Novel take on psychology of killing

The Sunday Business Post June 29th, 2006.

25 June 2006 REVIEWED BY Professor IAN O’DONNELL, professor of criminology, University College Dublin.
LIES IN A MIRROR: AN ESSAY ON EVIL AND DECEIT. By Peter Charleton, Blackhall Publishing €25

The subject matter of Lies in a Mirror - why we stab, beat and shoot each other, and how we account for our actions afterwards - is as old as time. The book’s reference points - the Nazi Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Soviet Gulags - have been extensively documented.

The route taken to the psychological conditions that allow violence to emerge has been well-traversed. But this is not to detract from Peter Charleton’s efforts. The questions he raises are fascinating because the answers have eluded us for so long and he gives the old arguments some novel twists.

This book links insights in a fluent and interesting way, and is written with verve and erudition. The raw materials in large part involve people’s self-narratives, the way we actively construct stories about our lives. The text is infused with vignettes drawn from the author’s experiences as a criminal barrister.

The historical range is wide, sweeping across continents and down centuries. Battlefields, concentration camps and private dwellings are all part of the mix. In an ambitious and thoughtful text, we learn how leaders are created and how they inspire devotion to the point of annihilation.

Charleton has a twin focus: explaining the origins of violence and exploring how perpetrators reconcile themselves to its consequences. His professional life brings him into regular contact with criminals trying to minimise the seriousness of their actions in order to avoid a conviction or reduce the penalty. Under such circumstances it is rational to embellish and distort the past. The truth is a hindrance.

One theme running through the book is how we persuade ourselves to kill and yet preserve a self-image as a person worthy of respect. A full and frank acceptance of the harm caused may be too great a burden to bear. Those who face their actions, denuded of excuses and victim-blaming, are diminished.

Charleton describes occasions when the burden of deceit is so great that a killer seems to struggle physically beneath it. These are men whose demeanour betrays the drama of their minds. It is as if they cannot straighten up to contemplate their own images; they avoid the gaze of the man in the mirror. Charleton emphasises the common factors that underlie violent acts, regardless of the time period when they occurred.

While in some ways maiming and raping are always the same, in others they are not. One of the defining trends of the past several centuries is a diminution in the number of impulsive violent exchanges between individuals. Open displays of aggression were replaced by codes of etiquette and manners; violence was pushed behind the scenes.

It is likely that bloodletting was not as troubling in the past to those who engaged in it. In this way evil is mutable; its underpinnings are not fixed. What is a source of shame and lies today was not always considered thus.

Killing is difficult when we see ourselves reflected in the potential victim. Then, in an instant, our lies and self-justifications evaporate.

Charleton gives the example of an Italian soldier taking aim at an enemy officer. When the ‘target’ lit a cigarette the sniper drew back. He wanted a cigarette himself and this created an instant fellow-feeling; to shoot a man under such circumstances would be murder, not an act of war.

Evil acts require indifference, not hatred. The stripping away of emotion allows behaviour that would otherwise be unconscionable. The enemy must be reduced to sub-human status before he can be crushed. To accept his humanity would make violence without regret impossible. To be defined as ‘other’ is the first necessary pre-condition for violence.

The more links in the chain between individual actions and lethal consequences, the easier it is to deny responsibility: I was just following orders; I did not know he would die; I only signed the warrant, someone else pulled the trigger.

To kill efficiently also requires distance. Charleton recounts how in 1941 Heinrich Himmler asked to see a ‘shooting operation’. But he came too close and was splashed by a victim’s brains.

This made him think about the psychological toll that killing could take, even on the most willing executioner, and led ultimately to the invention of the gas chamber, where massacres were less messy and less personal.

The technology of modern warfare has placed such a distance between combatants that killing has become comfortable. The flick of a switch to release a missile does not generate the same trauma as attempting to twist a bayonet into the stomach of a frightened teenager in an enemy uniform. But the implications of Charleton’s thesis are not entirely bleak. Men who do atrocious things are seldom irredeemable; the stain can be effaced.

The potential for violence is omnipresent and the challenge for society is to minimise the number of occasions when it is expressed. How best to accomplish this will be a subject for many future generations of scholars.

Ian O’Donnell is a director of the UCD Institute of Criminology.

www.blackhallpublishing.com