Book Review: Human Destructiveness

Group a series of lectures under an intriguing title such as "Churchill's Black Dog", the argument seems to run, and the pop psychology market will be painlessly beguiled into reading your work. The psychologically-minded man or woman on the Clapham omnibus will buy your product to consume on their journey. The problem with this particular offering, though, is that it is likely to prove indigestible to such readers while leaving psychologists, psychotherapists and philosophers dissatisfied. Philosophers, indeed, are omitted from the list of categories of people who Storr suggests in the first few pages are concerned with the nature of human destructiveness. The book suffers from the disadvantage of being both first published thirty years ago and, because recently revised and repackaged, his latest offering. The Joy of Solitude, an earlier work, was the magpie skill with which Storr selected and presented information from a multitude of writers spanning several centuries. Here we have Storr as he wrote in early texts such as Sexual Deviation and, at least initially, it is stodgy fare.

Originally published in 1972, Human Destructiveness seeks to examine humanities' capacity for evil. In attempting to discover the extent of this which manifests itself as genocide, racial conflict and other large-scale violence, Storr cautions against easy extrapolations from the behaviour of individuals to that of groups and nations, though he offers interesting discussions of what he calls aggressive personality disorders, sadomasochism and the mechanics of paranoid delusion. He concludes that the propensity for mass outbreaks of cruelty resides in our powers of imagination: "to be able to see fellow human beings as wholly evil (and therefore legitimate targets for our destructive impulses) requires an imaginary capacity not found in other species."

We might be forgiven for suspecting that the majority of revision took place in the last three chapters. Early chapters would benefit from further up-dating: several of the studies he quotes in the first two chapters were originally conducted thirty years ago and fewer than a third were produced during the last decade. The relative paucity of recent research is reflected in the simplifications and generalizations Storr presents. His statement that "the supposition that some cases of aggressive personality disorder are related to delay in the process of maturation is supported by the fact that aggressive and antisocial behaviour declines with age" seems to raise more questions than it answers. We might want to suggest that the meaning which society attributes to aggressive behaviour depends very largely on the age, sex, race and class of the individual: what might in one case be labelled as delinquency will in another be considered harmless eccentricity. Storr tells us that aggression is more common in urban than in rural environments, but this notion, interesting in itself, surely requires expansion and clarification? The differing ways in which, say, isolated farming communities in the west of Ireland, and blue-collar workers in London's East End come to understand what is aggressive and what is not has been studied by sociologists for several decades and the notion that aggression is a social construct rather than a given is not addressed here. We might want to agree with statements such as "Industrialization has made man biologically inept" if Storr were to explain his viewpoint further, while a page later he takes as read our agreement that the West must insist that family limitation go hand in hand with the provision of modern techniques of agriculture and preventative medicine to the "third world".

Later chapters are considerably more coherent and readable. The third, on sadomasochism, innovatively draws on the work of Marcus and traces the links he makes between the rise of sadomasochistic pornography and the novel form in enabling Storr to return to the format he employed in Solicitude. He dips and collates, marvellously weaving the thoughts of writers as diverse as Freud, de Sade and de Beauvoir in a highly entertaining and informative manner. On one page we find a wonderfully fresh anecdote about the abortive seduction of Swinburne by a bare-back circus rider, on another a reductionistic interpretation of the 'meaning' of Turandot. The book is probably worth its cover price for these alone.

A final point: we might ask why a book written by a British academic and published in London should adopt American spelling. If this is because the book is directed primarily at an American readership we might wonder whether it would have been possible to publish an adapted text for the not inconsiderable British market alongside the American version.

Simon Du Plock