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Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain, by Kathleen Taylor
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In Cruelty, neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor explores the factors behind violence, sexual abuse, genocide, and other atrocities. Drawing on history, politics, philosophy, psychology, and especially neuroscience, she sets cruelty in the context of human evolution and our current understanding of brain function. She begins with an example from Lithuania in World War II, in which a young man beat a group of prisoners to death, one by one, as a crowd of civilians cheered. Can the killer and his audience be described as mentally ill? Could we ever be like them? Taylor explores the beliefs, emotions, and even instincts which can lead normally decent and law-abiding people to commit shocking acts of murder. For instance, she shows how movements begun consciously can trigger more instinctive behavior. Men who chase a victim intending to scare him may find that their brains reinterpret the chase as a hunt--and treat the victim as prey. Filled with such insight, Taylor provides a clear, nuanced and thoughtful assessment of human viciousness.
- Sales Rank: #1542903 in Books
- Published on: 2009-04-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.30" h x 1.30" w x 9.20" l, 1.50 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 360 pages
Review
Both lay readers and academics from a variety of disciplines will find 'Cruelty' an absorbing and thought-provoking work. Sue McHale, Times Higher Education Supplement A copy should be given to every politician elected to Parliment. Sue McHale, Times Higher Education Supplement [A] wise and timely book. Steven Rose, The Guardian
About the Author
Kathleen Taylor is a researcher at the University of Oxford, and the author of Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control.
Most helpful customer reviews
21 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Disappointing
By Slow reader
In the last 100 years far more people have been killed in mass atrocities than in actual warfare. Recurrent cruelty on a massive scale is an urgent problem which mankind has failed to solve. Taylor comes to this subject claiming that her expertise in neuroscience will give new understanding. But she writes in a self-indulgent style in which large quantities of speculation are mixed with the results of her reading. Repetitive and rambling text with asides of doubtful relevance and an occasional lacing of feminism make the book an irritating read. I am not fond of fiction as evidence in a scientific context. Shakespeare's Othello is stunning literature but not scientific evidence. Other quotations are used frustratingly, often leaving a question floating rather than adding to understanding. "A benchmark study of sexual behaviour" (p 204) from which she quotes precise-sounding percentages turns out to be the fraudulent work of Alfred Kinsey. Even a glance at Wikepedia would have raised suspicion. It is difficult to know how much Taylor accepts Freud's theories. Many intelligent people do, but mainstream scientists are deeply sceptical. The irritating use of endnotes is sadly not just a feature of this book. Disrupting one's reading to flip to the note may yield only a source reference, or stuff which should either be omitted or put in the main text, or a comment without which the main text cannot be understood. This is bad editing as well as lack of organization and discipline by the author.
Expect plenty of the sort of stuff you might get by discussing the subject with an intelligent friend, plus references to literature you may not know. In that sense you will have mulled over many angles of the subject. Do not expect your understanding to be enhanced greatly in a scientific sense, because the small amount of neuroscience does not increase understanding as much as you might think. Sadly, the impression is that this book is the product of the urge to follow up a previous best-seller rather than of mature scholarship and an incisive mind.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A margin-wrecker: the best kind of book is one that begs to be marked up
By VampireCowboy
It's odd -- maybe not that odd -- that a book about cruel, base and disgusting acts would emerge as one of my favorites of all time.
The author, Kathleen Taylor (funny that two of my favorite authors are named Kathleen) is a neuroscientist at Oxford. She brings together the latest in the fledgling field of neuroscience with evolutionary theory, social and cultural anthropology and biologic processes to bring cruelty to life -- what it is and why we have it -- and helps readers arrive at a better understanding of what it means to be human. She has a vivid, technically precise and funny writing style that kept me hooked and kept me scribbling frantically in the margins as new ideas skittered away.
Cruelty, she argues, is linked to the uniquely human desire to predict and control the natural world. That can be as basic as avoiding dangerous predators or as refined as protecting belief systems important to our culture. And, she says, "...our hunger for control does not demand that our predictions are actively confirmed, just that they remain unchallenged."
Challenged, we are "...vulnerable to symbolic threats which cause us no physical harm." But because of the way our brains are wired, "...conflict feels stressful, like pain, and most people prefer to avoid it."
According to Taylor, we act against symbolic threats the same way our bodies act against dangerous diseases - "learn the warning signs, avoid the source, quarantine the infected and expel the contaminant." It's the same approach, and the same language (a blight upon our culture, threats to our way of living), that have been used to tragic result for those considered dangerous for centuries.
It's all tied to our biologic responses because, she argues, the symbolic brain is an extension of the physical brain. The same systems we use to deal with ingesting putrid food are high jacked by the brain when we encounter a putrid belief system that is, challenging to our symbolic health. It's the only system we have in place to deal with a threat that makes us feel sick.
"When it unwelcome ideas require extensive and effortful thought to accommodate them, it becomes easier not to bother changing the brain, but instead to shape the world to fit - by removing the irritant source of challenging signals."
That ties into one of my favorite lines, explaining why we (and I am certainly guilty of this) lash out at inanimate objects. "Broken gadgets can be expected not to work; unbroken gadgets should work; unbroken gadgets which should work and don't are infuriating misfits, to be treated accordingly."
Magnify that by the effort we expend mitigating against people who challenge our beliefs. "The more important the beliefs in question, the more strongly they will be defended, the more extreme emotion which a challenge will provoke and the more violent the response is likely to be."
We react to symbolic threats with mental acrobatics and, occasionally, the kind of violence usually reserved for physical threats, because that's all we know how to do. Just like "dogs that achieve nothing by barking at passing fire-engines, though the noise does recede, so perhaps they think they do," we protect our core beliefs at all costs, even though the strategies we employ may have no influence and in fact may run counter to those very beliefs.
She argues that, "Cruelty, thus, is as natural as laziness or competitiveness. It protects the precious self, physical or symbolic, by doing harm to those about whom we care less." Cruelty, then, is basically a too-aggressive response from our symbolic immune system.
It's a wild, funny, terrifying scientific ride through sadism and evil and pain and suffering and threat responses and neural pathways and a human history filled with tragic examples of cruelty. Rather than dark or depressing, I found it liberating and hopeful. The more we can understand the mechanisms of cruelty, the easier it will be to untangle them from misguided cultural beliefs and poorly understood biological functions. Cruelty may be part of the human condition, but refusing to act upon it may be one of our great accomplishments.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Pleasurable read-- very insightful!
By Sunshine LaRue
I was a little ambivalent about this when I first picked it up, but I couldn't put it down. I found it to be extremely engaging and thought-provoking-- a lot of the historical examples are extremely prophetic of what is going on in the world today. I highly recommend this title for anyone who is interested in the psychology of violence, war, and inhumanity.
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