The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,334

for the Israeli/Palestinian tragedy.218

SADISM

It’s hard to single out the most heinous form of human depravity—there are so many to choose from—but if genocide is the worst by quantity, sadism might be the worst by quality. The deliberate infliction of pain for no purpose but to enjoy a person’s suffering is not just morally monstrous but intellectually baffling, because in exchange for the agony of the victim the torturer receives no apparent personal or evolutionary benefit. And unlike many other sins, pure sadism is not a guilty pleasure that most people indulge in their fantasy lives; few of us daydream about watching cats burn to death. Yet torture is a recurring disfigurement in human history and current events, appearing in at least five circumstances.

Sadism can grow out of instrumental violence. The threat of torture can terrify political opponents, and it must at least occasionally be used to make the threat real. Torture may also be used to extract information from a criminal suspect or political enemy. Many police and national security forces engage in mild torture under euphemisms like “the third degree,” “moderate physical pressure,” and “enhanced interrogation,” and these tactics may sometimes be effective.219 And as moral philosophers since Jeremy Bentham have pointed out, in theory torture can even be justifiable, most famously in the ticking-bomb scenario in which a criminal knows the location of an explosive that will kill and maim many innocent people and only torture would force him to disclose its location.220

Yet among the many arguments against the use of torture is that it seldom stays instrumental for long. Torturers get carried away. They inflict so much suffering on their victims that the victims will say anything to make it stop, or become so delirious with agony as to be incapable of responding.221 Often the victims die, which makes the extraction of information moot. And in cases like the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, the use of torture, far from serving a useful purpose, was a strategic catastrophe for the country that allowed it to happen, inflaming enemies and alienating friends.

A second occasion for torture is in criminal and religious punishment. Here again there is a granule of instrumental motivation, namely to deter wrongdoers with the prospect of pain that would cancel out their gain. Yet as Beccaria and other Enlightenment reformers pointed out, any calculus of deterrence can achieve the same goals with punishments that are less severe but more reliable. And surely the death penalty, if it is applied at all, is a sufficient disincentive to capital crimes without needing the then-customary practice of preceding it with prolonged gruesome torture. In practice, corporal punishment and excruciating capital punishment escalate into orgies of cruelty for its own sake.

Entertainment itself can be a motive for torture, as at the Roman Colosseum and in blood sports like bearbaiting and cat-burning. Tuchman notes that towns in medieval France would sometimes purchase a condemned criminal from another town so they could entertain their citizens with a public execution.222

Hideous tortures and mutilations can accompany a rampage by soldiers, rioters, or militiamen, especially when they have been released from apprehension and fear, the phenomenon that Randall Collins calls forward panic. These are the atrocities that accompany pogroms, genocides, police brutality, and military routs, including those in tribal warfare.

Finally there are serial killers, the sickos who stalk, kidnap, torture, mutilate, and kill their victims for sexual gratification. Serial killers like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer are not the same as garden-variety mass murderers.223 Mass murderers include men who run amok, like the enraged postal workers who avenge a humiliation and prove their potency by taking as many people as they can with them in a final suicidal outburst. They also include spree killers, like the Washington, D.C., sniper John Muhammad, who stretch out their vengeance and dominance over several weeks. With serial killers, in contrast, the motive is sadism. They are aroused by the prospect of tormenting, disfiguring, dismembering, eviscerating, and slowly draining the life out of victims with their bare hands. Even the most jaded consumer of human atrocities will find something to shock them in Harold Schechter’s authoritative compendium The Serial Killer Files.

For all its notoriety in rock songs, made-for-TV movies, and Hollywood blockbusters, serial killing is a rare phenomenon. The criminologists James Alan Fox and Jack Levin note that “there may actually be more scholars studying serial murder than there are offenders committing it.”224 And even that small number (like every other