Author Archives: Joel

Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter have introduced the concept of altruistic punishment to explain cooperation [in group projects for the “public good”]. Following Fehr and Gächter, I define altruistic punishment as punishment inflicted on a defector from cooperation, which is costly to the punisher and without material gain. In a series of public goods experiments that pitted private return against public welfare requiring cooperation in a group project, cooperation was found to flourish when altruistic punishment was possible and to break down when it was ruled out.

Subjects were given the opportunity to invest in a group project with monies handed to them, or to keep the funds. Individually, if they chose to invest, they would receive less than if they kept the money, but collectively the group as a whole would receive more, if all invested…. Subjects could punish others after information was provided as to how much each had invested. But each punishment of another subject was costly. Specifically, subjects who chose to punish were required to forfeit an amount equal to one-third of the monetary punishment imposed on a defector. Thus, the punishment is altruistic. Defectors – those who refused to cooperate – were punished even when material self-interest was sacrificed by cooperators. Participants who chose to punish defectors by withholding monies themselves had to sacrifice monetary rewards….

“Negative emotions towards the defectors are the proximate mechanics behind altruistic punishment.” Concerning altruistic punishment, Fehr remarks, “It’s a very potent force for establishing large-scale cooperation, every citizen is a little policeman in a sense. There are so many social norms that we follow almost unconsciously, and they are enforced by the moral outrage we expect if we were to violate them.” The greater the extent of deviation from cooperation by defectors, the more heavily they were punished by cooperators. It was “punishment per se [that] provided the motivation, not some consequence anticipated by the player.” Instrumentality was not especially relevant….

Altruistic punishment has been robustly established. These findings stem from public goods experiments, but are readily generalizable to social groups seeking a basis for cooperation in the absence of a functioning external authority. Given an extreme, even life-threatening environment, such as massive economic failure followed by war, the particular form of altruistic punishment chosen can be severe.

Even as they were clearly losing their respective wars, Hitler proceeded mercilessly with his extermination campaign, Enver Paşa lent his approval to the Armenian genocide, and the Hutu extremists were rapidly eliminating Rwandan Tutsi. Hitler would die by his own hand, Enver in battle to unite Turkic peoples against the Soviets, and many of the Hutu génocidaires in the refugee camps of northern Congo.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 108-109

In a chapter somewhat disturbingly redolent of “the freakonomics of genocide” Midlarsky highlights altruistic punishment as a factor that not only motivates followers to cooperate in a genocidal project they otherwise find extremely distasteful (or worse), but also motivates leaders to persist in genocide at the expense of losing larger battles against their enemies.

On a more familiar level, “altruistic punishment” might well describe the motivations of political activists who would rather purge their party of defectors than win the next election.

In addition to rational choice, utopianism is a current theory that could serve as a starting point for comprehending the onset of genocide. In contrast to rational choice, which provides a social scientific basis, a focus on utopianism would provide an ideological source of genocide as a uniform substratum. This emphasis on ideology is the basis of a recently published well-written comparison of four genocides by Eric Weitz. Focusing on the concept of utopia at the core of genocidal ideologies, Weitz argues for its salience as an explanation of the Soviet, Cambodian, Nazi, and Bosnian atrocities.

In considering Weitz’s argument, though, it is apparent that the Marxist-Leninist cases are conflated with cases that have entirely different etiologies. The Soviets had an elaborate ideational class-based justification for mass murder, as did the Cambodians, while the Nazi and Bosnian instances were based on ethnoreligious criteria without elaborate justification. Thus, the concept of utopia does not go very far in explaining these latter two cases. The Nazis had utopian visions of a distant past including an ostensibly racially pure Ottonian Germany, while the Communists (Soviets and Cambodians) possessed a rigorous, if deeply flawed, ideational structure that predicted a future free of class oppression and conflict.

The consequences of ethnoreligious hostilities are vastly different from those of overtly political ideation. In the former, complete eradication is most frequently the goal, while in the latter elimination of incorrigible political enemies along with reeducation of the remainder constitutes the core of the governmental program. Victimization rates, therefore, differ substantially, ranging from the approximately 67 percent of Jews murdered in Nazi-targeted areas of Europe to at most 10 percent of the Soviet and Chinese populations, and 20 percent of the Cambodian. Moreover, possibilities for reconstituting cultural and religious life were sharply circumscribed for Jews (and Armenians) after their genocides. Such limitations were much less pronounced in the Soviet and Cambodian instances; contemporary Russia, indeed, has seen a massive Orthodox revival after the earlier decimation of church officials by the Bolsheviks….

Even more problematic in applying utopianism is the Armenian genocide. Neither in their past nor in any realistically conceived future could the Young Turks imagine a state “purified” of other nationalities, so that an ideology justifying mass murder could not be used effectively as motivation. Certainly at the time of the Armenian genocide in 1915–16, the Greeks, who were somewhat more numerous than the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and even more dominant in its economic life, were not subject to genocide….

Beyond the problem of generalizability, difficult as it is, the concept of utopianism itself certainly is not sufficient to explain genocide as a behavioral category. There have been utopian socialists of every stripe, for example, from cosmopolitans in the nineteenth-century United States and Europe, to more nationalistic ones in the kibbutzim in Israel. Hardly any had advocated, let alone participated in, genocide. In other words, utopianism can just as readily invoke benign, even reclusive, visions (e.g., the Hutterites), where the last thing any of these utopians wanted to do was to kill or even bother other people.

Where utopianism does get into trouble is in its juncture with the state and especially with state power. The conjoining of the two can lead to genocidal consequences, but it is the state that is the driving force behind the utopian vision or whatever related genocidal motivation (e.g., state security) may exist at the moment of decision. Utopian belief is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding the origins of genocide although, if strongly held, it certainly can provide the ideational basis for genocidal thinking.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 75-76

UPDATE: In a comment, reader Otto Pohl objects:

The percentages compared between Nazi Germany and the USSR and Cambodia are apples and oranges. The total percentage of people under Nazi rule murdered is quite small compared to the Soviet and Cambodian cases. Why compare a targeted minority in one case, Jews, and ignore it in the Soviet and Cambodian cases? Stalin murdered over a third of the Chechen, Crimean Tatar and Mennonite populations of the USSR. In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge completely eliminated the ethnic Vietnamese population. Very high percentages of Chams and Chinese also perished. Socialist racism was quite real and no less deadly than the Nazi variant.