ABSTRACT
One often hears that human beings are the most violent creatures on earth, yet the very same creature that rapes, pillages, tortures, maims, wages war, and invents ever more deadly instruments of destruction is responsible for the breathtaking artistic and technological achievements of our age. On the one hand, human history has been dominated by the irascible, brutish ape that resides in each of us; that selfish, xenophobic, and aggressive component of human nature that seems to make territorial conflict and war inevitable. Yet, on the other hand, the human race is
BACKGROUND ISSUES 351
The Reality of Cruelty and Destructiveness That human aggression and violence are widespread is self-evident. In chapter 9, we analyzed a single case of extreme aggression in detail; let us now examine the frightful scope of the problem. A good starting place is Freeman's (1964) well-known essay, "Human Aggression in Anthropological Perspective." Drawing from Lewis Richardson's (1960) Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, Freeman tells us that approximately 59 million human beings were killed between 1820 and 1945 in wars, murderous attacks, and deadly quarrels. Freeman goes on to quote from T. A. Walker's, A History of the Law of Nations:
When Basil II (1014) could blind fifteen thousand Bulgarians, leaving an eye to the leader of every hundred, it ceases to be a matter of surprise that Saracen marauders should thirty years later be impaled by Byzantine officials, that the Greeks of Adramyttium in the time of Malek Shah (110616) should drown Turkish children in boiling water, that the Emperor Nicephorous (961) should cast from catapults into a Cretan city the heads of Saracens slain in the attempt to raise the seige, or that a crusading Prince of Antioch (1097) should cook human bodies on spits to earn for his men the terrifying reputation of cannibalism. (in Freeman, 1964, p. 111) Fromm (1973) refers to the "ample" and "horrifying" historical docu-
mentation that exists throughout civilized history for seemingly spontaneous and ruthless acts of killing and destructiveness. He says that, "Many of these occurrences give the impression of orgies of destruction, in which neither the conventional nor genuinely moral factors had any inhibitory effect" (p. 271). Indeed, as Fromm tells us, we humans have engaged in virtually every destructive act accessible to the human imagination, including various forms of torture, mutilation, disembodiment, crucifixion, human sacrifice, and so forth. Throughout history, mere killing has been one of the milder forms of destructiveness, when compared to the extremes of human cruelty seen in the death camps at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück or the catalog of atrocities outlined by Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag Archipelago. Many more instances of extreme human cruelty could be listed, but as Langer (1978) comments, to do so makes for dreary reading. Aside from the sheer magnitude of human cruelty, the fact that such wanton destructiveness exists at all is of major importance theoretically. Indeed, extreme cruelty and destructiveness in humans cannot be realistically deduced, a priori, from any of the socialization models, and only a few of the biopsychological models address the problem directly.
