Fear and Violence

“Cain spoke to his brother Abel, and when they were in the fields, Cain rose up against his brother and killed him.” These few lines from Genesis recount the first murder committed in the [Judeo-Christian]¹ world. The motive? Unclear. The means? Unclear. The sentence? Unclear. Some have called the killing of Abel the “first genocide” in history.² One half of humanity does away with the other half.

A few millennia later, nothing has changed. Human beings have produced a staggering quantity of discourse and scholarship on violence — its origins, its course, its prevention — yet one aspect of the matter seems to have escaped them: the original murder, the one from which all others flow, is a fratricide.

This observation runs counter both to popular wisdom and to the great principles laid down by intellectual and religious authorities. We grow up fearing “the other,” that dangerous stranger. Our parents, our teachers, our friends have all taught us that the enemy lurks around the corner, where the ordinary citizen runs up against the “clash of civilizations” with the foreigners who threaten our way of life.

The truth is more disturbing: it is not so much the unknown that threatens us as the known. We despise and attack our brothers — family, intimates, neighbors whom we know well, perhaps too well. We know their faults, their beliefs, their desires, and it is because of this knowledge that we distrust them. Today as in the past, the most widespread form of violence pits neighboring or kindred communities against one another within a single country. Civil wars outnumber international conflicts. From assault to massacre, from murder to genocide, violence generally comes from within. Mahatma Gandhi, pioneer of nonviolence and father of modern India, was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist; Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian statesman and Nobel Peace laureate, was killed by an Egyptian Muslim; Yitzhak Rabin, former Israeli prime minister and Nobel Peace laureate, was shot dead by an Israeli Jew. Each of these three assassins was a faithful child of his own country and his own religion.

Civil wars are generally crueler than wars between nations, and their consequences are felt long after peace returns. The Civil War (1861–1865) caused far more American deaths than all the other conflicts the country has been involved in, at a time when the population was only a tenth of what it is today; its long-term effects have surely surpassed those of any other conflict. The great bloodlettings of the twentieth century, whose victims number in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions, are bound up with the Russian, Chinese, and Spanish civil wars. At present in Iraq (without going into the ins and outs of that war), the human losses caused by the sectarian conflict pitting Sunnis against Shiites far exceed the number of casualties attributable to foreign troops. “Iraq (is) already in a state of civil war,”³ two specialists on the Arab world declared in 2007. The civil wars tearing apart the Democratic Republic of the Congo have already caused millions of deaths, to which the world has paid little attention.

The Second World War, emblem of the international conflicts that ravaged the twentieth century, is doubled by a paradigmatic fratricide: the extermination of the Jewish people. The antisemitism that arose in Germany and Austria did not target a foreign population with bizarre customs: German Jews were fully integrated into society and were doing very well. Neither marginal nor outsiders, they belonged to the establishment in many professional fields — law, medicine, journalism, science, banking. German antisemitism targeted intimates, not strangers.

In Eastern Europe, where most Jews lived and where the bulk of the massacres took place, the situation resembled that of Western Europe in many respects: many Jews were an integral part of society. In her documentary Where Is My Older Brother, Cain? the Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Arnold examines the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne, a small town in northeastern Poland. Relations between Jews and Poles there had been excellent: “Everyone called one another by their first name,” one resident recalled.⁴ But one day in the summer of 1941, one half of the village killed the other: the 1,600 people who made up the entire Jewish population of the town were locked in a barn and burned alive. The historian Jan T. Gross, who investigated this collective murder, set out his conclusions in a book titled Neighbors (Les voisins).⁵

The extermination of the Jews of Europe prefigures⁶ the mass killings carried out in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda — not by strangers, but by neighbors. For centuries, Serbs and Bosnian Muslims had lived and worked together. Intermarriage between communities was extremely common. In Rwanda, Hutus and Tutsis have trouble telling one another apart. In the words of the French Africanist Gérard Prunier, the Rwandan genocide was marked by “neighborly relations” and unfolded from house to house. To grasp the phenomenon, Prunier suggests imagining “a world in which most German SS men would have had Jewish relatives”⁷ — a perspective that upends the commonly held idea that hatred of “the other” lies at the root of many genocides. In fact, German Christians and Jews, Serbs and Bosnian Muslims, Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq all knew one another well. It is reasonable to think that internecine wars do not arise from a lack of mutual understanding, but from the reverse.

On the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, an American newspaper reported that 17,000 homicides had been committed across the country in 2005 alone. Thus, while American opinion lived in obsessive dread of foreign pilots ready to crash into its skyscrapers, six times as many people were killed in a single year on national soil as in the September 11 attacks. The rise in homicides (+4.8%)⁸ aroused little interest among journalists, for reasons that seem obvious: first, its news value comes nowhere near that of suicide bombers and their victims; second, homicides are spread across the entire year and the whole country; and finally, they follow patterns that recur more or less from one year to the next.

These steady losses remind us that fits of murderous fury erupt for the most part between people who know one another. Domestic violence is the proof. The anxious citizen may fight for better lighting in public spaces, but he is far more likely to be assaulted or killed in his own kitchen by an acquaintance than in a parking lot by a perfect stranger. A study of homicides committed in New York between 2003 and 2005 shows that three-quarters of the killers knew their victims.⁹ National statistics confirm that the majority of homicides pit intimates against one another. As for rape and assault, the figures tilt even further toward the intimate. You have more to fear from a spouse, an ex-boyfriend, or an office colleague than from a stranger.¹⁰ Urban gangs prey above all on the gangs of neighboring blocks.¹¹ It is resemblance, not difference, that provokes violence.

In the Los Angeles neighborhood where I live, the public schools are inhospitable. High fences cut them off from the outside world. And during the day a police car is permanently stationed in front of the high school entrance. Clearly, parents and authorities dread an outbreak of violence. But whom are these fences meant to keep out? In the schools, the violence does not come from intruders: it is to deter the students from fighting one another that these officers stand guard.

To admit that violence arises mainly among intimates leads us to doubt our certainties: is the stranger lurking around the corner as dangerous as we are told? If he were, the solution would be obvious: get to know that stranger. Talk to him, hold out a hand. Humanity would remedy violence by fostering communication among peoples, the study of foreign cultures, and the education of the masses. Alas, it is not so simple. Our brother, our neighbor enrages us because we understand him too well, not the reverse. Cain too knew Abel well. The Bible tells us that he “spoke with his brother Abel,” and then killed him.

If the threat comes not from the stranger but from the familiar, should we see in this the sign of an irreducible opposition between the two notions? Or are they, in spite of everything, bound to one another? Sigmund Freud¹² inclined toward the second proposition. In his view, the kinship between the words unheimlich (uncanny, eerie) and heimlich (familiar) is no accident: it underscores, on the contrary, their deep inner proximity.¹³ In this light, the other frightens us because he is uncannily familiar. We then perceive more clearly the buried origins of fratricidal violence: each person hates the neighbor he is supposed to love. Why? Could the small differences that set us apart provoke a stronger hatred than great differences? Again according to Freud, the phenomenon arises from the “narcissism of minor differences.” He observes that “it is precisely the minor differences between people who are otherwise alike that give rise to feelings of strangeness and hostility.”¹⁴ The narcissism of minor differences appears for the first time in an essay titled “The Taboo of Virginity,” in the course of which Freud also studies “the dread of woman.” Could these two notions be related? Could the narcissism of minor differences, that instigator of hostility, stem from the difference between the sexes?

The work of the philosopher and literary critic René Girard also helps illuminate the nature of the threat that issues from the familiar. A specialist in what he calls mimetic desire, Girard studied at length its relation to violence. He calls into question the commonly held idea that resemblances are more praiseworthy than differences: “In human relations, the same, the similar, are evocative of harmony.”¹⁵ Yet in fact similarity leads rather to rivalry and to violence. According to Girard, the danger lies not in differences but in their absence.

The notion of similarity and the unease it provokes run counter to our usual interpretation of world conflicts. We like to believe that hostilities are bound up with deep antagonisms over how to live in society — as if to consider that our divisions stem from differences of degree (relative poverty, for instance) rather than of substance would trivialize the stakes. To that perspective we prefer the scenario of the “clash of civilizations,” and notably that of the collisions between Western and Islamic culture: singled out, fundamentalists are reproached with propagating doctrines radically opposed to Western values. Yet the anger of Islamist extremists seems to stem not from the gap between the two cultures but from its very disappearance: what exasperates them may be not the distance but the encroachment of the West. They rage at having to copy Western society. Osama bin Laden vilifies the Muslims who imitate Westerners: “The Jews and Christians have tempted us with the comfort of material life and its easy pleasures. They have invaded us with their materialist values.”¹⁶

Violence has inspired a mountain of work and scholarship. Specialists generally distinguish interpersonal violence (homicide and rape) from collective violence (wars and riots). Historians tend to devote themselves to the details of particular events — this murder, that war — and arrive at fragile conclusions. Sociologists and political scientists, who prefer to consider a multiplicity of events, arrive at a profusion of conclusions, often simplistic yet couched in jargon. One sociologist who had studied some thirty acts of violence, ranging from simple assault to hooliganism, sums up his thesis thus: “I seek to develop a general theory of violence as a situational process (…). All types of violent confrontation share the same basic tension… called non-solidary entrainment.”

For some years now, the sociological approach to violence — which never entirely disappeared — has been making a forceful comeback. Nearly fifty years ago, Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression (L’Agression, une histoire naturelle du mal) and Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative (Le Territoire) already set out theories of violence grounded in biology. Advances in genetics and evolutionary biology have brought this approach back into fashion. Psychology has absorbed chemistry and biology. Biology has gained the upper hand over the once-triumphant psychoanalysis. Psychological disorders, it is now thought, arise chiefly from chemical imbalances in the brain. Psychiatrists analyze less and less. They prescribe.

The application of Darwinian thought — the principle of the struggle of species for survival — to the political and social sciences is much in vogue. Sociobiological theses stress the hereditary character of violence, both individual and social. The political scientist Bradley A. Thayer’s work on foreign policy establishes a link between Darwinian thought and the notion of global conflict. “It is time to bring Darwin into the study of international relations,”¹⁷ he declares. In his encyclopedic study of war, the Israeli Azar Gat likewise defends a Darwinian point of view. Human violence and war are nothing special, he writes. According to Gat, violent rivalry is “the rule” throughout “the whole of nature.”¹⁸ Some studies of criminal violence now invoke genetics. A highly regarded work on homicide in the United States closes with a reflection by the primatologist Frans de Waal on humanity’s unmatched aptitude for violence.¹⁹

In the present book there will be no question of Darwin or DNA. The biological factor doubtless plays a role in violence (does it not play a role in everything around us?). But that is not my concern. I am a historian, to be sure, but to connect facts and events to one another is not enough for me. I do not claim to reinvent the road. I will try only to push the vehicle in a new direction. My aim here is to gather facts and reflections in order to lay bare the fratricidal roots of violence. I offer a reading of it as it relates to certain historical configurations of the twentieth century, such as antisemitism in Germany and Islamic terrorism. In the pages that follow there will be no question of domestic violence or of criminal assault, whose fratricidal dimension is obvious.

Foreword to: Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present — French edition, Les Ressorts de la violence. Peur de l’autre ou peur du semblable, Belfond, 2014.

Notes