The destructive urge

Both Christians, Muslims have capacity for extremes of cruelty and violence, with faith least of the determinants

Following events as they unfolded in Lahore on Sunday, March 15, there was a mounting sense of horror, which peaked at the burning of two men who may or may not have been accomplices of the suicide bombers who had attacked two churches. For those with the stomach for it there is a remarkably complete visual record available online as the killing of the men was captured by multiple mobile phone cameras, and clips were swiftly posted.

A couple of days later after further violence and destruction on Monday, I ran into the denialism that surfaces almost automatically… ‘Oh, that cannot have been done by Christians, Christians would never do that. It must be some outsiders who burned those men.’ The same strain of denialism that attaches when there is an attack on the Muslim population, a denial of the possibility that true Muslims would ever do such a thing. Both are wrong, because both Christians and Muslims have a capacity for extremes of cruelty and violence, with faith being perhaps the least of the determinants.

The incident sent me to my library, and an exploration of books not opened for perhaps decades and one in particular gripped my attention — The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, by Erich Fromm (1973). I shall not attempt to boil down nearly 700 pages of dense psychological analysis here, but Fromm identified three traits that have their fingerprints on the violence our society inflicts upon itself with a dreadful regularity.

He posited that freedom was a part of human nature and that we choose to either embrace or escape from it. Embracing our freedoms is healthy, whereas escaping freedom via a variety of mechanisms leads to internal conflicts. The most common escape mechanisms he described as “automaton conformity”, “authoritarianism” and “destructiveness”. Any bells starting to ring yet?

Automaton conformity is about changing the ideal self to fit the perception of what is believed to be the societal preferred type of personality, and in the process the true self is lost. (‘Oh no… they cannot be true… fill in the faith of your choice). It in psychological terms displaces the burden — and the responsibility that goes with choice to wider society. Authoritarianism is the giving of oneself to another, an abdication of freedom, a surrender of free will which removes the option of choice almost completely. Destructiveness is the process that tries to eliminate others, indeed eliminate the world as a whole such is the power of the destructive forces. Fromm is reported to have said that “the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it”. A dark vision indeed.

We live our lives juggling freedoms and choices; most of us in ignorance of Fromm’s thinking which is anyway half-a-century-old now. Dated his ideas may be but there is a chilling relevance to the decayed society we live in, where destructiveness is never far below the surface and only requires a set of triggers in both the individual and collective senses to break the meniscus. Destructiveness comes up for air to find a society where the moral compass broke long ago, and where the polarities of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have been reversed. An ideal environment for prescriptive mayhem, with enough of Fromm’s descriptors in evidence to release unalloyed cruelty.

Those who beat and then burned two possibly innocent men did not get up in the morning thinking that they would participate in an act of brutal murder of two strangers. The members of the mob in all likelihood led perfectly ordinary and unremarkable lives up until that morning, and most are unlikely to have ever committed any serious criminal act, let alone killing anybody.

Our society is ever more prone to wanton violence and destructiveness, and personal and collective freedoms are ever more tightly proscribed. Choices are narrowed down to stark black and white, never nuanced… ‘you are either with us or you are against us’ being the dominant paradigm. Last Sunday it was the Christians that responded murderously to extreme stimuli, but it could be any other group, faith-based or not, because the urge for destruction in Pakistan is dangerously close to being a suicide note.

Published in The Express Tribune, March  19^th,  2015.

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