Divining the source of evil and human cruelty

"Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain"

by Kathleen Taylor

Oxford University Press, 350 pp., $34.95

"The Anatomy of Evil"

by Michael H. Stone, M.D.

Prometheus Books, 430 pp., $26.98

When news breaks of a psychopathic crime (usually murder), people use a particular set of adjectives that reflect their horror, writes psychiatrist Michael H. Stone, M.D., in his new book "The Anatomy of Evil" — "words like 'fiendish,' 'revolting,' 'heinous,' and (pretty regularly) 'inhuman.' This is how we distance ourselves from the acts in question, as if to say: 'no human could do these things.' We don't like to be reminded that only humans do these kinds of things, that evil is an exclusively human phenomenon."

University of Oxford neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor concurs. Her new book, "Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain," coincidentally appearing on the shelves at the same time as Stone's, examines the roots and forms of human cruelty.

Taylor writes, "Cruelty is as old as humankind, if not older. At its core lies unjustified voluntary behaviour which causes foreseeable suffering to an undeserving victim or victims ... [I]ts aim is to make its targets suffer physically or psychologically."

But why does cruelty exist? It is comforting to consider brutality an aberration and decency the norm. But, as Taylor reminds us, "Moral judgements, paradoxically, have been used to justify extraordinary cruelty."

She also notes our morbid fascination with evil and cruelty. "Horrific assaults and ingeniously unpleasant murders are abundantly available in mainstream fiction," both in books and on screen, she writes.

If that perverse appeal extends to nonfiction, then both these books are likely to succeed in the marketplace. Their success will be well-deserved. The books are both thorough in their research and thought-provoking in their approach.

They are also remarkably complementary. Understanding any scientific subject requires a combination of observation and analysis — or stated another way, empirical evidence and theory. "The Anatomy of Evil" is largely empirical in its approach, while "Cruelty" focuses on analysis. "The Anatomy of Evil" centers on Stone's systematic study of hundreds of "true crime" books and magazine articles, plus in-person interviews with some of the perpetrators. From that, he developed a 22-point scale of evil ranging from justifiable homicide (category #1) to psychopathic torture murders with torture as the primary motive (category #22). That scale may represent a breakthrough for criminologists, but nonexpert readers will find the distinctions between its levels to be subjective, subtle and not particularly enlightening.

Fortunately, Stone also provides a much more interesting and useful set of measurement criteria. Those are the various axes along which evil-doers may be measured: personality traits, behavioral traits, experiences and genetic predispositions.

Kathleen Taylor's "Cruelty" is concerned less with quantifying evil and more with putting it in the broader context of human behavior. She discusses in detail two key concepts that enable ordinary people to become extraordinarily cruel: "otherization," which transforms the victims into something subhuman in the perpetrators' eyes; and "world-shaping," the inclination to see the world according to one's beliefs, even when those beliefs conflict with sensory information or other knowledge.

Taylor systematically describes the way the brain processes information that leads to actions, the role of emotion, the development of a belief system, and the progression from callousness to sadism. Then, in her closing chapter, she leaves the realm of analysis for speculation and, some might say, self-justification: "The scientific study of cruelty has consequences for our everyday understanding of human harm-doing. If we can come to grasp why people commit atrocities, we may be able to prevent them — that is the hope."

Stone also includes a note of optimism in his "Final Thoughts." "The system is not perfect," he writes. "We need to pay more attention to subtleties of personality, becoming more restrictive with the psychopathic killers and more liberal with the non-psychopathic prisoners who show genuine signs of remorse, reform, and redemption."

Physicist Fred Bortz is the author of 17 books for young readers.