Modern Dilemmas of Culture, Religion, and Violence

Review of Sudhir Kakar, The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ISBN 0226422852, xiii, 217 pages, paperback, $14.95.

Review of Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996 (c. 1995). ISBN 0316330116, xxvi, 367 pages, paperback, $14.95.

In 1981 I was on holiday in San Sebastian,

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Spain, when my visit was cut short by the annual demonstrations/violence of the radical Basque faction in that region. I say “annual” because almost every summer since then I have read with great interest of the activities of the separatists which usually peak in August and may or may not involve serious acts of violence. I had arrived at this beautiful resort town in the late afternoon and we had reservations in a lovely, old hotel that was on the ocean and located at the edge of the town. That evening, I headed to the old city part of town with my companions and as we walked we began to hear sounds of what we thought might be firecrackers. As we continued on we saw people running towards us and scattering all over. It took a minute or two before we realized that these people were running from some kind of riot and that the “firecrackers” were gun shots. We instinctively fled for cover and I slipped into a doorway in an alley.

I felt both excited and scared. For a split second I entertained the possibility of exploring farther since, as a political scientist, I had no small interest in revolution. But reason prevailed and I retreated to my hotel with my companions. The manager of our hotel had explained to us the circumstances — a separatist demonstrator had been killed the night before by the police and the Basque partisans were mobilized for action — and she suggested that it would be best for us to leave even though it meant that she would have to give us back our money. Her 12-year-old son had explained to us that it was “the revolution” and that the townspeople were all united. I was struck by mother and son’s lack of fear and total commitment to the potential ensuing violence. They seemed almost excited by it all. Reading Sudhir Kakar’s The Colors of Violence reminds me of this experience and, in retrospect, helps me to understand the phenomenon that I was witnessing.

Kakar examines the Hindu-Muslim violence of 1990 in the south Indian city of Hyderabad as a case study to explore the roots and dynamics of religious riots. His concern is with the in-depth psychological issues involved in such displays of violence. His analysis begins with an assessment of the historical and “collective unconscious” as well as conscious forces at play in the violent dance between the minority Muslim and the host Hindu communities. He weaves this analysis into the larger context of modernization and the tensions created by that process. Kakar studies the significant leaders as well as some of the more humble victims of this violence. He conducts in-depth interviews in each of the communities. His analysis ends with a summary of the various “identity threats” experienced by each group that arise from “the social cultural arena” which provokes the resurgence of “the latent group aspect” of identity. Kakar’s analysis of this case study is extraordinary because, in addition to being a gifted psychoanalyst, he is an excellent historian and social scientist. He tells a tale that draws the reader into the world of his subjects, forcing us to leave behind our particular preconceptions and visceral discomfort with the emotion-laden topic of religious violence.

The backdrop to the Hyderabad riots is rooted in the circumstances surrounding Indian independence from British rule and the partitioning of a territory occupied by two diverse cultures and peoples living in proximity for hundreds of years. As is always the case in this kind of political “compromise,” state “boundaries” do not resolve factional conflict but are attempts to limit the conflict and create a context for their eventual resolution. The violent riots that attended the partition of India have given way to the sporadic violence as evidenced in Hyderabad, but the circumstances surrounding partitioning form part of the “sacred” history of the Muslim and Hindu communities. Sudhir Kakar shares his own family’s “sacred” history to illustrate this phenomenon. He explores the dynamic of the social identity of the individual and how, under certain circumstances, the social or “group” identity overtakes individual consciousness, which is evident in the “mob” behavior of the rioters.

Kakar explores the history of the city in terms of the evolution of political, economic, and social conditions between the Muslim and Hindu populations — factors significant in understanding the violence — and he is sensitive to the pressures created by modernization, pressures that nationalists and political scientists have been insensitive to.

Implied in this “modernity project” — a catchall term for political democracy, scientific rationality, and philosophical individualism — were the notions that the tasks of economic development would absorb all the energies of the people, and any conflicts which arose as a consequence of this enterprise would be taken care of by democratic processes (p. 38).

He suggests that the riots, on one level, represent

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power struggles and are triggered by fears of domination by one group over the other. The fact that these power struggles become interpreted in the language of sacred history has to do with the significance of the role of the leadership class. Kakar describes the traditions and roles of the peblwans, the wrestlers who constitute a class of leaders found in both the Muslim and Hindu communities and who become the warriors for their group in times of strife and riot. His interviews with leaders on both sides are compelling and revealing: these warriors feel righteous regarding the violence, and it is no small accomplishment that Kakar draws a picture of them that does not fit the picture of “— as in Hannah Arendt’s `brutality of evil’ hypothesis — perfectly ordinary people with the capacity to behave as monsters” (p. 86). It is this righteous acceptance of violence or the possibility of violence that I observed in Spain so many years ago that Kakar so eloquently explains as the defensive posture of the group that has experienced “identity threats” and that this group or social identity exists parallel to individual identity. The fight or riots are not about religion but community and defending one’s community, an entity that has become increasingly precarious to maintain in the modern world.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, confirms some of the insights of the Kakar study for he explores the process employed by the U.S. Army to transform the citizen into the soldier or “warrior.” While both authors investigate the complex conditioning involved in creating warriors, Grossman emphasizes the difficulties in teaching the individual to overcome his natural resistance to killing. He provides a wealth of material and information to make his case, analyzing the case material from military records of all the wars of this century and demonstrating that psychiatric casualties have always been high. In World War II, for example, the “last just war” for most people, psychiatric casualties numbered 504,000 and this is after the fact that over 800,000 men were screened out as 4-F, unfit for military service. At one point, “psychiatric casualties were being discharged from the U.S. Army faster than new recruits were being drafted in” (p. 43). He goes on to argue that over the century the army has developed various strategies for conditioning soldiers for battle and the thrust of the training is to prepare soldiers to be killers, and that despite the sophistication and success of the training process (improvement over successive wars in the “kill rate,” the number of combatants that do not take flight) there are always psychiatric casualties.

Grossman is an excellent military historian as well as a psychologist and the strength of his analysis lies in the numerous facts and other information he provides on the how the military operates. He painstakingly describes the recruiting and training of recruits and the conditions under which they can be counted on to be most efficient and effective as killers, what he describes as “killing behavior.” For example, he describes the optimal conditions for such behavior, which include variables like proximity of authority and respect for authority (beloved leaders that sanction the behavior), group absolution and group support, distance from the victim, weapons used (it is harder to kill with a knife than a gun), as well as extenuating circumstances like casualty losses and losses of friends and comrades. Grossman explores the issue of atrocity, and in this context he confirms what Kakar described in the religious riots: individuals overwhelmed by the group identity and consumed by their losses (past atrocities) seek retribution through violence. He goes on to analyze the power of atrocity as well: “One of the most obvious and blatant benefits of atrocity is that it quite simply scares the hell out of people. The raw horror and savagery of those who murder and abuse cause people to flee, hide, and defend themselves feebly…” (p. 207). He concludes his analysis of atrocity with the observation that as often as it occurs in the modern world there is just as often the attendant response of disbelief, or denial, which Grossman attributes to “our innate resistance to killing. Just as one hesitates to kill in the face of extreme pressure … one has difficulty imagining … the existence of atrocity despite the existence of facts” (p. 212). His analysis of the complexity of human behavior and the subtle observations he makes along with the “facts” infuses this military history with a depth that is remarkable.

The most powerful insights that Grossman provides in On Killing involve his analysis of contemporary American culture. Violence in our culture reflects the conditions in modern society that make destructive acts easier and that subtly condition us, particularly the young, to being capable of acting violently. He points to the violence in the media and the phenomenon of video games that often revolve around killing. He argues that these forms of entertainment do not

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represent sublimations but rather desensitize people to killing. He also points out that in modern society there are many factors that provide psychological distance between people, race, gender, and so forth, and that such distance makes killing or violence between groups easier. My first association to this observation was the O.J. Simpson trial and the difference in point of view between whites and African-Americans on that trial. It also made me think of the Basque conflict where clearly there is a psychological distance between the Basques and their fellow countrymen. Grossman, like Kakar, is sensitive to the issue of how modern societies create a culture and a context that places pressures on individuals and groups that are a mixture of health and disease. What Lord Moran said of war equally applies to modernization: “War … has no power to transform, it merely exaggerates the good and evil that are in us” (p. 205).

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