May 18, 2004
The actions of our prison personnel depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos and videos represents one of the greatest moral embarrassments ever suffered by the U. S. military and the nation as a whole. And it could not have come at a worse time for the country and present administration. We entered the war with Iraq on two basic pretexts, one explicit and the other implicit. Explicitly, it was fear of Saddam Hussein's WMDs, and implicitly President Bush and company felt compelled to bring "our morally superior democratic way of life" to the people of Iraq. I am a Bush supporter in general, but no WMDs have been found and Abu Ghraib has left America in moral shambles.
Columnists and commentators have expressed utter shock and dismay over the Abu Ghraib fiasco. Kathleen Parker suggests that our pornographic culture has dumbed down the idea of dignity and personal moral responsibility to the point that Abu Ghraib should come as no surprise. Anne Applebaum says that the American soldiers and civilians involved were not quite Nazi or Soviet camp guards, but they clearly treated their enemies as less than human. Jeff Donn emphasizes that the Abu Ghraib guards were otherwise normal and unremarkable people by societal standards, and they behaved much like the student "guards" in Phillip Zimbardo's classic 1971 study. According to Stanford psychologist Zimbardo, just playing a guard seemed to temporarily blot out the experiences of a lifetime for some students "and the ugliest, most base, pathological side of human nature surfaced."
To quote Bill Clinton, it depends on what Zimbardo means by "pathological." Historically, the Abu Ghraib guards behaved much like our pre-modern human ancestors in their relations with human enemies and prey animals of other species. Humans have always tended to see their enemies as less human than themselves, and animals of prey are, of course, not human by definition. It is ever so easy for the human mind to place a hated other into the non-human category and to, then, treat them no better than "prey."
For several million years up to a mere 12,000 or so years ago, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers and the male hunters spent much of their day planning and preparing for the hunt or actually hunting. Such hunting involved gaining access to an animal of prey, killing it in an often brutal and group-organized manner, and then proudly bringing it back to a deeply appreciative village. These were the star athletes of the Paleolithic and there were groupies galore. Cutting up the meat and sharing the bounty was often in a festive and very socially enjoyable atmosphere. Everything centered around the warrior-hunters and their prize prey.
I believe that the hunter motif- hunting of prey, joy in killing in the group male context, and festive eating and celebration- lies deep within the archetypes of the human mind. Perhaps the most dramatic and "inexplicable" aspect of Abu Ghraib was the festive and joyous atmosphere in which the depraved acts occurred.
In his 1979 book on Human Family Systems, sociobiologist Pierre van den Berghe describes the behavior of an obscure tribe of Melanesian cannibals observed in the 1950s. After killing a number of people from a neighboring tribe, groups of men and women gathered around the corpses and engaged in a joyous orgy of body mutilation and some body parts were consumed on the spot. Moreover, some of the males copulated with the corpses while simultaneously cutting off body parts! Hunting, killing, sex, and joy- a not so neat package that goes far back in human ancestry.
In Abu Ghraib others had already done the hunting and capturing and the "prey" were not killed as a matter of practice. But we still have the abject de-humanization of the enemy, the sex, the joy, and the festivity. Prison guards were given total control over their "prey" enemies, and, thus, the ancient motivational urge to release "inhuman" violence rose to the surface. This is, in my view, the major underlying cause of the Abu Ghraib fiasco, and invoking "lack of discipline," "lack of supervision," "orders from above," and the like, greatly miss the point.
The standard list of excuses tells us little of substance about the descent into darkness. Without an older human nature in the background, there would be no Abu Ghraib despite a multitude of aggravating conditions. In his preliminary comments before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Donald Rumsfeld erred a bit in saying that the behavior of the Abu Ghraib guards was "cruel, sadistic, and inhuman." Unfortunately, it was all too human.
Kent Bailey [kbailey(at)vcu.org]
