inhumanity – Page 2 – Engaging Peace

Can compassion replace humiliation?

Posted on April 7, 2011July 6, 2011 by kathiemm

Humiliation is clearly a means for showing disregard and contempt, and is perhaps particularly insidious because it can be done without any direct physical contact.

Countless experts on the Middle East have made note of centuries of humiliation by Christian invaders. Those invaders took land and resources by force, divided peoples up into arbitrarily created countries to weaken political and military resistance, and denigrated the most popular religion of the area.

Because of wide recognition of the destructive aftermath of humiliation, the Preamble of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins by stressing the importance of recognizing that:

“…the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and that “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind….”

Acting ethically to promote human rights, peace, and reconciliation becomes particularly challenging in the face of inhumane acts perpetuated by other human beings. Certainly, the retaliation of Muslim militants against innocent people in a U.N. Mission in Afghanistan is horrifying, just as is the desecration of the Qu’ran by Terry Jones.

By now we should understand how violence begets violence in a constantly escalating spiral. We have not yet solved the threat of Star Wars or other forms of mass destruction that can wipe the human race from the planet.

We must develop new ways of dealing with insults to our beliefs and our rights–alternatives that don’t promote the spiral of retaliations. One such approach is the Compassionate Listening Project (see video below).

An outgrowth of years of reconciliation efforts with Israel and Palestine, the initiative is designed to teach peacemaking skills at every level of human interaction from the personal family to the global family. Members of this project are ready to talk to anyone, including terrorists, to promote peace.

Can we even imagine a world where compassion and listening replace humiliation and retaliation?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Towards greater moral engagement

Posted on January 6, 2011April 18, 2021 by kathiemm

Moral engagement requires moral agency–active engagement in resisting pressures and justifications for behaving inhumanely, and proactive efforts to engage in and promote humane behavior. Key contributors to moral agency include humanizing the other, and empathizing with the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the other.

Poster: Free Manning — Poster designed by Eric Gulliver, 2011

A noteworthy example of someone who courageously stuck his neck out to protest inhumane behavior is U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning. We recommend that you read all you can about this serviceman and decide which mechanisms fit him or whoever is the WikiLeaks whistle blower who released the video of the helicopter attack on civilians and the Reuters newsmen.

Moral engagement does not come easy. Manning has been imprisoned and allegedly tortured for his whistle blowing activities. On a lesser scale, humanizing members of a group that is reviled by members of your own group can make you unpopular and put you at risk. Empathizing with people who are despised by your peers can be psychologically painful and socially dangerous.

However, there are also high costs to moral disengagement. Wars are increasingly followed by large numbers of suicides and cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in their former participants—a likely reflection of the “moral injury” experienced by those former participants because of what they did to other human beings. (For more information on moral injury in veterans, see the work of Brett Litz.)

Movement from moral disengagement to engagement is possible. Servicemen who went to Vietnam were well-indoctrinated in morally disengaged reasoning. Yet many became morally engaged in the face of the horrendous inhumanity they witnessed and in which they were ordered to participate. The active anti-war movement that spread within the armed forces helped bring that war to an end.

Today, veterans against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are working tirelessly for an end to those wars. Consider what you can do to support them and engage in peace-promoting activities. For example, read and consider adding your name to the Open Letter of Reconciliation and Responsibility to the Iraqi People by Iraq Veterans Against the War.

If you love democracy and appreciate your freedoms, remember the words of Thomas Jefferson: “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Remember also how many times yesterday’s “enemies” have become today’s allies. Reconciliation is always possible.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Exonerating or pardoning the victim (Moral engagement, part 9)

Posted on December 16, 2010December 22, 2010 by kathiemm

The form of moral engagement that we call “exonerating or pardoning the victim” is in many ways a logical outgrowth of perspective taking and empathy. If you are able to put yourself in the shoes of another, you become more able to understand the ways in which people who behaved inhumanely may be no more inhumane and evil, and have no more desire to kill and maim, than you.

Failure to pardon can have disastrous effects. After World War I, there was no exonerating or pardoning of any of the people in the Axis powers by the Allies. Instead, the heavy load of reparations, imposed poverty, and humiliation of all Germans–whether they had been directly involved in the war or not–contributed directly to the rise of Hitler and World War II.

After World War II, the victorious powers proved that they, for at least that one generation, had learned the lesson of World War I, and avoided acting on desires for punishment and retaliation, working instead to rebuild Japan and Germany.

Perhaps the highest level of moral engagement can be found in individuals who were themselves victimized but have found the courage to forgive their oppressors; a perfect example of this level and type of moral engagement can be found in Nelson Mandela. In a later post, we will provide a review of the film Invictus, a powerful illustration of Mandela’s forgiveness program, carried out in the context o f preparation for a World Cup rugby match.

The following movie review by our guest blogger, Mimi Maritz, illustrates these themes of exonerating and pardoning in another film.

Review of “Forgiving Dr. Mengele”
This documentary tells the story of Holocaust concentration camp survivor, Eva. Like her twin sister Miriam, Eva was subjected to excruciating and nearly fatal experiments by Dr. Mengele, the notorious prison camp doctor, yet she came to pardon her former oppressors.

Through her search to help Miriam discover which drug Dr. Mengele injected to stunt her kidney growth, Eva met face-to-face with other Nazis involved in the Holocaust. Her search led her to realize that the only way to move forward and live life without regret was by forgiving those who had harmed her and millions of others.

Eva argues that to avoid being victims for the rest of their lives, the survivors of victimization must free themselves from suffering, and that the only way to do this is by accepting the past and forgiving the transgressors.

By forgiving, Eva does not mean forgetting; she is continually spreading her story to all who will listen. When another survivor says to Eva “I am unable to smile deeply from my heart… I do not know how to be happy,” Eva declares that we have the right to live without pain and we do not need permission to start healing our hearts.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology, with Mimi Maritz

Ecological approach to studying peace and war

Posted on August 23, 2010July 6, 2011 by kathiemm

It is unlikely that the human capacity for inhumanity can ever be adequately explained by any one theory. We believe that all behavior is multi-determined—that is, many forces at a variety of levels contribute to any one type of behavior, including aggression.

We subscribe to what has been called an ecological approach to understanding complex behaviors. This approach involves constructs reflecting different contexts that influence individuals and are in turn influenced by those individuals. That set of constructs includes: the macrosystem, the exosystem, the microsystem, and the individual.

For example, an individual’s concerns about “national security” are influenced by:

The values and mass media positions of the society at large (the macrosystem)
The views expressed in places of worship, neighborhood, and more local media (the exosystem)
Lessons promulgated within the home and family (the microsystem)

Moreover, individuals bring to all of their interactions their own genetic heritage and the results of their personal experiences, beginning in the womb. Sometimes that heritage and those experiences can lead individuals to behave in ways that change the microsystem, or the exosystem, or the macrosystem. Think of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King.

Consider also your own views on national security, on torture, on terrorism. How many influences on those views, at what levels of experience, can you identify?

In our next post, we start considering psychological theories that focus on thoughts and emotions that individuals bring to their interactions, as well as the thoughts and emotions they carry away from those interactions.

Individuals’ tendencies to incorporate ideas from the different environments in which they grow and to which they adapt can lead to a great deal of ingroup and outgroup thinking that can provide a basis for enduring conflict.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology