Customer Reviews

Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century

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This is an important work written in a clear and accessible manner. It is anecdotal and interpretive in style. Typically, one or more chapters tell a war story including details which may not be generally known; then the end of each section develops lessons to be learned.

Glover's book is a terrible indictment of war and other atrocities in the 20th Century. It is sometimes a tough read but is much more focused on the "whys and wherefores" than on the gruesomeness of the underlying subject matter. In other words it examines the psychology, politics and philosophy of war. The book is not comprehensive. We can all think of history which is not covered here. I guess I still have not quite figured out what criteria Glover used to include or exclude material. However, his themes are rationally developed. Some wars are shown to have been tribal in nature, some based on a belief system. Sometimes objective truth was abandoned and a cycle of self-deception ensued.

Glover shows how one's moral identity can be systematically eroded allowing us to slide into participation. Tools may include innuendo, ambiguous intentions, the "cold joke", the imposition of belief systems, the abandonment of objective truth, the spiral of hate, the use of precedent, the confusing of ends and means, physical distance (frequently enabled by technology), and the fragmentation of responsibility. Rectitude and honor were part of the "innocence" (i.e. part of the trap) that led to the First World War trenches. These can all lead to the abandonment of objective truth and a cycle of self-deception can ensue. Sometimes bureaucracy together with distance and division of labor can shrivel human response.

To resist, we need to keep our humanity alive. People need imaginative awareness and the democratic habits of tolerance, persuasion and compromise; also the abilities to accept ambiguity, to apply skeptical inquiry and to think critically. Moral identity is a key resource. We need to maintain self-respect and autonomy. We also need to notice small things and to guard against a slide into participation. The first step is to not look away and there is great value in early protest or refusal.

Reading this has been a growing experience for me and I now own an authoritative reference (more than 900 items in the bibliography) to help me write letters next time government leaders move us in uncomfortable directions. Thank you Professor Glover. Your book is a service to humankind.

Jonathan Glover has written an interesting and lively chronicle of the twentieth century using the prism of morality as his filter. Noting that the last 100 years were the most brutal in human history, Glover seeks the reasons why this became the case. In Europe at rhe start of the century, most people accepted the authority of morality. What happened to undermine that authority? Glover states that barbarism is not unique to the twentieth century: atrocities have always been with us throughout recorded time. Technology has made a difference; hyped as the answer for a better life, technology has also made it easier for programs such as genocide and biocide, not to mention the total destruction of humanity via nuclear weapons. Never before has the fate of so many been in the hands of so few.

Perhaps it has been that the view of human psychology developed during the Enlightenment has stagnated, failng to adjust to new developments and the outgrowths of those developments in the industrialized world. Glover tellingly quotes John Maynard Keynes's criticism of Bertrand Russell's comments about life and affairs as "brittle" because there was "no solid diagnosis of human nature underlying them."

But Glover errs by leading his book with a look at Nietzsche as a harbinger of the new type of thinking, concentrating on Nietzsche's values of "cruelty," which the philosopher had associated with the overman, the man who overcomes himself, creating new values in the process. Nietsche did not endorse his values of the ubermensch as values for the mass of humanity. The Nazis attempted to adopt Nietzsche as a philosophical cornerstone, but it is evident from their writings, especially those of Alfred Baumler (quoted by Glover), that they did not understand exactly what their chosen philosopher was really saying. Glover would have been much better off in this study by leading off with a study of Nietzsche's study of resentment. The twentieth century marked the triumph of resentment over rationality, taking the technology developed through and by a brittle rational world-view and using it not for the enhancement of human life, but rather the destruction of life.

Glover also misses another opportunity when he fails to note that the bloody reigns of Stalin and Mao are in a very large sense based on the Enlightenment view of human psychology that mankind was perfectible. Those not in step with the new order were deemed expendable, Glover quotes a chilling statement Stalin made while issuing arrest warrants, "Who's going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years' time? No one."

Most of Glover's analysis is spent with Hitler, and from the viewpoint of twentieth century history we can understand why. Much more is known about Hitler and his regime than those of Stalin and Mao, of whom new revelations are made with every passing year. In covering the excesses of all three dictators, Glover remains on target with an analysis that keeps the reader turning the pages.

Other strong points include chapters on Hiroshima, Rwanda, the Gulf War, and the refusal of Italians to help their allies, the Nazis exterminate Jews in Croatia, serving as a beacon of hope and rationality in a deadly irrational darkness.

Well worth your time and money, especially that it is now in paperback, and thus easier to read on the train or bus. The book will make you think and is the perfect tome to read on the way to and from work.

Jonathan Glover's book is not quite like anything you've read on war, state terror, and genocide. The tour of twentieth-century horrors is thematic rather than chronological, organized according to the ethical issues Glover wants to explore. This takes a little getting used to, but it allows the author to jump, for example, from the First World War to the Cuban Missile Crisis, to see which lessons had been learned in the interim and which might be applied in the future. The cumulative power of Glover's pointillist technique is enormous. "Humanity" combines a clear-eyed (necessarily often gruesome) depiction of *in*humanity with an informed and enlightening discussion of how leaders and ordinary people can change things for the better. As an examination of the psychological and existential origins of mass murder and genocide, it marks an advance on Ervin Staub's classic "Roots of Evil," and should be of interest to any student of modern history and politics.

Put simply, this is a wonderful book. Jonathan Glover has written a book that everyone with an interest in recent history should read. While the ultimate focus is philosophical, it is a terrific book of history. Glover takes some of the most horrific events of the past century (WWI, Stalinism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Rwanda, Bosnia), provides a clear analysis (he would hold his own with any historian), then further analyzes the events and how they might have been avoided in philosphical terms. But he doesn't let the philosophical discussions become either arcane or pedantic. For someone like me, who has more of a historical background, the philosophy was clear and enlightening. While he doesn't completely avoid abstractions, he addresses the abstractions is such a way that they engender practical understanding of many of the great horrors of the 20th century.

One can only hope that our national leaders will read and understand his message.

I was struck by the incisiveness of his analysis of Stalinist Russia, in particular the reasons why it was such a dismal failure (both in economic and human terms). I came away with a keener understanding of the principles by which to judge the viability of other "utopian" schemes.

A final point and a minor quibble. Glover concludes that religion has largely failed in creating the kind of moral authority that will prevent future Rwandas and Bosnias. That's true as far as it goes. But it doesn't mean that the religions are false. G. K. Chesterton said: "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and not tried." I believe that the moral authority of rational people of faith is still our greatest hope for a 21st century that is better than the 20th.

Enough of the quibbling. Glover has written an accessible, interesting and important book that demands a broad readership by people who would like to see a more humane world.

This book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in moral philosophy, moral psychology, or moral *history*. Glover's ideas are so interesting--and the details he discusses are so shocking--I found this book impossible to put down.

Jonathan Glover has written a highly readable history of the twentieth century that focuses on atrocities. While Glover, a moral philosopher and Director of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King's College in London, uses his philosophical expertise to provide a very philosophically-informed history, his knowledge of twentieth century history is formidable. The result is a book that, as far as I know, is absolutely unique in the literature: a history of the twentieth century from a distinctively *moral* perspective. Glover discusses the ethical ideas used to justify these atrocities, and the psychological conditions that made evil actions.

For those of us who have a background in moral philosophy, this made for some very interesting reading as he applied age-old theoretical arguments to concrete historical events and persons. To cite just one example: commenting on the kind of life Stalin lived, Glover notes a parallel with an argument made by Socrates. Glover writes, Stalin's "life gives striking support to what Socrates said about the life of an immoral person not being enviable. His bitterness, paranoia and fear make it hard to imagine anyone else wanting to be Stalin" (p. 250). This type of historico-philosophical insight can be found throughout Glover's book.

In addition to the historical and philosophical aspect of Glover's work, there is also a psychological component. Throughout the book, Glover discusses what he calls the 'moral resources' -- certain human needs and tendencies that work against selfish behavior. Glover presents convincing evidence that shows how the suppression of moral resources contributed to the tragedies of the last century. This, in turn, allows Glover to offer suggestions on how to cultivate the moral resources in everyone, so that we can try to avoid the atrocities of the last century.

One final comment: Glover's history is not comprehensive, nor was it intended to be (as he makes clear on p. 2). Glover focuses on several of the major atrocities of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust, Hiroshama, the Gulag, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. While his list of subjects is far from comprehensive, Glover has identified themes in human nature and in ethics that probably apply to the events that were omitted.

Really an excellent and thoughtfully written book. I wholeheartedly recommend it. One of the issues I kept thinking about however, was the author's brief discussion of where Stalin, Hitler and Mao rank on the relative evilness scale. Glover concludes that Hitler is the worst ("to turn towards Hitler is to look into the deepest darkness of all."). There is certainly support for this. First, neither of the other two targeted an enire race, religion or nationality for death as Hitler did. Second, while it might be argued that the millions of murders by Stalin and Mao were carried out under their astoundingly perverse belief (but belief nevertheless) that this might, as the author says, "improve people's lives", which they apparently had a "genuine desire to do", Hitler, by contrast, merely hated the Jews. Third, from what I am aware, the killings by Stalin and Mao were mostly within the borders of their own countries while the same is certainly not true of Hitler (think Poland, for starters). Finally, when one speaks about these three today, Hitler elicits instant revulsion while many people don't really even know who the other two are, or if they do, they have only a cloudy notion of who they were and what they were about, and certainly don't think of those two as "evil incarnate" the way we tend to think of Hitler. And yet, there is an argument to be made that the other two are even worse than Hitler. (I realize that to compare degrees of evil may carry the suggestion that if a person is "less evil" in a certain respect, then they are actually not terrible, or that their actions are somehow "condonable". That is obviously not my intent, but merely a necessary hazard of an exercise where you ask "Who is the most evil?".)

First of all, as the author notes, both Stalin and Mao caused far, far more people to be killed than did Hitler. Second, it seems that the life of the ordinary German was much better under Hitler than the ordinary Russian or Chinese person under Stalin or Mao. Of course, if you were a Jewish person (as I am) or another "weaker non-Aryan" undesirable, this seems absurd. However, it seems as if there was so much paranoia, terror and fear under the other two, that literally EVERY person living under Stalin or Mao lived a nightmarish existence every day, regardless of their race, religion, nationality or anything else about them. If they were not murdered or sent away to camps, they nevertheless must have lived every day in the most abject fear that one of these things could happen. No one could talk freely to anyone, not even members of their own family. While Hitler--as with all dictators--clearly had a degree of paranoia--witness the Ernst Rohm killing in 1934--it seemed to be limited more towards top officials who seemd to be a threat, and also seemed to be less and less of a factor as he started to consolidate his power in the mid to late-30's. But Stalin and Mao, by contrast, seemed to be obsessively concerned not only with the higher-ups in their respective parties but also with virtually every man, woman, and child in the entire country. This meant that the killings cut across every category. Finally, it would seem as if Germany was a far stronger and healthier country in, say, 1940, then in 1933, while I question whether the same can be said of the other two countries. Obviously this is again absurd if one is Jewish, but as noted before, when comparing evil people, everything is relative. Of course, Germany in 1945, was a far different story than 1940, but it recovered. As far as I can tell however, China and Russia were crappy and depressing places before the War, during the War, after the War and ever since.

I suppose one way to look at this perverse issue is as follows: If you were going to be transported back into one of the three countries in, say 1935, and your race, religion and nationality was completely up to chance--i.e. selected at random with no bearing on what you are now, which of these horrible places would you pick? (Of course, this doesn't account for the possibility of being in certain other countries, such as Poland, which seem to have been the brunt of everyone's evil.)

Readers who pick up this book probably think they are going to be reading a discussion centering on ethical thinking in the 20th century with some mention of historical events. Not entirely so. This book is more a compendium of the great mass murders of the 20th century with some comments on the abuse of the enlightenment and Nietzsche.

Glover gives cursory descriptions of the atrocities in Nazi Germany, the USSR, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Yugoslavia (Nothing about the murder of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, though.) He also discusses World War One, the My Lai massacre, Hiroshima and the Cuban missile crisis. In a way, the book is a kind of Cliff's Notes for these 20th century events. He doesn't offer anything new, but if you didn't take a contemporary history course or haven't been reading the newspapers, this is a book for you.

A problem with this book is that Glover feels most comfortable on well-trod ground. There doesn't seem to be nearly so many books about, say, Rwanda as there are on Nazi Germany, but still most of the book is about Nazi Germany. Glover notes that Stalin and Mao (and proportionally to the population, Pol Pot) were responsible for more deaths than Hitler and Himmler, but Nazism still has "a unique moral horror." Perhaps so, but the reader may also feel that Glover spends so much space on Nazism because there is so much more material to mine. Indeed, he doesn't reach far for his material. His sources include William Shirer, Hannah Arendt, Robert Conquest and Barbara Tuchman. Even the reader who hasn't read much contemporary history will have a feeling of déjà vu.

Like Allan Bloom, Glover portrays Nietzsche as the villain of the 20th century. Partially because Nietzsche urged men to be hard and to close their eyes to pity, Hitler and Stalin did just that. This might be true in Hitler's case, but is it true in Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's? For them, wasn't Marx, who is barely discussed here, more of an influence? Did Nietzsche also help cause the genocide in Rwanda and was Lt. William Calley thinking about "Also sprach Zarathustra" as he led his men into My Lai? Glover does mention Heidegger, but he is more interested in Heidegger's vanity and willingness to use the Nazis for career advancement than in his influential but "nebulous and elusive" philosophy.

Didn't Cambodia or Yugoslavia or Rwanda also have native philosophers who prepared the ground for disaster or who became collaborators when the murderous regimes came to power? There isn't much about them here. Although this book is supposed to be a "moral history" of the 20th century, the summaries of events are better than the summaries of ethical influences on these historical events.

If someone were really interested in learning about the terrible events of the 20th century, he or she would first skip to the back of the book and go find the materials that Glover used as references. After reading those, the reader would look for still more books. Alone this book will suffice only for those who want a thumbnail sketch of the terrors of the last century.

Glover describes the ethical and moral absues of the 20th century by finding common themes - rather than chronological ones - to describe the process through which so many crimes were committed. Ideology and blind faithfulness to ideas are major culprits in the century borne out of the enlightenment. In some ways he approahes the explanations of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer) in the analysis of reaso extending beyond the borders of the humane. There are also sevarl quotations from important writers and social critics of the century. I find the selections from Solzhenitsyn most compelling, not least because his Gulag archipelago signalled to the Western European maoists and communists that scientific human organization theories are dangerous. I also recommend reckless Minds by Mark Lilla, who examines similar ideas, though, from the point of view of the intellectuals that too often were blinded by the rationality of the ideas of tyrants. excellent and worthwhile book.

"Humanity" is an engrossing exercise in empirical ethics. It identifies the moral attitudes and psychological conditions that made possible some of the standout horrors of the 20th century -- the Holocaust, the Gulag, World War I, Hiroshima, Bosnia, My Lai, the Rwandan genocide, etc. In spite of this grim material, the book's bottomline is that mankind isn't hopelessly depraved, because we DO have moral resources that can keep our violent and cruel impulses in check. In particular, we can feel sympathy and regard for other people, and we can develop a "moral identity" of ourselves as persons who "simply don't do" certain things (like murdering people). Unfortunately, these moral resources can be overriden or perverted by conditions such as fear, technological distancing, the fragmentation of bureaucratic responsbility, or the inability to empathize with the sufferings of alien peoples.

The book's strengths are many. I particularly enjoyed the explanation of why the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 turned out differently than the European crisis of July 1914. Also excellent is the discussion of how the Nazis cultivated a warped moral identity of hardness and obedience that allowed them to see themselves as moral even while they slaughtered children. I took off one star only because the book's focus is on extreme and unusual cases of inhumanity. Easy cases make for easy moral analysis. It would have been interesting to consider the psychological tricks that permit people to work for the tobacco industry or to endorse torture in the war on terror. I'd also note that the book's anecdotal approach to history and ethics might put off readers looking for philosophical rigor.

That said, "Humanity" is a great book. Read it!

Glover, a philosopher, provides a deft historical account of how politics and technology have repeatedly conspired to erode the bonds of morality. The results are hauntingly familiar: Auschwitz, Dresden, Nagasaki, My Lai, Rwanda. That Glover's choice of case studies can seem arbitrary in its incompleteness is depressing testimony to the importance of his topic.

Glover's mission is to uncover the moral psychology of our own inhumanity: he catalogues and analyzes the processes that unleash the destructiveness in our nature. His hope is that this knowledge will help us to marshal the moral resources necessary to retain our humanity. His vision is that sympathy, empathy, and respect can overcome the horrors of sadism, tribalism, and ideology.

Glover's analyses are sophisticated and appealing mixtures of philosophy, psychology, and history; they are seldom marred by the optimistic naiveté that makes unpalatable most other proffered solutions to human callousness and cruelty. Their credibility is enhanced by Glover's evident mastery of recent work in moral and political philosophy and in social psychology. Given this intellectual sophistication, it is extraordinary that his prose is accessible and often elegant. This book is a rarity: a philosophical text that speaks passionately and clearly about an issue of extreme public concern.