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James Waller. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 315 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-195-14868-1.
In Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, professor of psychology and Holocaust scholar James Waller provides an explanation for moral evil. Dr. Waller's goal is "to offer a psychological explanation of how ordinary people commit extraordinary evil" (10, original italics). Waller undertakes his goal in three steps. First, he advances an argument that it is ordinary people-rather than unusual or exceptional people-who execute great evil. Second, he details his original model for exactly how ordinary people do horrific things. And finally, he offers reflections on the application and usefulness of his model to future scholarship and to avoiding evil.
The first section of Becoming Evil, comprised of chapters one through four, argues that ordinary people, like you and me, commit extraordinary evil. To establish his case, Waller surveys and rejects five standard models of evil, each of which posits the extraordinary origins for great evil. Specifically, Waller examines the collectivist, anti-Semitic eliminativist, mad Nazi, Nazi personality, and demonization models. The collectivist model posits that groups are "inherently selfish and uncaring" and thus cause individuals, collectively, to perpetrate evil (31). Waller rejects this view on the grounds that groups exacerbate the previously established characteristics of their members, whether good or bad; groups in and of themselves do not engender evil behavior. The anti-Semitic eliminativist model, championed by Daniel Goldhagen, holds that the Holocaust occurred because German culture was permeated by the extraordinarily evil ideology of anti-Semitism. Waller discards this model for several reasons, including the facts that "not all the killers in the Holocaust were Germans" and "German executioners were equally capable of killing millions of non-Jews" (45). The mad Nazi model claims that the Nazi leadership was insane, and it was their psychopathology that caused the Holocaust. Waller rejects this position for many reasons, including the fact that psychological evaluations as well as "historical and eyewitness testimony . . . make it clear that most perpetrators could not be considered psychopathological" (71). The Nazi personality model asserts that Nazis had a homogeneous personality, perhaps one characteristically authoritarian. Waller eschews this hypothesis, however, since the psychological data shows, again, that...