On Killing

Where I think the 1% have really won the war of ideas, it's not Capitalism Vs Whatever. It's the Hobbesian view of human nature as brutal, savage creatures. It's why the nightly News is rape, murder, rape, murder, murder, war and more war. People will confidently point to some event as proof that human nature is inherently bad/evil. We'd all be running around raping, pillaging and murdering to our hearts content if it weren't for the police! Today, in fact, there was a bombing of the Boston Marathon, further proof of the depravity of the human spirit.

Or is it? The truth is we are in our infancy of understanding human nature; anybody who speaks authoritatively and conclusively probably doesn't have a clue. But that's not to say we don't know anything. One of the most interesting books I've read in some time is "On Killing" by David Grossman. It deals with the psychological toll of killing on soldiers. But, perhaps, the most interesting aspect of Grossman's work is the inherent resistance humans have to killing one another:

During World War II U.S. Army Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall asked these average soldiers what it was that they did in battle. His singularly unexpected discovery was that, of every hundred men along the line of fire during the period of an encoun-ter, an average of only 15 to 20 "would take any part with their weapons." This was consistently true "whether the action was spread over a day, or two days or three."

Marshall was one of the pioneers in this field. What's even more surprising is that of that 15 or 20 who actually shot the majority of them were purposefully trying to miss! The firing rate continues to increase with modern training and by the Vietnam War soldiers are firing at a 90% rate and yet it still took an average of 50,000 bullets for every killed enemy soldier! Despite the higher firing rates, soldiers were still purposefully missing.

This phenomena appears to be universal. Take our nation's Civil War, one of the bloodiest wars in our nations history:

Author of the Civil War Collector's Encyclopedia F. A. Lord tells us that after the Bade of Gettysburg, 27,574 muskets were recovered from the battlefield. Of these, nearly 90 percent (twenty-four thousand) were loaded. Twelve thousand of these loaded muskets were found to be loaded more than once, and six thousand of the multiply loaded weapons had from three to ten rounds loaded in the barrel. One weapon had been loaded twenty-three times. Why, then, were there so many loaded weapons available on the battlefield, and why did at least twelve thousand soldiers misload their weapons in combat?

That's a lot of loaded muskets, and it says something wonderful about the human spirit. Remember this is a war where lines of soldiers may have only been 30 yards from each other. Given the weapons they used we should have seen kill rates of hundreds of dead per minute; instead these battles saw one or two dead per minute. Most of these men were simply pantomiming the movements of fire, load, fire. They were loading and loading and loading but never firing!

This is both sides! They have no idea that the soldiers across from them are doing the same thing. Bullets are being fired. People are dying. People are getting hurt. And yet the great majority of men did anything and everything they could to avoid killing anyone! Grossman sums it up well when he says:

Secretly, quietly, at the moment of decision, just like the 80 to 85 percent of World War II soldiers observed by Marshall, these soldiers found themselves to be conscientious objectors who were unable to kill their fellow man.

How amazing is that? How wonderful it is to think that even with their lives on the line, even in the heat of battle, most men find themselves to be conscientious objectors when it matters most!

 

Posted with Blogsy