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Title: The Bully's Pulpit
Author: David Graeber
Date: 2015
Language: en
Topics: anthropology
Source: http://thebaffler.com/salvos/bullys-pulpit#anchor1

David Graeber

The Bully's Pulpit

In February and early March 1991, during the first Gulf War, U.S. forces

bombed, shelled, and otherwise set fire to thousands of young Iraqi men

who were trying to flee Kuwait. There were a series of such

incidents—the “Highway of Death,” “Highway 8,” the “Battle of

Rumaila”—in which U.S. air power cut off columns of retreating Iraqis

and engaged in what the military refers to as a “turkey shoot,” where

trapped soldiers are simply slaughtered in their vehicles. Images of

charred bodies trying desperately to crawl from their trucks became

iconic symbols of the war.

I have never understood why this mass slaughter of Iraqi men isn’t

considered a war crime. It’s clear that, at the time, the U.S. command

feared it might be. President George H.W. Bush quickly announced a

temporary cessation of hostilities, and the military has deployed

enormous efforts since then to minimize the casualty count, obscure the

circumstances, defame the victims (“a bunch of rapists, murderers, and

thugs,” General Norman Schwarzkopf later insisted), and prevent the most

graphic images from appearing on U.S. television. It’s rumored that

there are videos from cameras mounted on helicopter gunships of panicked

Iraqis, which will never be released.

It makes sense that the elites were worried. These were, after all,

mostly young men who’d been drafted and who, when thrown into combat,

made precisely the decision one would wish all young men in such a

situation would make: saying to hell with this, packing up their things,

and going home. For this, they should be burned alive? When ISIS burned

a Jordanian pilot alive last winter, it was universally denounced as

unspeakably barbaric—which it was, of course. Still, ISIS at least could

point out that the pilot had been dropping bombs on them. The retreating

Iraqis on the “Highway of Death” and other main drags of American

carnage were just kids who didn’t want to fight.

But maybe it was this very refusal that’s prevented the Iraqi soldiers

from garnering more sympathy, not only in elite circles, where you

wouldn’t expect much, but also in the court of public opinion. On some

level, let’s face it: these men were cowards. They got what they

deserved.

There seems, indeed, a decided lack of sympathy for noncombatant men in

war zones. Even reports by international human rights organizations

speak of massacres as being directed almost exclusively against women,

children, and, perhaps, the elderly. The implication, almost never

stated outright, is that adult males are either combatants or have

something wrong with them. (“You mean to say there were people out there

slaughtering women and children and you weren’t out there defending

them? What are you? Chicken?”) Those who carry out massacres have been

known to cynically manipulate this tacit conscription: most famously,

the Bosnian Serb commanders who calculated they could avoid charges of

genocide if, instead of exterminating the entire population of conquered

towns and villages, they merely exterminated all males between ages

fifteen and fifty-five.

But there is something more at work in circumscribing our empathy for

the fleeing Iraqi massacre victims. U.S. news consumers were bombarded

with accusations that they were actually a bunch of criminals who’d been

personally raping and pillaging and tossing newborn babies out of

incubators (unlike that Jordanian pilot, who’d merely been dropping

bombs on cities full of women and children from a safe, or so he

thought, altitude). We are all taught that bullies are really cowards,

so we easily accept that the reverse must naturally be true as well. For

most of us, the primordial experience of bullying and being bullied

lurks in the background whenever crimes and atrocities are discussed. It

shapes our sensibilities and our capacities for empathy in deep and

pernicious ways.

Cowardice Is a Cause Too

Most people dislike wars and feel the world would be a better place

without them. Yet contempt for cowardice seems to move them on a far

deeper level. After all, desertion—the tendency of conscripts called up

for their first experience of military glory to duck out of the line of

march and hide in the nearest forest, gulch, or empty farmhouse and

then, when the column has safely passed, figure out a way to return

home—is probably the greatest threat to wars of conquest. Napoleon’s

armies, for instance, lost far more troops to desertion than to combat.

Conscript armies often have to deploy a significant percentage of their

conscripts behind the lines with orders to shoot any of their fellow

conscripts who try to run away. Yet even those who claim to hate war

often feel uncomfortable celebrating desertion.

About the only real exception I know of is Germany, which has erected a

series of monuments labeled “To the Unknown Deserter.” The first and

most famous, in Potsdam, is inscribed: “TO A MAN WHO REFUSED TO KILL HIS

FELLOW MAN.” Yet even here, when I tell friends about this monument, I

often encounter a sort of instinctive wince. “I guess what people will

ask is: Did they really desert because they didn’t want to kill others,

or because they didn’t want to die themselves?” As if there’s something

wrong with that.

In militaristic societies like the United States, it is almost axiomatic

that our enemies must be cowards—especially if the enemy can be labeled

a “terrorist” (i.e., someone accused of wishing to create fear in us, to

turn us, of all people, into cowards). It is then necessary to ritually

turn matters around and insist that no, it is they who are actually

fearful. All attacks on U.S. citizens are by definition “cowardly

attacks.” The second George Bush was referring to the 9/11 attacks as

“cowardly acts” the very next morning. On the face of it, this is odd.

After all, there’s no lack of bad things one can find to say about

Mohammed Atta and his confederates—take your pick, really—but surely

“coward” isn’t one of them. Blowing up a wedding party using an unmanned

drone might be considered an act of cowardice. Personally flying an

airplane into a skyscraper takes guts. Nevertheless, the idea that one

can be courageous in a bad cause seems to somehow fall outside the

domain of acceptable public discourse, despite the fact that much of

what passes for world history consists of endless accounts of courageous

people doing awful things.

On Fundamental Flaws

Sooner or later, every project for human freedom will have to comprehend

why we accept societies being ranked and ordered by violence and

domination to begin with. And it strikes me that our visceral reaction

to weakness and cowardice, our strange reluctance to identify with even

the most justifiable forms of fear, might provide a clue.

The problem is that debate so far has been dominated by proponents of

two equally absurd positions. On the one side, there are those who deny

that it’s possible to say anything about humans as a species; on the

other, there are those who assume that the goal is to explain why it is

that some humans seem to take pleasure in pushing other ones around. The

latter camp almost invariably ends up spinning stories about baboons and

chimps, usually to introduce the proposition that humans—or at least

those of us with sufficient quantities of testosterone—inherit from our

primate ancestors an inbuilt tendency toward self-aggrandizing

aggression that manifests itself in war, which cannot be gotten rid of,

but may be diverted into competitive market activity. On the basis of

these assumptions, the cowards are those who lack a fundamental

biological impulse, and it’s hardly surprising that we would hold them

in contempt.

There are a lot of problems with this story, but the most obvious is

that it simply isn’t true. The prospect of going to war does not

automatically set off a biological trigger in the human male. Just

consider what Andrew Bard Schmookler has referred to as “the parable of

the tribes.” Five societies share the same river valley. They can all

live in peace only if every one of them remains peaceful. The moment one

“bad apple” is introduced—say, the young men in one tribe decide that an

appropriate way of handling the loss of a loved one is to go bring back

some foreigner’s head, or that their God has chosen them to be the

scourge of unbelievers—well, the other tribes, if they don’t want to be

exterminated, have only three options: flee, submit, or reorganize their

own societies around effectiveness in war. The logic seems hard to

fault. Nevertheless, as anyone familiar with the history of, say,

Oceania, Amazonia, or Africa would be aware, a great many societies

simply refused to organize themselves on military lines. Again and

again, we encounter descriptions of relatively peaceful communities who

just accepted that every few years, they’d have to take to the hills as

some raiding party of local bad boys arrived to torch their villages,

rape, pillage, and carry off trophy parts from hapless stragglers. The

vast majority of human males have refused to spend their time training

for war, even when it was in their immediate practical interest to do

so. To me, this is proof positive that human beings are not a

particularly bellicose species. [1]

No one would deny, of course, that humans are flawed creatures. Just

about every human language has some analogue of the English “humane” or

expressions like “to treat someone like a human being,” implying that

simply recognizing another creature as a fellow human entails a

responsibility to treat them with a certain minimum of kindness,

consideration, and respect. It is obvious, however, that nowhere do

humans consistently live up to that responsibility. And when we fail, we

shrug and say we’re “only human.” To be human, then, is both to have

ideals and to fail to live up to them.

If this is how humans tend to think of themselves, then it’s hardly

surprising that when we try to understand what makes structures of

violent domination possible, we tend to look at the existence of

antisocial impulses and ask: Why are some people cruel? Why do they

desire to dominate others? These, however, are exactly the wrong

questions to ask. Humans have an endless variety of urges. Usually,

they’re pulling us in any number of different directions at once. Their

mere existence implies nothing.

The question we should be asking is not why people are sometimes cruel,

or even why a few people are usually cruel (all evidence suggests true

sadists are an extremely small proportion of the population overall),

but how we have come to create institutions that encourage such behavior

and that suggest cruel people are in some ways admirable—or at least as

deserving of sympathy as those they push around.

Here I think it’s important to look carefully at how institutions

organize the reactions of the audience. Usually, when we try to imagine

the primordial scene of domination, we see some kind of Hegelian

master-slave dialectic in which two parties are vying for recognition

from one another, leading to one being permanently trampled underfoot.

We should imagine instead a three-way relation of aggressor, victim, and

witness, one in which both contending parties are appealing for

recognition (validation, sympathy, etc.) from someone else. The Hegelian

battle for supremacy, after all, is just an abstraction. A just-so

story. Few of us have witnessed two grown men duel to the death in order

to get the other to recognize him as truly human. The three-way

scenario, in which one party pummels another while both appeal to those

around them to recognize their humanity, we’ve all witnessed and

participated in, taking one role or the other, a thousand times since

grade school.

Elementary (School) Structures of Domination

I am speaking, of course, about schoolyard bullying. Bullying, I

propose, represents a kind of elementary structure of human domination.

If we want to understand how everything goes wrong, this is where we

should begin.

In this case too, provisos must be introduced. It would be very easy to

slip back into crude evolutionary arguments. There is a tradition of

thought—the Lord of the Flies tradition, we might call it—that

interprets schoolyard bullies as a modern incarnation of the ancestral

“killer ape,” the primordial alpha male who instantly restores the law

of the jungle once no longer restrained by rational adult male

authority. But this is clearly false. In fact, books like Lord of the

Flies are better read as meditations on the kind of calculated

techniques of terror and intimidation that British public schools

employed to shape upper-class children into officials capable of running

an empire. These techniques did not emerge in the absence of authority;

they were techniques designed to create a certain sort of cold-blooded,

calculating adult male authority to begin with.

Today, most schools are not like the Eton and Harrow of William

Golding’s day, but even at those that boast of their elaborate

anti-bullying programs, schoolyard bullying happens in a way that’s in

no sense at odds with or in spite of the school’s institutional

authority. Bullying is more like a refraction of its authority. To begin

with an obvious point: children in school can’t leave. Normally, a

child’s first instinct upon being tormented or humiliated by someone

much larger is to go someplace else. Schoolchildren, however, don’t have

that option. If they try persistently to flee to safety, the authorities

will bring them back. This is one reason, I suspect, for the stereotype

of the bully as teacher’s pet or hall monitor: even when it’s not true,

it draws on the tacit knowledge that the bully does depend on the

authority of the institution in at least that one way—the school is,

effectively, holding the victims in place while their tormentors hit

them. This dependency on authority is also why the most extreme and

elaborate forms of bullying take place in prisons, where dominant

inmates and prison guards fall into alliances.

Even more, bullies are usually aware that the system is likely to punish

any victim who strikes back more harshly. Just as a woman, confronted by

an abusive man who may well be twice her size, cannot afford to engage

in a “fair fight,” but must seize the opportune moment to inflict as

much as damage as possible on the man who’s been abusing her—since she

cannot leave him in a position to retaliate—so too must the schoolyard

bullying victim respond with disproportionate force, not to disable the

opponent, in this case, but to deliver a blow so decisive that it makes

the antagonist hesitate to engage again.

I learned this lesson firsthand. I was scrawny in grade school, younger

than my peers—I’d skipped a grade—and thus a prime target for some of

the bigger kids who seemed to have developed a quasi-scientific

technique of jabbing runts like me sharp, hard, and quick enough to

avoid being accused of “fighting.” Hardly a day went by that I was not

attacked. Finally, I decided enough was enough, found my moment, and

sent one particularly noxious galoot sprawling across the corridor with

a well-placed blow to the head. I think I might have cracked his lip. In

a way, it worked exactly as intended: for a month or two, bullies

largely stayed away. But the immediate result was that we were both

taken to the office for fighting, and the fact that he had struck first

was determined to be irrelevant. I was found to be the guilty party and

expelled from the school’s advanced math and science club. (Since he was

a C student, there was nothing, really, for him to be expelled from.)

“It doesn’t matter who started it” are probably six of most insidious

words in the English language. Of course it matters.

Crowdsourced Cruelty

Very little of this focus on the role of institutional authority is

reflected in the psychological literature on bullying, which, being

largely written for school authorities, assumes that their role is

entirely benign. Still, recent research—of which there has been an

outpouring since Columbine—has yielded, I think, a number of surprising

revelations about the elementary forms of domination. Let’s go deeper.

The first thing this research reveals is that the overwhelming majority

of bullying incidents take place in front of an audience. Lonely,

private persecution is relatively rare. Much of bullying is about

humiliation, and the effects cannot really be produced without someone

to witness them. Sometimes, onlookers actively abet the bully, laughing,

goading, or joining in. More often, the audience is passively

acquiescent. Only rarely does anyone step in to defend a classmate being

threatened, mocked, or physically attacked.

When researchers question children on why they do not intervene, a

minority say they felt the victim got what he or she deserved, but the

majority say they didn’t like what happened, and certainly didn’t much

like the bully, but decided that getting involved might mean ending up

on the receiving end of the same treatment—and that would only make

things worse. Interestingly, this is not true. Studies also show that in

general, if one or two onlookers object, then bullies back off. Yet

somehow most onlookers are convinced the opposite will happen. Why?

For one thing, because nearly every genre of popular fiction they are

likely to be exposed to tells them it will. Comic book superheroes

routinely step in to say, “Hey, stop beating on that kid”—and invariably

the culprit does indeed turn his wrath on them, resulting in all sorts

of mayhem. (If there is a covert message in such fiction, it is surely

along the lines of: “You had better not get involved in such matters

unless you are capable of taking on some monster from another dimension

who can shoot lightning from its eyes.”) The “hero,” as deployed in the

U.S. media, is largely an alibi for passivity. This first occurred to me

when watching a small-town TV newscaster praising some teenager who’d

jumped into a river to save a drowning child. “When I asked him why he

did it,” the newscaster remarked, “he said what true heroes always say,

‘I just did what anyone would do under the circumstances.’” The audience

is supposed to understand that, of course, this isn’t true. Anyone would

not do that. And that’s okay. Heroes are extraordinary. It’s perfectly

acceptable under the same circumstances for you to just stand there and

wait for a professional rescue team.

It’s also possible that audiences of grade schoolers react passively to

bullying because they have caught on to how adult authority operates and

mistakenly assume the same logic applies to interactions with their

peers. If it is, say, a police officer who is pushing around some

hapless adult, then yes, it is absolutely true that intervening is

likely to land you in serious trouble—quite possibly, at the wrong end

of a club. And we all know what happens to “whistleblowers.” (Remember

Secretary of State John Kerry calling on Edward Snowden to “man up” and

submit himself to a lifetime of sadistic bullying at the hands of the

U.S. criminal justice system? What is an innocent child supposed to make

of this?) The fates of the Mannings or Snowdens of the world are

high-profile advertisements for a cardinal principle of American

culture: while abusing authority may be bad, openly pointing out that

someone is abusing authority is much worse—and merits the severest

punishment.

A second surprising finding from recent research: bullies do not, in

fact, suffer from low self-esteem. Psychologists had long assumed that

mean kids were taking out their insecurities on others. No. It turns out

that most bullies act like self-satisfied little pricks not because they

are tortured by self-doubt, but because they actually are self-satisfied

little pricks. Indeed, such is their self-assurance that they create a

moral universe in which their swagger and violence becomes the standard

by which all others are to be judged; weakness, clumsiness,

absentmindedness, or self-righteous whining are not just sins, but

provocations that would be wrong to leave unaddressed.

Here, too, I can offer personal testimony. I keenly remember a

conversation with a jock I knew in high school. He was a lunk, but a

good-natured one. I think we’d even gotten stoned together once or

twice. One day, after rehearsing some costume drama, I thought it would

be fun to walk into the dorm in Renaissance garb. As soon as he saw me,

he pounced as if about to pulverize. I was so indignant I forgot to be

terrified. “Matt! What the hell are you doing? Why would you want to

attack me?” Matt seemed so taken aback that he forgot to continue

menacing me. “But . . . you came into the dorm wearing tights!” he

protested. “I mean, what did you expect?” Was Matt enacting deep-seated

insecurities about his own sexuality? I don’t know. Probably so. But the

real question is, why do we assume his troubled mind is so important?

What really matters was that he genuinely felt he was defending a social

code.

In this instance, the adolescent bully was deploying violence to enforce

a code of homophobic masculinity that underpins adult authority as well.

But with smaller children, this is often not the case. Here we come to a

third surprising finding of the psychological literature—maybe the most

telling of all. At first, it’s not actually the fat girl, or the boy

with glasses, who is most likely to be targeted. That comes later, as

bullies (ever cognizant of power relations) learn to choose their

victims according to adult standards. At first, the principal criterion

is how the victim reacts. The ideal victim is not absolutely passive.

No, the ideal victim is one who fights back in some way but does so

ineffectively, by flailing about, say, or screaming or crying,

threatening to tell their mother, pretending they’re going to fight and

then trying to run away. Doing so is precisely what makes it possible to

create a moral drama in which the audience can tell itself the bully

must be, in some sense, in the right.

This triangular dynamic among bully, victim, and audience is what I mean

by the deep structure of bullying. It deserves to be analyzed in the

textbooks. Actually, it deserves to be set in giant neon letters

everywhere: Bullying creates a moral drama in which the manner of the

victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective

justification for the original act of aggression itself.

Not only does this drama appear at the very origins of bullying in early

childhood; it is precisely the aspect that endures in adult life. I call

it the “you two cut it out” fallacy. Anyone who frequents social media

forums will recognize the pattern. Aggressor attacks. Target tries to

rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor ramps up attack.

Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor

further ramps up attack.

This can happen a dozen, fifty times, until finally, the target answers

back. Then, and only then, a dozen voices immediately sound, crying

“Fight! Fight! Look at those two idiots going at it!” or “Can’t you two

just calm down and learn to see the other’s point of view?” The clever

bully knows that this will happen—and that he will forfeit no points for

being the aggressor. He also knows that if he tempers his aggression to

just the right pitch, the victim’s response can itself be represented as

the problem.

Nob: You’re a decent chap, Jeeves, but I must say, you’re a bit of an

imbecile.

Jeeves: A bit of a . . . what!? What the hell do you mean by that?

Nob: See what I mean? Calm down! I said you were a decent chap. And such

language! Don’t you realize there are ladies present?

And what is true of social class is also true of any other form of

structural inequality: hence epithets such as “shrill women,” “angry

black men,” and an endless variety of similar terms of dismissive

contempt. But the essential logic of bullying is prior to such

inequalities. It is the ur-stuff of which they are made.

Stop Hitting Yourself

And this, I propose, is the critical human flaw. It’s not that as a

species we’re particularly aggressive. It’s that we tend to respond to

aggression very poorly. Our first instinct when we observe unprovoked

aggression is either to pretend it isn’t happening or, if that becomes

impossible, to equate attacker and victim, placing both under a kind of

contagion, which, it is hoped, can be prevented from spreading to

everybody else. (Hence, the psychologists’ finding that bullies and

victims tend to be about equally disliked.) The feeling of guilt caused

by the suspicion that this is a fundamentally cowardly way to

behave—since it is a fundamentally cowardly way to behave—opens up a

complex play of projections, in which the bully is seen simultaneously

as an unconquerable super-villain and a pitiable, insecure blowhard,

while the victim becomes both an aggressor (a violator of whatever

social conventions the bully has invoked or invented) and a pathetic

coward unwilling to defend himself.

Obviously, I am offering only the most minimal sketch of complex

psychodynamics. But even so, these insights may help us understand why

we find it so difficult to extend our sympathies to, among others,

fleeing Iraqi conscripts gunned down in “turkey shoots” by U.S.

warriors. We apply the same logic we did when passively watching some

childhood bully terrorizing his flailing victim: we equate aggressors

and victims, insist that everyone is equally guilty (notice how,

whenever one hears a report of an atrocity, some will immediately start

insisting that the victims must have committed atrocities too), and just

hope that by doing so, the contagion will not spread to us.

This is difficult stuff. I don’t claim to understand it completely. But

if we are ever going to move toward a genuinely free society, then we’re

going to have to recognize how the triangular and mutually constitutive

relationship of bully, victim, and audience really works, and then

develop ways to combat it. Remember, the situation isn’t hopeless. If it

were not possible to create structures—habits, sensibilities, forms of

common wisdom—that do sometimes prevent the dynamic from clicking in,

then egalitarian societies of any sort would never have been possible.

Remember, too, how little courage is usually required to thwart bullies

who are not backed up by any sort of institutional power. Most of all,

remember that when the bullies really are backed up by such power, the

heroes may be those who simply run away.

[1] Still, before we let adult males entirely off the hook, I should

observe that the argument for military efficiency cuts two ways: even

those societies whose men refuse to organize themselves effectively for

war also do, in the overwhelming majority of cases, insist that women

should not fight at all. This is hardly very efficient. Even if one were

to concede that men are, generally speaking, better at fighting (and

this is by no means clear; it depends on the type of fighting), and one

were to simply choose the most able-bodied half of any given population,

then some of them would be female. Anyway, in a truly desperate

situation it can be suicidal not to employ every hand you’ve got.

Nonetheless, again and again we find men—even those relatively

nonbelligerent ones—deciding they would rather die than break the code

saying women should never be allowed to handle weapons. No wonder we

find it so difficult to sympathize with male atrocity victims: they are,

to the degree that they segregate women from combat, complicit in the

logic of male violence that destroyed them. But if we are trying to

identify that key flaw or set of flaws in human nature that allows for

that logic of male violence to exist to begin with, it leaves us with a

confusing picture. We do not, perhaps, have some sort of inbuilt

proclivity for violent domination. But we do have a tendency to treat

those forms of violent domination that do exist—starting with that of

men over women—as moral imperatives unto themselves.