has arisen to meet the needs of political
scholars. Instead, modern psychologists, sociologists,
and biologists forge competing images of human nature and
a convergence of outlooks appears unlikely in the
foreseeable future" . In contemporary
studies, psychologists uphold this multiple-causation
approach and build abstract models. They insist, as if
anyone was in a danger of forgetting it, that "at all
points, political and psychological studies are
inextricably intertwined". The pessimistic view of what
lies ahead may be summarized in the words of the Dutch
researcher Johan van der Dennen, who is reputed for
having amassed over 100,000 sources on political
violence: "In retrospect it seems clear that the
phenomena dealt with can be approached from so many
different points of view, from so many disciplines, and
on so many levels, that a unitary comprehensive theory is
hardly to be expected in the near future". In view of the fact
that war is a consciously motivated human behavior, the
idea that, since "political and psychological studies are
inextricably intertwined" (above) they are qualitatively
not different from one another, could be based on a
fundamental methodological error. The "intertwined"
causes are not all the same: some are real-direct causes
motivating people, other are indirect causes that might
or might not affect them. The assumptions we
make about causation govern our approach to changing the
condition. In medicine, or in any helping profession,
without knowing the physical or closest-to-physical
psychological agents - viruses, germs, neuroses, etc. -we
cannot deal with critical factors in changing the
condition. Changing only the indirect causes of illness,
such as economic conditions, nutrition or sanitation, we
practice hygiene and hopefully prevent the spread of
disease. But hygiene is not medicine and prevention is
not healing once the human organism becomes infected. As
I submit this essay to you, I still feel rather lonely in
my feeling that the mainstream research has failed to
follow that simple principle of scientific approach that
stipulates, that in order to help a human condition one
must first and foremost ascertain the DIRECT-physical
causes. We need to change that multi-causation approach
before we could make a difference. Having chosen the
direct-physical causation approach, I begun by looking at
what was obvious in the behavior of racist, ethnocentric,
nationalistic, etc. bigots, fanatics and single-minded
supporters of all war operations (my living environment
is a perfect laboratory for becoming a
participant-observer). First, since under all multiple
conditions and influences people commit organized
violence against other people consciously, I decided that
the organ I should investigate in order to locate the
direct quasi-physical causes of warlike thinking and
behavior is the conscious part of the mind, the socially
acquired system of Orientation. Moreover, anywhere
in the world and no matter how absurd and evil in my and
your view, the fanatics of conflict must have a moral
justification for what they believe and what they do,
same as the rest of us. The perpetrators of socially
sanctioned evil anywhere behave as if they were under
compulsion to believe they are right and their enemies
are wrong. I therefore began investigating how they
manage; how exactly they manage to massacre or victimize
helpless victims without compromising their own highest
human values. I reasoned, that if I could interfere with
their rationalization or self-justification system it
would be like interfering with the direct causes, which
is what one must do if one wishes ever to develop some
remedies. Since "Conceptions of right and justice form an
inescapable part of the context of political_ reasoning",
I surmised that if I could find ways to undermine that
justification system I would effectively neutralize the
effects of the "virus" - a hope that in my private
experience has been sustained beyond my own expectations.
The
research-questions leading to the Theory of
Dehumanization were formulated on the lowest possible
level of abstraction: "How exactly does it happen that
normal individuals, all possessing a conscience, an
awareness of their individual responsibility for their
judgment and choice of truth over untruth, reason over
irrationality, justice over injustice and morality over
sin, - manage to justify in their own eyes even the most
inhuman atrocities and acts of self and others
mass-destruction? In what ways exactly they are different
from others (me)? What exactly, if anything, can be
objectively defined as wrong with them? Which of their
organic functions of perceiving, thinking, and telling
right from wrong, are affected? How? How does it happen?
When? - The theory of Dehumanization embodies answers to
all those questions. The evidence
regarding beliefs\thinking about war and conflict was
collected from public communication media in Israel over
25 years. It was found that war-oriented thinking
patterns universally conformed to one basic orientation
structure: "We Always Good\Right - Them Always
Bad\Wrong\Guilty". That fantastic structure is made
possible by the uniquely human capacity for endless
abstraction helped by two mental mechanisms. One
mechanism molds all incoming information into a number of
specific, fixed and recurring, universal patterns in
conformity to the "We Good - Them Bad" orientation.
The other
mechanism, Blind Areas, turned out to be a major
discovery in the researching process. It has been found
with astonishing significance that persons, who
consistently expressed their views in patterns that
conformed to the "We Right Them Guilty" cognitive map of
social orientation, practically never (sic!) gave
expression to any awareness of even the most obvious
human realities that did not conform to that map. For
example, the evidence indicated, that not one leader or
spokesperson in the Israeli national consensus uttered,
over a period of 20 years, a spontaneous expression of
warning that we might be forgetting that "Them" are not
one hostile entity but many different individuals, men
women and children, not all bad and many suffering in
this conflict (the "national consensus" designation
applies to the authorities, the establishment, all
sources except those who were repeatedly referred to in
political discourse as "Bleeding Hearts" ("Lefties",
"Defeatists", "Self-hating", etc.). Not one consensual
voice uttered a spontaneous expression of awareness, that
having to forcefully rule over the Palestinians could be
dangerous for the moral soul of Israelis; or that any of
the suppression\punitive measures against "Them" were
unjustified or too much; or that any of the (thousands)
military operations of all kinds were unnecessary or
excessive; or that some aspect of our stand against them
could be not exactly right; or that some third-party
mediation effort toward resolution of the conflict should
not be seen as a threat, or that we could open some
initiative toward reconciliation, etc. - blind areas in
place of obvious human realities. That finding was fully
confirmed in texts referring to war in other cultures
past and present. The Theory of
Dehumanization organizes the identified Blind Areas and
Patterned Beliefs in ten headings: 1)We, 2)Them,
3)Bleeding Hearts, 4)Deviants, 5)Captives, 6)Leader,
7)Strategy, 8)Other Nations, 9)Morality, 10)Time.
Corresponding Blind Areas and Patterned Beliefs are
listed under the ten headings and comprise the
Dehumanization Syndrome, a list of symptoms that makes
the condition operationally definable like any other
psychological condition (only, it is felt, with far
greater precision). Analysis for Dehumanization is
performed by first classifying one's verbal expressions
(the relevant behavior of politicians is open, public
knowledge) under each of the 10 headings of the Syndrome
and then comparing them to the Patterned Beliefs.
Individual diagnosis is made by noting, in addition,
one's inattention (over a length of time) to the
realities covered in Blind Areas. Space does not
permit presenting the whole list of symptoms. Some
examples of Blind Areas follow (the corresponding
Patterned Beliefs can be easily imagined): THEM: Their
(same as ours) humanity and individuality BLEEDING HEARTS:
The fact the WE (the nation, the people) and our
leaders (leadership, government, ruling party) are not
the same thing, and therefore opposing the government
may not necessarily be against the nation while
supporting the government could be. STRATEGY: The
possibility, that the best tactics in certain
situations is not using force; the possibility that
the best tactics is making a conciliatory
move. MORALITY: The
moral obligation itself: measuring whatever we do to
them and they do to us with the same yardstick.
TIME: The fact
that history, past, and future have no meaning other
than in the perception and thinking of people living
in the present. The Dehumanization
Syndrome embodies the informed answer to the question how
people can be so irrational and immoral in a war
situation: Their perception mechanism filters out into
Blind Areas all evidence that could lead them to the
realization that in fighting and killing they may not be
doing the right thing. The direct cause of unjustified
wars is not what bigots, fanatics or warmongers believe;
it is what they do not think of and do not even perceive,
like their own fallible humanity, or the "enemy's"
individuality and equal humanity, or that the reality
that justified war and enmity could change in time. Blind
Areas effectively protect the dehumanized against
experiencing any "cognitive dissonance" in committing
even the worst war crimes. The full
Dehumanization Syndrome, which is list of symptoms, the
tool for analysis and the map of the inner space of
politically dehumanized minds will be sent by the author
to all upon request. The Theory of
Dehumanization claims to present the so far unattained
breakthrough in social theory, because bringing those
areas of mental blindness to human awareness affects the
direct inner causes of the condition. The Blind Areas and
Patterned Beliefs could be compared, in terms of organic
quasi-physical existence, to virus or software programmed
in the mental mechanism. Interfering with people's
Orientation System would be analogous to healing; whilst
all other known methods of prevention of intergroup
prejudice and enmity (improving political, geopolitical,
social, economic, or educational conditions, etc.)
manipulate factors that indirectly affect the beliefs and
actions of people and therefore could have, at best, the
effect of preventive sanitation measures. Secondly, the
Dehumanization Syndrome as an analytical tool makes the
condition objectively identifiable and definable in terms
of specific individual expression and behavior, and so it
can be approached, understood, and discussed
scientifically as a psychological state of mind, beyond
the present level of political discourse in our culture
that regards various manifestations of Dehumanization,
prejudice, racism, fanaticism etc., as a matter of
personal opinions and values (practically never owned,
always projected on some others), which lie beyond the
reach of objective scientific assessment. Applications in
education, culture, "Peace Studies", political discourse
and political prediction are such that, in my limited
experience, justify the hope that intergroup conflicts
and war as we experience them could now begin to become
things of the past. The Theory of
Dehumanization deciphers the code of destructive
political behavior in conflict by discovering that its
motivational drive (the overriding "interest") is the
need to maintain one's orientation (identity) system in
working order (Blind Areas exist to prevent it from
collapsing in face of human reality). Behavior of public
figures identified as dehumanized can be predicted, with
great accuracy, to be in conformity with any of the
Patterned Beliefs, including Strategy ("The way to deal
with Them is force"; "If force has not worked more force
should be applied"). Many common illusions regarding
"peace process" and errors of conventional political
analyzers could be thus avoided. On the other hand, even
a single spontaneous expression of awareness of reality
covered in a Blind Area, uttered by a person who was
formerly diagnosed as dehumanized, predicts (with very
high probability) a radical turn-around in his\her
attitudes about the conflict. When children are
old enough to learn that there have been WE and THEM,
wars, heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators,
etc., they are probably old enough to learn that there
has been Dehumanization, the most dangerous of social
epidemics which they should become able to identify in
themselves and in others. The Dehumanization Syndrome
would make the concept definable, its symptoms
identifiable in the here-and-now, applicable to any
historical, literary or contemporary text analyzed in a
classroom as well as to any real-life situation including
one's own. Students should learn the truth - relative to
the best knowledge of their teachers - about
politically-ideologically-religiously motivated human
irrational and destructive behavior, by the same logic
they learn the truth about sex, evolution, history, and
whatever is considered the truth to be passed on to the
next generation. In teaching
historical, literary, and contemporary political texts,
content analysis for identifying the Patterned Beliefs
may be introduced. Content analysis
for signs of awareness of any of the Blind Areas is
particularly recommended, since it would help the
analyzers to become aware of any such Blind Areas within
themselves. By applying the Theory of Dehumanization,
even single classroom teacher, without any technical gear
or costly apparatus, could effectively arrest and prevent
the development of dehumanized thinking and feeling
patterns in her or his students. As the dehumanized
system of orientation has been found to be entirely
dependant on its Blind Areas, prevention and healing
methods bring those Blind Areas into awareness. The
single technique found most effective is asking open
questions about realities hidden in the Blind Areas. This
technique circumvents resistance since it does not
question the dehumanized beliefs about "THEM", but rather
points at human realities in the territory and in
oneself, and asks persons, who normally avoid paying
attention to it, what they make of it. By that, it helps
them fill-in into their cognitive maps the human
realities that were missing there. To what extent and
how soon such educational practices will free people and
their systems from prejudices and warlike orientation? To
what extent would war be regarded as an option for
resolving conflicts in a society of members who are aware
of the dangers of Dehumanization and are skilled in
identifying its symptoms in their environment of
communicated ideas? - I can only hope some of you will
try to implement it in order that we all may find out.
Recommended
Readings - Dennen, van
der Johann. 1987, "In-group/out-group
differentiation". In V. Reynolds, V. Falger, & I.
Vine (eds.), The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism. London
and Sydney: Croom Helm pp. 1-47. - Erikson, Erik.
1965. "Psychoanalysis and ongoing History: problems of
Identity Hatred and Nonviolence", American Journal of
Psychiatry. 122, 241-250. - Kressel, Neil
J. 1990. "The Politics of Knowledge Production in
Social Psychology." Journal of Social Psychology (130,
pp. 5-28). - Koenigsberg,
Richard A. 1992. Hitler's Ideology. New York: The
Library of Social Science. - Kressel, Neil
J. 1993. "Politics and human nature", in Neil Kressel
(ed.), Political Psychology. New York: Paragon.
- Rogers, Carl
R. 1977. Carl Rogers on Personal Power. New York:
Delta. - Rosenberg, S.
W. 1988. Reason, Ideology and Politics. Cambridge UK:
Polity Press. - Simpson, E.
1987. "The Development of Political Reasoning". Human
Development. 30, pp. 268-281. - Waller, James.
2002. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit
Genocide and Mass Killing. New York: Oxford University
Press. see also:
PREVENTION OF
DEHUMANIZATION IN (CLASSROOM) EDUCATION, by Olek
Netzer (pdf-version)
http://emanzipationhumanum.de/english/human/dehum.html
by Olek
Netzer
WE: The
fact that "We" (the Nation, the People, the Country)
is an abstract term, that in reality only individual
human beings exist.
- Allport,
Gordon W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Garden City
NY: Anchor Books.
LIBERATION
FROM PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLOITATION: THE THEORY UNDERLYING
THE WORK TO BE DONE,
by Olek Netzer
(pdf-version)
THAT WAY NEVER MORE - Egalitarian Alternative to the
Pyramid of Political Party Power, by Olek Netzer
(pdf-version)
The
Einstein Project,
by Antonio
Rossin
Truth,
Belief, and Negative Language,
by Antonio
Rossin
The
Lessened Flexibility Syndrome -
LFS,
by Antonio Rossin
"Religion
- Communication - Addiction",
by Antonio Rossin
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Emanzipation
Humanum,
version November 2005, translation from german to english by
the author. Criticism, suggestions as to form and content,
dialogue, translation into other languages are all
desired
http://emanzipationhumanum.de/english/human