May 22, 2004
The behavior of the Abu Ghraib guards was not only a national and international embarrassment, but also a grievous threat to the Enlightenment view of the perfectibility of man. Secular humanism and the mystique of human perfectibility so permeate the American sense of self that any sign of "animalistic" behavior throws the intellectual classes into a state of panic, repression, and denial. This process of denial seems to affect conservative thinkers about as much as "there is no such thing as a bad boy" liberals. Widespread denial may explain why there is no comprehensive theory in social science to explain "phylogenetically regressive" events like Abu Ghraib (Bailey, May 16, in MND).
Lack of theory leads to oxymoronic arguments like "the behavior of the Abu Ghraib guards was so low, so stupid, so vile, and so inhuman that there had to be a higher cause behind it." We humans simply do not do such things unless under orders from those of higher rank. Some family members even imply that, in following such orders, the accused guards were merely doing their duty in the fight against international terrorism. The Enlightenment view demands that any primitive outpourings must be blamed on anything other than the atavistic actions of the perpetuators themselves...or rationalized as "really not that bad after all."
Then there is the helpful but woefully incomplete line of argument that the guards' vile behavior was "caused" by a lengthy list of aggravating and extenuating circumstances- e. g., physical and mental exhaustion, the desert heat, sexual tension between male and female personnel, lax discipline and poor management of the prison by those higher in the chain of command, and so on. At best, these are secondary causes that merely stress the guards' capacity to inhibit ancient and archetypal tendencies that reside deep in the minds of all of us. Without those deeper tendencies all of the stressors in the world could not have produced the Abu Ghraib fiasco.
In my first piece on Abu Ghraib (MND, May 18, 2004), I referred to the joy, festivity, and sexual abandon associated with the killing, mutilation, and consuming of enemies by an obscure tribe of Melanesian cannibals observed in the 1950s. Of course, Abu Ghraib was far short of that, but there are disturbing similarities. There was plenty of joy, festivity, and sexual abandon as the guards abused, injured, humiliated and de-humanized their charges- and treated them as captured "prey." The joy and festivity exhibited literally beg for theoretical explanation.
The Melanesian cannibals exhibited the full hunting complex- hunting, killing, mutilation of the corpse, and literally consuming the remains. To all of this they fused in the sexual motif to augment the festive occasion. From the perspective of the victims, however, it was a humiliating and agonizing form of death that gives reality to our worst nightmares.
On a hypothetical scale from the lowest human behavior to the highest, the cannibalistic orgy represented something close to the lowest human limit. Stephen Hawking's most brilliant thought in his illustrious lifetime might represent something close to the highest human limit. Now, where do we place the depredations of the Abu Ghraib guards on our hypothetical scale? I would say a bit closer to our Melanesian friends than Stephen Hawking on his best day.
We speak of the vile behavior of the Abu Ghraib guards, but this is somewhat of a misnomer. What we call behavior is a complex amalgamation of motivation, emotion, thought, fantasy, and overt action. Many of us have been motivated, emotionally energized, and driven by obsessive thoughts and fantasies to do the most awful and vile things. But a person of high moral character rarely, if ever, allows the worst of the ancestral self to invade the domain of human action. He or she may be boiling internally with anger, loneliness, or sexual frustration, but observers have no hint of the inner torment and ancient themes in play.
What frightens and abhors us is the alacrity with which the accused Abu Ghraib guards invited their animal selves into the realm of overt behavior. No doubt, many of the best-behaved guards wished ill to their enemy and might have enjoyed the rituals of humiliation and sexual abandon. But they would never have behaved so abominably...orders or not.
Most of us delve every day into the animal self in desire, feeling, and fantasy, but the moral test is at the gate to overt behavior. This is where Lynndie England and the other abusers failed. As long as people do not act animalistically, then the Enlightenment sense of self can prevail. But Lynndie and the rest unleashed their ancestral selves for us all to see- and we hate them for it.
Kent Bailey [kbailey(at)vcu.org]
