Posted on 02/07/2007 6:36:07 AM PST by gobucks
At the age of 84, America's grand man of letters Norman Mailer has lost nothing of his appetite for controversy. His latest novel, The Castle In The Forest, tackles the childhood of Adolf Hitler.
The book tells how two-year-old Adolf watched his father whip a dog with 'a look of remarkable intensity for one so small'. And how, as a six-year-old, he went into the woods by himself 'to work on the power of his voice. He would roar at the trees until his throat was sore'. Perhaps the most chilling passage is when Adolf causes the death of his younger brother, Edmund, by deliberately infecting him with measles by kissing him.
But above all, the novel poses a central question: 'When did evil enter Hitler's soul?' And it provides an unequivocal answer: at the moment of conception.
This, of course, is a dotty idea. For a start, the use of the word evil - which is associated with the occult and the Devil - is pure laziness because evil implies conduct that is so bad we can never explain it.
But more importantly, Mailer's novel does raise the issue of whether Hitler was predisposed at birth to be a genocidal tyrant.
Or to put it another way, whether people can be born bad - whether it is inevitable that some individuals will turn out to be murderers or rapists or bullies or thieves and there is nothing that can be done about it.
Coincidentally, a so-called scientific study from the University of Virginia this week reached the conclusion that children may be 'born to be bad'.
But I believe this conclusion to be completely misguided. And I come to this conclusion having spent a lifetime studying truly bad people - I wrote the biography of the north London mass murderer Dennis Nilsen, for example, and came to know him well.
Virginia's experts in human genetics would have us believe that character defects such as criminal behaviour, the desire to bully others and the necessity to tell lies despite all evidence that one has been rumbled are tied up in our DNA.
They have little or nothing to do with influences that may bombard us in our infancy.
Thus, there is precious little virtue in trying to be a good child, because the programming of your personality has decided in advance that you can't win.
Forget about the soul. It's all to do with the ingredients that were thrown in by your parents, and by theirs, and so on ad infinitum. The result is a soup which cannot be unmixed.
Scientists seem to have spent the best part of a century gleefully promoting this idea and repudiating the Romantic notion of the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau that 'there is absolutely no fundamental perversity in the human heart', and that all bad behaviour is the result of society itself.
Today, experts appear to take a perverse pleasure in making sure we know how irredeemably wicked we are. This week's research is just the latest in a long line of simple-minded foolishness.
It is wrong because it confuses two separate categories of inquiry. One is whether children have a predisposition to behave badly; the other is why they behave badly, which is not at all the same thing.
Of course, a child inherits traits of personality from its parents. It also learns much of its behaviour from its parents. These facts are undeniable, and manifested every day in ordinary observation.
We have all encountered terrible parents who spend all their energies in berating their offspring, shouting, forbidding, chastising, screaming their own frustrations with spitting mouths and glaring eyes at infants who are at first bewildered, and subsequently adopt the same negative behaviour patterns as their only way of dealing with the world.
It is no wonder they bully in the playground and attack their peers, physically, violently, as well as verbally. The genes have predisposed them to angry behaviour and the way they have been treated by their parents has encouraged it. They seem trapped.
Yet not all of them succumb to this hideous imprisonment - and this is why the scientists are fundamentally wrong. Some children break free and evolve, in contradiction to the supposed predisposition that should, say the scientists, warp their soul.
In other words, the predisposition may be there; it is what you do about it that makes the difference. The fact that one child may turn into a bully or become a criminal and another not remains a tantalising mystery, and one that scientists cannot possibly explain in simple terms of DNA.
That is why it is the subject of much of our drama, from the ancient Greek theatre to today. And not only drama, but real incident as well.
Consider the case of Gary Gilmore - the American murderer who killed a hotel clerk in Utah, then killed a student the following night, and was fatally shot himself a year later by a firing squad - which was chronicled by Norman Mailer in his 1979 book The Executioner's Song.
Gilmore had a brother, Frank, who turned out to be as peaceable and inoffensive in character as Gary was violent and destructive.
Their mother, Bessie, was perplexed, for she brought them up together. 'One son picked up the gun,' she said. 'The other did not pick up the gun. Why?' Nobody has been able to offer her a fully-inclusive answer. Similarly, Jeffrey Dahmer in Milwaukee strangled and dismembered 17 men between 1978 and 1991. Much was made of his upbringing by a self- obsessed mother and largely absent father.
He inherited their lack of human warmth and inability to empathise and see the world through eyes other than their own. He was dangerously disconnected from humankind.
But he, too, had a brother, David, who never did anyone any harm and who now lives quietly under another name. David had the same parents, the same start in life and carried the same cartload of genes and DNA as his brother.
It is how the child learns to manage his inheritance that matters, how to shape it and restrict it when necessary.
Dahmer, paradoxically, did make an effort, and spent many years grappling with the murderous monster within, of which he was all too aware. But he lost the battle.
Others, like mass murderers Frederick West and Dennis Nilsen, never tried, because they did not realise that it mattered - they were, like the engineer of the Nazis' Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, morally blind.
Nobody would pretend that it is easy to behave well, or that the influence of genes is negligible. It requires struggle.
Vice is the easy option, whereas virtue denotes difficulty and sweat. As the great Roman philosopher and dramatist Seneca wrote: 'Nature does not give a man virtue, the process of becoming a good man is an art.'
The art is in using one's genetic inheritance to advantage. People such as the scholars responsible for this latest study get mixed up between aggression and hostility.
For example, if a child inherits the aggressive gene, he might transform it into ambition and enterprise, leadership, artistic creation, love, self-fulfilment, all beneficent in outcome.
On the other hand, another child with the same genetic disposition to aggression might become a hooligan.
It is often said that Beethoven, remote, sullen, morose, superior, driven, might have become a dangerous psychopath if he hadn't written music.
Norman Mailer's suggestion that Hitler was evil at the moment of conception may be his attempt to explain conduct so bad that it defies comprehension.
But in reality, it is a ridiculous notion that, if taken seriously, excuses the behaviour of perhaps the most appalling individual in history.
The human brain is an organ,just like the heart,lungs and liver.If one is born with a subtle (perhaps genetic) defect of the lungs then that person could certainly have very serious health/breathing problems.
If a person is born with just the right kind of subtle brain defect (which may or may not be genetic) then that person could develop serious behavior problems throughout life.
Have you ever seen the CT Scan or PET Scan of a chronic schizophrenic? I have.When comparing them to the CT and PET Scans of normal people the differences are so dramatic and obvious that even a hospital janitor can tell that there's a difference.
I was wondering when you guys would show up. ;-)
This would describe Keith Olberman.
I agree with the others who say they believe environment to be the stronger influence, but the authors argument using brothers of famous murderers is weak. To be valid this argument would require identical twins of evil people.
yes
However, FREE WILL allows us to choose a righteous path for our lives OR the evil alternative.
Seriously, he convinced (how hard was it) a whole lot of people to do his bidding. The methodical coldhearted cruelty, and the sheer numbers boggles the minds of even the hard corps.
Was there that much evil to go around? were they brainwashed?
I think there inherantly is the capacity to do good and evil in the mind, and in some (weak minded? starved for power? ) the tipping point towards evil is close.
Yup.He was the scumbag that Mailer and a few of his friends "discovered" while he was doing a long prison stretch for some serious crime.
Mailer and his pals told the parole board that this clown was so talented that he must be allowed to "contribute" from outside a prison cell...and the parole board agreed.
And then....a couple of weeks after his release...he murdered a waiter in an argument over the use of a bathroom.
Not all sociopaths are violent, and commit crimes, however.
This is the core of liberal bleeding hearts. This is the notion that someone else is always to blame, especially the parents. The liberal conclusion is that evil can't be condemned or judged.
Yes. And it's unlikely that Mailer ever lost a minute's sleep over the incident. One wonders whether Mailer even remembers the murdered waiter's name...
who else is there to blame for how a child is raised?
the difference is a conservative will try and fix the problem with love, understanding, support, and if necessary, punishment.
a liberal will ignore it and hope it'll go away, perscribe drugs to cover it up, or try to psycho-analyze it and call it a "mental disorder" that should be protected.
Did you see the snakes?
heh...yeah
According to Radzhinsky's bio, Stalin's mother told him he would have done better to be a priest.
Ditto.
Turning the Nazis into cartoonish supervillians has obscured the lessons we should learn. Instead, we should remember that they were men like you and I, who loved their wives and kids and thought they were doing what was best for their country - and so justified the most astonishingly evil acts. The evil of the Nazis was disturbingly banal.
"Methodical" is the key word. Couple that with "obey or die", plus a good dose of "everyone is doing it", and most people will do anything, with little remorse, just to do their job, collect a paycheck, and go home at the end of the day.
Evil behavior can be surprisingly mundane. When made methodical and commonplace, few people would _not_ do it.
Hence the axiom that humans are inherently evil - very little encouragement is needed for most people to cross the line.
I was hoping you'd save that picture for future reference.
It was a classic.
I don't know if it's totally depraved, but it's mentally depraved.
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