Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century

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Yale University Press, 11 août 2000 - 480 pages
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The twentieth century was the most brutal in human history, featuring a litany of shameful events that includes the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Stalinist era, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. This important book looks at the politics of our times and the roots of human nature to discover why so many atrocities were perpetuated and how we can create a social environment to prevent their recurrence.

Jonathan Glover finds similarities in the psychology of those who perpetuate, collaborate in, and are complicit with atrocities, uncovering some disturbing common elements -- tribal hatred, blind adherence to ideology, diminished personal responsibility -- as well as characteristics unique to each situation. Acknowledging that human nature has a dark and destructive side, he proposes that we encourage the development of a political and personal moral imagination that will compel us to refrain from and protest all acts of cruelty.

 

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HUMANITY: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century

Avis d'utilisateur  - Kirkus

An attempt to formulate a new ethics, based on human psychology, that will account for 20th-century atrocities and offer some realistic hope that they can be avoided in the future.The mindless carnage ... Consulter l'avis complet

LibraryThing Review

Avis d'utilisateur  - jcvogan1 - LibraryThing

Through a review of the targetting of civilians in WWI and WWII, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and Nazism, along with a few other examples, talks about the role of morality in human political activity ... Consulter l'avis complet

Pages sélectionnées

Table des matières

In Those Years
237
The Trap of Terror
241
Belief Ends and Means
252
Stalinism and the Moral Resources
257
The Working of the Belief System
265
Stalinism Truth and Moral Identity
274
Maos Utopian Project
283
Overturning the Basket Cambodia
299

THE MORAL PSYCHOLOGY OF WAGING WAR
45
Close Combat
47
The Case of My Lai
58
The Shift to Killing at a Distance
64
Bombing
69
Hiroshima
89
War and the Moral Resources
113
TRIBALISM
117
Rwanda
119
The Tribal Trap
123
The Political Containment of Tribalism
133
The Roots of Tribal Conflict
141
The Capacity to Unchain Ourselves
149
WAR AS A TRAP
153
The Trap of the Trenches
155
The Home Front
165
The Stone Has Started to Roll 1914
177
Sliding Out of the Trap 1962
200
Ways Out
224
BELIEF AND TERROR STALIN AND HIS HEIRS
235
Utopia and Belief
310
THE WILL TO CREATE MANKIND ANEW THE NAZI EXPERIMENT
315
The Core of Nazism
317
Obedience and Conformity
328
35 The Attack on Humanity
337
The Erosion of Moral Identity
349
The Nazi Moral Identity
355
The Willingness to Believe
360
Philosophers
365
Bystanders
379
Interpreting the Nazi Episode
394
ON THE RECENT MORAL HISTORY OF HUMANITY
399
Some People and Not Others
401
Ethics Humanized
405
The Past Alive in the Present
411
References
415
Sources and Acknowledgements
448
Index
451
Droits d'auteur

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Expressions et termes fréquents

Fréquemment cités

Page 328 - Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
Page 31 - And sentries sweated for the day was hot: A crowd of ordinary decent folk Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke As three pale figures were led forth and bound To three posts driven upright in the ground. The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others...
Page 349 - ... but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, eg men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
Page 155 - Out of the air a voice without a face Proved by statistics that some cause was just In tones as dry and level as the place : No one was cheered...
Page 184 - Government was terrible to a degree ; just for a word — ' ' neutrality,' a word which in war time had so often been ' disregarded — just for a scrap of paper Great Britain was 'going to make war on a kindred nation who desired ' nothing better than to be friends with her.
Page 47 - She looked over his shoulder For vines and olive trees, Marble, well-governed cities And ships upon untamed seas, But there on the shining metal His hands had put instead An artificial wilderness And a sky like lead. A plain without a feature, bare and brown, No blade of grass, no sign of neighbourhood, Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood An unintelligible multitude. A million eyes, a million boots in line, Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Page 117 - We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare; More substance in our enmities Than in our love; O honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare.
Page 31 - Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke) And sentries sweated for the day was hot : A crowd of ordinary decent folk Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke As three pale figures were led forth and bound To three posts driven upright in the ground. The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same v c.

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À propos de l'auteur (2000)

Jonathan Glover is director of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King's College, London.

Informations bibliographiques