Customer Reviews

Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain

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In the last 100 years far more people have been killed in mass atrocities than in actual warfare. Recurrent cruelty on a massive scale is an urgent problem which mankind has failed to solve. Taylor comes to this subject claiming that her expertise in neuroscience will give new understanding. But she writes in a self-indulgent style in which large quantities of speculation are mixed with the results of her reading. Repetitive and rambling text with asides of doubtful relevance and an occasional lacing of feminism make the book an irritating read. I am not fond of fiction as evidence in a scientific context. Shakespeare's Othello is stunning literature but not scientific evidence. Other quotations are used frustratingly, often leaving a question floating rather than adding to understanding. "A benchmark study of sexual behaviour" (p 204) from which she quotes precise-sounding percentages turns out to be the fraudulent work of Alfred Kinsey. Even a glance at Wikepedia would have raised suspicion. It is difficult to know how much Taylor accepts Freud's theories. Many intelligent people do, but mainstream scientists are deeply sceptical. The irritating use of endnotes is sadly not just a feature of this book. Disrupting one's reading to flip to the note may yield only a source reference, or stuff which should either be omitted or put in the main text, or a comment without which the main text cannot be understood. This is bad editing as well as lack of organization and discipline by the author.
Expect plenty of the sort of stuff you might get by discussing the subject with an intelligent friend, plus references to literature you may not know. In that sense you will have mulled over many angles of the subject. Do not expect your understanding to be enhanced greatly in a scientific sense, because the small amount of neuroscience does not increase understanding as much as you might think. Sadly, the impression is that this book is the product of the urge to follow up a previous best-seller rather than of mature scholarship and an incisive mind.

I was a little ambivalent about this when I first picked it up, but I couldn't put it down. I found it to be extremely engaging and thought-provoking-- a lot of the historical examples are extremely prophetic of what is going on in the world today. I highly recommend this title for anyone who is interested in the psychology of violence, war, and inhumanity.