Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide is the culmination of Kristen Monroe's twenty years of work on altruism and moral choice. The book is magisterial in scope. Its goals are ambitious, its methods innovative, and its results provocative.
As in her previous work, Monroe relies on narrative data—the stories people tell about themselves and others—to probe individual psychological processes. Her goal is to develop “an empirically grounded theory of moral choice” (p. 4), one that accounts for not only rescuers, but also bystanders and genocide supporters.
The presentation of unedited interview transcripts forms the heart of the book. Reading the transcripts without commentary imparts an immediacy and intimacy rarely encountered in social science monographs. It is as if one is listening in on very, very private conversations. Reading the raw data also allows the reader to form her own mental picture of each interviewee, which is exactly Monroe's intention.
Monroe presents interviews—or what she calls “targeted case studies”—with five different people (p. 27). The five she presents are similar in background, but differ in their responses to the Nazi conquest of Europe and the Holocaust. They are drawn from a pool of over 100 interviews that Monroe conducted over fifteen years, starting in 1988.
Tony is the rescuer from an affluent background who views his activities as nothing extraordinary. Beatrix is the bystander. She is Tony's cousin and grew up in the same affluence, but when faced with the same circumstances did nothing to help, believing that one person could not make any difference. Kurt is the “good” German soldier whose profile is similar to that of Tony, as both served in their respective armies. Kurt believes in the ineluctable forces of history and thus supports Germany's invasion of the West, but not the East, which he views as the historic homeland of the Slavs. Fritz is a disillusioned Nazi supporter who admits that he, like many others, dealt with the conflagration of Nazi persecution of Jews by putting his head in the sand—despite traveling all over Europe during the war as a journalist. Florentine is what Monroe calls an “unrepentant” Nazi supporter; she is the widow of one of the most prominent Dutch Nazis of World War II, and has lost none of her devotion to Hitler and the Nazi cause in the ensuing years. All respondents are Dutch, save Kurt who is German. All interviews were conducted in English.
Some readers might balk at the small number of interviews, but Monroe's justification is both persuasive and creative. As she explains, we can learn a lot about the differences between, say, French, English, and German grammar by comparing individual speakers of each language. Comparing different speakers highlights key differences in how each language is put together. So it is with the study of moral choice. Comparing actors who made very different moral choices in the face of extreme circumstances can reveal key differences in how each is put together psychologically.
The five respondents vary in their levels of articulateness and fluency in English, but even those less articulate provide rich insight. In the case of Beatrix, for example, it is the long silences, shrugs, and hesitations that are so telling as she struggles to describe how she sees herself and to explain why she never tried to hide anyone in the room she and her husband built in the attic “where you could go away to hide” (p. 96). Beatrix was no Nazi supporter and admits to knowing about the campaign against Jews, but does not connect this knowledge to her own circumstances: her husband's ability to start a medical practice because of a Jewish doctor fleeing to South Africa. As she continues talking, it is clear that a low sense of efficacy permeates her entire worldview and self-image, two key components of what Monroe calls an “ethical framework.” This ethical framework, Monroe explains, is akin to “scaffolding” which is filled in by life experience. Identity filters through this ethical framework to produce an “ethical perspective.”
We all have ethical perspectives, Monroe explains, and each is unique because it is based on a host of life experiences which form our individual self-image, worldview, canonical expectations, idealized cognitive models, and the way we integrate values into our identities.The key variable that forms our ethical perspective is identity. According to Monroe's theory, it is identity that delimits the choices on our individual “menu” of options, not only morally but also cognitively. Beatrix, for example, displays a self-concept marked by low efficacy; additionally, she sees herself as someone who is always “doing the wrong things” (p. 102). According to Monroe's theory, it is not that Beatrix thought about, and then decided against, using the room in her attic to hide people. Rather, that possibility never existed for Beatrix—it never appeared on her menu of options.
For rescuers, identity also determines choice, but rescuer identity is comprised of a much different self-image—one with high efficacy or the belief that one can control one's destiny. Rescuers view all people as part of the same humanity and, therefore, worthy of the same treatment. (Non-rescuers, by contrast, see the world in “us v. them” terms, consistent with Social Identity Theory [SIT].) Seeing all people as part of the same humanity makes others' suffering morally salient, hence, demanding action. For rescuers, helping those in need is the only option they see.
What differs then between rescuers, bystanders, and Nazi supporters is not the psychological process behind the different choices these actors make, or that some actors simply lack a moral compass, since moral sense is innate to all human beings and many animal species as well. Rather, what differentiates rescuers from bystanders and Nazi supporters are the components of their respective identities, which limit the cognitive choices each actor sees.
As someone deeply influenced by Monroe's work, I could not help but make comparisons between her findings and my own on the Rwandan genocide. The research design for my book, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (2009), was inspired by Monroe's design for The Heart of Altruism (1996). For The Heart of Altruism, Monroe constructs a spectrum of increasingly other-regarding behavior. For Killing Neighbors, I constructed a spectrum of increasingly violent responses to genocide. At one end were rescuers, at the other end, killers. Though my focus was on explaining killers (more specifically, how ordinary farmers became killers), I followed Monroe's method and examined a range of people who did not kill with the hope of understanding better those who did. (Unlike Monroe, I had access to self-identified killers; these were prisoners who had voluntarily confessed to having participated in the genocide in exchange for the possibility of a shortened sentence.)
While my approach was not psychological, there are striking parallels between my findings and hers. First, the small number of rescuers I spoke with closely resembled Monroe's rescuers in their behavior. They were impervious to the attendant risks involved in trying to hide those in need. They helped people without distinction and never buckled under increasing pressures to betray them.
Second, I found the same sense of low efficacy that Monroe finds in bystanders and Nazi supporters in a group I called “joiners.” Joiners were ordinary farmers who were mobilized to carry out the violence, but were not involved in planning or organizing the genocide. Many joiners echoed Beatrix (the bystander) and Kurt (the loyal German soldier) when I asked them if they ever tried to refuse orders to kill or orders to turn people over to the killers. Many responded by saying “What could I do? I was only one person” or “No one was listening to me.”
Third, joiners, like Monroe's non-rescuers, placed the locus of agency on external forces—in this case, the group. By group, I do not mean ethnic group, but rather the group of local men mobilized to carry out the genocide in their community. Joiners looked to the group to make sense of the situation and to decide what to do about rumors of threats and attacks, much like Monroe's non-rescuers located agency in external forces beyond their control.
Fourth, in contrast to joiners, resisters (those who were pressured but refused to go along with certain activities) never looked to external forces or other people to make sense of the situation or to decide what to do. Rather, they maintained their own internal sense of right and wrong and thus were always clear about what they were and were not willing to do. One resister, for example, refused to share meat stolen from a neighbor. (Stealing and pillaging Tutsi property was a common prelude to killing.) When I asked him why he refused, he responded, “Because it's wrong to eat stolen meat.” Joiners, by contrast, never mentioned the rightness or wrongness of their actions. This silence echoed that of Monroe's non-rescuers, who never mentioned the sanctity of life when talking about the plight of Jews during the war, as if it never occurred to them that Jews faced a situation of constant life and death. Rescuers like Tony, by contrast, referred to the sanctity of life often as this was rescuers' most cherished value.
Fifth, I found that interviewing people who did not kill did sharpen my understanding of those who did, much as Monroe bets that comparing rescuers to bystanders and Nazi supporters will reveal important insight into all three actors. Finding Rwandans who managed to evade, avoid, shirk, or refuse to participate in the genocide, for example, indicated that there was room for joiners to exercise agency, however circumscribed it may have been. In other words, joiners could have decided not to go along with the violence, but did not.
Finally, one set of findings seem to point to limitations in Monroe's theory. I found that many of my interviewees defied straightforward categorization into the analytic boxes of “rescuer,” “bystander,” and “supporter.” Instead, many actors (except rescuers) occupied different categories over time or more than one category at the same time. Joiners, for example, not only refrained from killing at times, but even helped people escape. Some killers helped strangers while others helped friends. This finding led me to conclude that contrary to SIT, most Rwandans did not wake up one morning to see Tutsi as the ultimate out-group. Instead, they continued to see their Tutsi friends and neighbors as friends and neighbors, indicating that categorization processes do not reduce simply to “us” and “them.” Other distinctions continue to be salient.
Monroe also points out that categorizing others as an out-group makes it easier to mistreat them. But categorizing people as an out-group does not necessarily mean that a person will mistreat others. How a person acts toward out-group members seems to depend largely on situation. An example comes from Monroe's fascinating appendix in which she compares different sources of narrative (written autobiographies and interview transcripts) from two interviewees. One of the interviewees she discusses is Irene, a Polish girl featured extensively in The Hand of Compassion (2004). Irene was hiding Jews in a villa where a German major was living and where she worked as the housekeeper. Quite by accident, the major discovers Irene's rescue operation but agrees to let her continue in exchange for a sexual relationship with Irene. While the Jews' situation may have had little moral salience for the major, this lack of salience did not lead him to report them. The deal the major strikes with Irene is significant since he could have turned in the Jews and forced a sexual relationship onto Irene, but he did not.
In addition to treating categorization processes as straightforward, Monroe's theory also seems to treat identities as fairly stable. She presents Florentine as the ultimate Nazi supporter, whose love of Hitler has not waned in the many decades since the war. I, however, remained skeptical of Florentine's one-note diatribe against “the Jews” during the whole of her interview, and wondered what a second or third interview would have revealed, especially if Florentine's young, admiring sycophant was not present. It is quite possible that Florentine, despite her anti-Semitic rantings, makes further distinctions within categories, as Kurt does when he distinguishes between “our” Jews (German Jews) and “other” Jews (Jews from outside Germany) and as Hutu extremists do when they form close friendships with Tutsi.
In the end, I found that Monroe's theory goes a long way in explaining rescuers' actions. I was also convinced that the same psychological process operates with bystanders, genocide supporters, and rescuers. I was less convinced, however, that the identities of bystanders and genocide supporters circumscribe the options they see as clearly as it does for rescuers. The actions of non-rescuers in a given moment are much more indeterminate, making them potentially benign and threatening at the same time. As Irene remarks in The Hand of Compassion (2004), she had no idea how the major would react when he walked in on some of the Jews she was hiding in the villa.
This is not to diminish in any way the contribution of Monroe's theory or her book. No book, even one that covers as much ground as Monroe's, can answer all questions, especially the large questions that Monroe raises. Much to her credit, she ends the book with perhaps the most challenging question that all research on genocide begs—how our scholarly insights can help to prevent or stop future episodes of mass killing. Or, to put it in Monroe's terms: How we can turn the vast sea of Beatrix's (bystanders), Kurt's (loyal soldiers), and Fritz's (ostriches) into people whose cognitive and moral perspective resembles more closely that of Tony and Irene (rescuers).
Monroe does not offer easy answers but simply points out that “If we categorize, we can recategorize” (p. 313). Categorizing, however, is not just an individual, psychological process; it is also a state project. States regularly pursue campaigns of making and remaking categories, of drawing and re-drawing boundaries, and of forcing and enticing people to see themselves and others in particular ways. What we need to find is a way to mold our individual perspectives so that we are less vulnerable to such moves and more anchored to the view of a single humanity. Monroe's book brings us one step closer to this ideal.
