Ending Cycles of Violence Based Upon Humiliation

Review of Evelin Gerda Lindner, Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006. ISBN: 0-275-99109-1, xix, 248 pages, $49.95.

The author’s avowed aim in Making Enemies is exploring “the explosive role the seldom-studied emotion [of humiliation] plays at every level of human conflict, from our global politics to our private lives.” She describes the state of our world as a “ramshackle global village,” some of whose neighborhoods are racked by violence, many by destitution, and a relative few by prosperity. Evelin Gerda Lindner asks what factor plays the largest role in blocking the kind of cooperation that could lead the peoples of this Earth to create the kind of global future that all peoples want to live in. Her answer is “humiliation.”

Dr. Lindner defines humiliation as “enforced lowering of a person or group, a process of subjugation that damages or strips away pride, honor or dignity. To be humiliated is to be placed, mostly against one’s will and often in a deeply hurtful way, in a situation that is greatly inferior to what one feels one should expect. The victim is forced into passivity, acted upon, and made helpless.”

In her view, we as a species are coming out of a period in which humiliation was seen in a radically different way than we have begun to conceptualize it in recent history. Ours is a time pivoting between two ages: one with the division of people into higher and lower classes, where humiliating those beneath one’s station was deemed proper and right, and an emerging age of human rights in which all people are deemed of equal value. Instead of being considered a moral corrective to remind others of their place in the social order, the humiliation of children, spouses, classes of people, and countries is now seen as abusive. Lindner created the term “egalization” to mean that all human lives are equal in value, but not that all human beings are “the same” or that hierarchy never serves a legitimate purpose. In the emerging human rights paradigm, belief in the equal value of all human lives is seen as right while humiliation is seen as abusive and an outrage, rather than as proper. This dawning sense of outrage poses enormous danger during the historical transition between the two paradigms. As long as the powerful verbally promote that we are all of equal value while simultaneously maintaining conditions that work to the contrary, mounting outrage can be expected which may lead to global violence. Another path, demonstrated by leaders like Nelson Mandela, is needed to chart a course toward egalization of dignity without resort to violence.

Humiliation makes for the bitterest of inter-cultural enemies, and arises both as a result of intentionally inflicting “messages” meant to subdue others and from unintentionally creating humiliation through slights and insults in relationships, including in the midst of attempts meant to help. Lindner is adept at giving voice to the conflicting experiences of peoples on both sides of the experience of humiliation, fostering an empathic comprehension where humiliation-outrage has tended to block any such understanding or amelioration of tensions.

Before continuing, more needs to be said about the author. Evelin Gerda Lindner is a transdisciplinary social scientist with doctoral degrees in. clinical psychology and medicine. Her field research in Somali and Rwanda has led her to develop a theory of humiliation as an outgrowth of her thesis that humiliation lies at the crux of genocide and warfare. Dr. Lindner is the founding manager of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies (HumanDHS: http://www.humiliationstudies.org), a global network of scholars, researchers, and activists dedicated to ending cycles of humiliation, which is affiliated with the Columbia University Conflict Resolution Network.

To Professor Lindner the greatest threat to peace lies not in a clash of civilizations but in a “clash of humiliations.” The great divide on the planet is between moderates of all groups, who must work together across boundaries, and extremists who become “humiliation entrepreneurs” who “in cases of collectively perpetrated mayhem … invite followers to pour their frustrations into a grander narrative of humiliation that uses retaliatory acts of humiliation as

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a ‘remedy.’ Only ‘Mandelas,’ individuals who know how to build dignified relationships, can avoid this.” Moderates who are capable of building such relationships must work together around the planet, investing in “global institution building, containment and policing,” recognizing that “everybody’s security hinges on everybody else’s security.” Building on Avishai Margalit’s work in The Decent Society (1996), she states that “just societies no longer suffice; the goal should be decent societies that transcend humiliation. Decency reigns when dignity for all is made possible” and adds that decency “calls for a joint effort to attain the goals of the United Nations Millennium Declaration.”

The valuable volume is rich in clarifying many of the conflicts issuing in horrendous violence in this new century, offering clear and practical insights for students, theoreticians, and practitioners of peace-building for reducing humiliation and promoting the kind of global village that is both realistically attainable and well-liked by all around the planet. Making Enemies offers much to both professionals for whom these issues are salient and the general reader who is looking for a greater understanding of our times and a cause for hopefulness. It implicitly poses the following questions perhaps best answered by psychohistorians: How much of history can be read as driven by deliberate or inadvertent induction of humiliation and responses to humiliation? Are war, genocide, and other incidents of historical violence best understood as catalyzed by humiliation? When violence has been averted and cooperation achieved, was that achieved by according dignity to another party rather than humiliating them? To what extent have various leaders been motivated by humiliation, counterphobic responses to humiliation, exploiting popular feelings of humiliation for personal/political gain? How thoroughly does Lindner’s thesis offer a key to unlocking the history of the human drama?

In my opinion it may be psychohistorians who are best equipped by their particular interdisciplinary expertise to answer those questions. Whatever the answer, our world stands in need of transformation. It is my hope that Professor Lindner’s vision can help achieve that goal.

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