My first non-fiction in a while. It's a very intense book, covering major atrocities of the twentieth century and trying to connect the dots from smaller ones to larger. The idea is to find parallels. Do transitions such as going from allowing a few "accidental" civilian targets in WW2 bombing -> encouraging firebombing of cities -> Hiroshima & Nagasaki mirror the transitions of dehumanizing prisoners -> coming to accept torture as ok? What combinations of fear and intimidation kept people from speaking up and helping under Stalin and Hitler and Mao? And why did some people keep small bites of their humanity while others were liberated to cruelty?

Anyway, a heavy book, but very readable. I enjoyed learning the history more than his philosophy. ( )

The question that I pose for this book is "should an ethicist write history?"

Glover does a good job in setting his parameters early on. The first part essentially sets the terms for the rest of the writing. However, as a historian, I must find some false premises within his writing and histoiriography (method). First, he has a very abridged treatment of Nietzsche. While Nietzsche did indeed leave a wake of amoralism, his writings don't stipulate it as much as Glover leads to belive. Second, and most damning, is the fact that this isn't a moral history at all, Glover treats it more as a discussion of the twentieth century's more morally egregious acts, and prescription according to his analysis. While I don't think that Glover treads on bad logic in his analysis (there is a case for a Leviathan U.N.), I think calling "Humanity" a "moral history" is not so true. This is the domain of cultural historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists, perhaps not philosophers. For unlike philosophers, social scientists are great at measuring and identifying human morality over time. Yes, this isn't what Glover is doing, but I must still assign demerit for bad marketing if nothing else.

As I have said, left to his own, Glover makes some good scholarship. However, the reader should treat "Humanity" for what it is, not what it is not. ( )

Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Jonathan Glover
September 19, 2011

Motivated by a comment by a philospher that the job of philosophy was to make sense of the twentieth century, Glover, an ethicist, reviews the horrors of the century past. He starts with the morals of war, reviewing close combat in the first world war, My Lai, HIroshima, and Bosnia. He points out that war becomes a trap for moral responses as it continues. It became easier to kill when it was at a distance. He notes that tribalism remains potent, reviewing Rwanda. He blames Nietzsche for undercutting the foundations of morality, with his will to power and the death of religion, and later in the book explains how the Nazis distorted Nietszche. Other than war, the great problems were ideologies, and the terror at the disposal of the state, leading to the great murderers, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Ideology is one of reasons ordinary people collaborate in atrocities, others being tribal identity, and being able to regard outsiders as less than human. He talks several times about the "cold joke", the euphenism covering the horror, like the comment that a Gulag prisoner shot was "making fertilizer"

In the end, he is for a world government with serious powers and ability to intervene for humanitarian ends, and for people to be guided by moral imagination, the ability to imagine what the other person is experiencing, and empathizing with them. This seemed to be borne out in the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis. Very good prose

Some notes:
"The chief business of twentieth century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth century history" - R.G. Collingwood

Hobbesian fear - the fear of the power of others. "And from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himself, so reasonable as Anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till he sees no other power great enough to endanger him" Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Regarding the psychosomatic symptoms of Nazis conducting the extermination of the Jews "These symptoms of inner conflict are an extreme case of what Socrates said about how the happiness of those who do immoral things is destroyed."

In the case of Heidegger and his embrace of Nazism. His work on Being is obscure, and a philosopher sent to Auschwitz, Jean Amery, commented on the emptiness of the notion. Also, that the obscure philosopher is in a sense trying to dominate his audience, asking for conclusions to be taken on his own authority

"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deads, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being"
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago ( )

Promised much more than it delivered. A good historical survey, but a superficial analysis and crank solutions. ( )

Through a review of the targetting of civilians in WWI and WWII, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and Nazism, along with a few other examples, talks about the role of morality in human political activity, particularly with regards to the use of violence. Insights are not revolutionary but well-thought threw and is a good introduction to the historical examples, if unknown to the reader. ( )

This is a different take on the development of and rationale behind the major atrocities of the twentieth century, including detailed chapters on the growth of Stalinism and the Nazi genocide against the Jewish people.

The book is compelling reading, in a large part due to its cringe inducing descriptions of various atrocities committed in the past 100 years. The author attempts to explain these events through an ethical and philosophical framework. I didn't find much to distinguish the author's arguments from others who have also written on these atrocities. A section on the actions of philosophers in Nazi Germany was particularly dry, and seemed primarily to be in there as a justification for the author to burnish his credentials as a philosopher.

Overall, however, it is a very thought-provoking book, and made me reexamine my assumptions behind such acts as the fire-bombing of Dresden and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This book was written in 1999, but has much relevance in the post 9/11 world, particularly in the author's examination of a society's moral slide to the point of being able to accept and initiate atrocities against its own people or those of other nations. ( )

Absorbing and wide ranging book, instantly accessible and very well written. Glover makes a difficult and complicated subject a pleasure to read. ( )

In Humanity, English ethicist Jonathan Glover begins with the now commonplace observation that the last 100 years were perhaps the most brutal in all history. But the problem wasn't that human nature suddenly took a sharp turn for the worse: "It is a myth that barbarism is unique to the twentieth century: the whole of human history includes wars, massacres, and every kind of torture and cruelty," he writes. Technology has made a huge difference, but psychology has remained the same--and this is what Glover seeks to examine, through discussions of Nietzsche, the My Lai atrocity in Vietnam, Hiroshima, tribal genocide in Rwanda, Stalinism, Nazism, and so on.

There is much history here, but Humanity is fundamentally a book of philosophy. In his first chapter, for instance, Glover announces his goal "to replace the thin, mechanical psychology of the Enlightenment with something more complex, something closer to reality." But he also seeks "to defend the Enlightenment hope of a world that is more peaceful and more humane, the hope that by understanding more about ourselves we can do something to create a world with less misery." The result is an odd combination of darkness and light--darkness because the subject matter of the 20th century's moral failings is so bleak, light because of Glover's earnest optimism, which insists that "keeping the past alive may help to prevent atrocities." He cites Stalin's bracing comment, made while signing death warrants: "Who's going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years' time? No one." At one level, Humanity is a book of remembrance. But it's more than that: it's also an attempt to understand what it is in the human mind that makes moral disaster always loom--and a prayer that this aspect of our psychology might be better controlled. --John J. Miller.

Steven Pinker, New York Times Book Review
"This is an extraordinary book: brilliant, haunting and uniquely important."

This fascinating and profound book is about the psychology that made possible Hiroshima, the Nazi genocide, the Gulag, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and many other atrocities. The author reveals common patterns - how the distance and fragmented responsibility of technological warfare gave rise to Hiroshima; how the tribalism resulted in mutual fear and hatred in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia; how the systems of belief made atrocities possible in Stalin's Russia, in Mao's China and in Cambodia; and how the powerful combination of tribalism and belief enabled people to do otherwise unimaginable things in Nazi Germany. The common patterns suggest weak points in our psychology. The resulting picture is used as a guide for the ethics we should create if we hope to overcome them.