Rethinking Serial Murder, Spree Killing, and Atrocities

Beyond the Usual Distinctions

Robert Shanafelt, Nathan W. Pino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317564676
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Multiple killings by serial or spree killers and the mass violence seen in war crimes and other atrocities have typically been understood as discrete category types, which can foster the view that there are fundamentally different kinds of human beings, including "deviants" who are born evil and innately given to sadism or a callous lack of empathy. In contrast, this book considers the violence of these "deviants" in terms of larger questions about human violence. Therefore, in addition to describing the life histories of a sample of individual serial and spree murderers, the book includes analysis of macro-level phenomena such as genocide, mass rape and killing, and torture occurring under conditions of war, state authorization, or political upheaval. The chief claim of the book is that, given the "right" combination of factors occurring at different levels of analysis, virtually anyone can emerge as a killer or perpetrator of atrocities. While it is crucial to understand individual killers in terms of the details of their biographies, it is equally crucial to understand political atrocities in terms of the details of their histories; and to see that persons and groups are always the product of complexly interacting assemblage processes.

1
On Killing, Murder, and Extreme Violence in Biological and Historical Perspective

Questions about whether the murders of a sociopath and the extreme violence of ethnic “cleansings” are abnormal or have their roots in a widely shared human psychology evoke disparate answers from scholars committed to different explanatory paradigms. So, it is important not to get carried away by caricatures of the positions of those one disagrees with. Still, we should reiterate at the outset that in our opinion, despite claims that have been made to the contrary, humans have neither an instinct for killing nor a special aversion to it. Rather, humans are the product of the particular pathways they encounter and create for themselves as individuals making constrained individual choices, just as societies became what they are by a complex assembly of social processes and aggregate choices made under the exterior constraints of structural and environmental conditions. While it is possible that a propensity to kill has some causal components that exist at the subpersonal level due to genetics alone, such as through mutations that cause malfunctions of the neurobiological circuits associated with feelings of sympathy, this in no way would explain why any one particular individual would kill. As we argue throughout the book, to explain an individual’s life adequately means taking into consideration the unique pathways of life at all levels, from the biological to the social and the cultural. In this chapter, to show such interaction, we will focus on the impacts of the social on the personal and subpersonal level. What this approach shows is that it is an oversimplification to consider each of these levels alone. Men do not commit murder simply because their ancient primate male ancestors killed or because there exists any such thing as a “gene for violence.” Nor can we ignore the fact that we—men and women—are animals with a biological heritage. These days, it is accurate to say that virtually all well-informed scholars understand that human behavior involves a complex interaction of biological, historical, psychological, and social processes. However, significant differences still exist in the emphasis that is attached to each domain.

In his introduction to a special issue of the British Journal of Criminology devoted to “human evolution, history, and violence,” Manuel Eisner notes that criminologists should be interested in such diverse phenomena as Neolithic massacres, historical patterns of blood feud and infanticide, and cross-cultural patterns in the age of homicide offenders. This is because, he claims, such phenomena may “strike at the very heart of the criminology of violence” (Eisner 2011: 473). We agree, but also want to note here that while serial killing and extreme political violence are indeed terrifying and indicative of the worst features of humanity, we should put aside all assumptions about what is evil or monstrous to consider violence in terms of the most basic of questions. To us, the basic question is: What is our heritage of killing? In order to answer this question from our perspective, not only must we delve into the set of diverse topics mentioned by Eisner, but also into the paradigms that have been used to analyze them. These paradigms include evolutionary psychology, various paradigms about a hunting past, paradigms that are based on chimpanzee patterns of violence, and models of violence based on comparisons of human prehistory and history.

Roots of Violence or Dead Ends?

Today, one common approach to the study of violence and killing in the broadest way is to examine statistical patterns. Most reported and commented on are patterns relating to gender. According to Eisner (2011: 474), historical and cross-cultural research suggests that men commit 85–95% of all homicides. Similarly, in their widely cited analysis of homicide, psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson (1988: 146–150) suggest that conflicts between men are far more likely to end up in murder than conflicts between women. Indeed, their cross-cultural statistics show that men are 90% more likely to kill other men than women are to kill other women. Recent data from 207 countries compiled by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2011: 11) indicate that the figures of Eisner and Daly and Wilson might exaggerate the case somewhat, with the UN figures showing that men account for about 80% of perpetrators and victims of homicide. Historically, killing has also been mostly the domain of younger men, although, again, not exclusively so (Thorpe 2005: 5; Nivette 2011: 587–588). Be that as it may, it is clear that men engage in killing and other forms of violence far more often than women, so we will therefore spend more time discussing male perpetrators of extreme violence.

At one time, there was anthropological consensus that prehistory was quite peaceful until the advent of agriculture, cities, and hierarchically ordered societies. More recently, this view has been called into question, particularly in notable works by Keeley (1996), LeBlanc (2003), and Guilaine and Zammit (2005). Based on their understanding of chimpanzee violence, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson (1996) have argued that natural selection favored an ancestral ape given to aggressive acts formed by coalitions of males against outsiders on behalf of the territorial group. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss (2005) emphasizes that murder of conspecifics occurred for another reason: the reproductive success of individuals. For Buss, “killing is fundamentally in our nature because over the eons of human evolution murder was so surprisingly beneficial in the intense game of reproductive competition.” As a result, he believes, “our minds have developed adaptations to kill.”¹

Not all those working from an evolutionary perspective put it so bluntly. Others see homicide not so much as directly selected for, but as an indirect consequence of emotions and behavioral inclinations related to reproductive success in ways other than killing a rival. Historian John Carter Wood (2011: 487) quotes an essay from criminologist Anthony Walsh (2006) as more representative of the prevailing opinion: “evolutionary psychologists do not claim that there is an evolved mechanism dedicated to homicide. Behaviors that were adaptive, however, such as male sexual propriety, jealousy, aggressive resource acquisition, and status striving, would have occasionally manifested themselves in homicide.” In a sweeping review that uses the work of criminologists, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and historians of war, the prominent evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker (2011) discusses a wide range of statistical data purporting to show that both prehistoric times and historical eras up to recent times were marked by rates of murder and killing much higher than those found today. “For all the dangers we face today,” he argues, “the dangers of yesterday were even worse” (Pinker 2011: 30). Yet, for Pinker, violence is both an adaptation and something that can be ameliorated by social conditions.

Western thinking tends to dichotomize, and modern media exacerbates these dichotomies through the simplifications of debate. Probably no greater dichotomy exists than that between the extremes of Hobbes’ primordial human condition of “war of all against all” and Rousseau’s view of an idyllic past occupied by Noble Savages. While it is indeed true, as Pinker claims (Pinker 2011; 2002), that there are still social scientists who see human psychology as a “blank slate,” entirely the product of learning, with minds like a sponge ready to soak up whatever comes its way, those who argue that violence and war have nothing to do with biological adaptations or the shaping influences of natural selection seem to be far less numerous today than they were 20 or 30 years ago. Nonetheless, to accept a role for biology at the micro level does not mean that one gives up the biological relations to the social exterior, and at different levels of scale. Indeed, many claims of Evolutionary Psychologists² about the role of prehistory and our primate heritage in shaping a single human nature are misconceived, oversimplified, or exaggerated precisely because they misunderstand the operation of exterior and interior subpersonal, personal, and social processes in the long term. This is evident in a misplaced concreteness given to descriptive and explanatory concepts.

A major premise of the Evolutionary Psychology paradigm is that human nature has been shaped through stable processes of natural selection that occurred during what is referred to by followers as the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). As Buller (2006) points out, there are a number of flaws with this assumption, particularly in that it posits an understanding of selection pressures during tens of thousands of years for which there is only fragmentary evidence, but also in that it downplays a variety of mechanisms that cannot be understood in terms of a single “entity” selecting for reproductive success. (These include genetic drift at the gene-to-population level, adaptive plasticity and stable variation at the micro level, and the role of species [individuals] in the construction of their own ecological niches.) With respect to aggression, Fuentes points out that not only is aggression not a discrete trait that can be selected for but that “the available evidence shows that aggression is neither the primary, nor the most successful, way to achieve dominance and to mate and produce offspring” (Fuentes 2012: 149). And, as will be discussed further, evidence about violence in human prehistory is spotty and subject to differing interpretations.

In contrast to Evolutionary Psychology, we believe that what is important about our propensity for both peace and violence is an evolutionary heritage that goes back far deeper than simply our human past. We have a heritage of being both predator and prey that is much deeper than our primate past. Whatever our unique features, our proclivities toward attack or defensive aggression owe much to the mammalian fight-or-flight stress response and to the ancient mammalian limbic system; our sexuality and feelings of attachment depend on hormones of pleasure and excitation that are shared by diverse social animals. Our brains, while obviously unique and prepared to attend to efficiently learned signals key for survival, must master varying features of the environment and respond flexibly to changing social contexts. Great apes do this quite effectively (and so do cetaceans and some birds), but the emergence of language and a fully elaborated symbolic culture also means living in terms of a unique niche. This is the information environment that fosters the development of a healthy neocortex, an environment that consists not just of brains with their various physical subcomponents, but brain/minds that grow and develop in the domain of the social and cultural. While our brains are not “blank slates,” they are also not predetermined computer programs. Without opportunities to experience a healthy exploration of one’s surroundings, social relationships with emotional connections, and basic forms of communication and language, what we think of as the mind and the self do not come to full fruition.

Unfortunately, the archeological and bioanthropological evidence does not provide simple answers to questions about the underpinnings of murder, massacre, and war, although Hobbesians are convinced that the evidence on their side is conclusive. Currently, Wrangham’s view of the “demonic male” that young men, along with young male chimpanzees, “have an evolved disposition to attack and kill members of out-groups” (Potts and Hayden 2010: 267) remains widely cited, if also more subtly argued than such quotations suggest (Fuentes 2012: 154–155).

We wish to set forth our argument in the context of two discussions. The first concerns the possible role of a hunting heritage in the development of human killing potentials. The second is about the frequency and intensity of deadly violence in prehistory. Seeing a role for hunting may be seen as old-fashioned, but we do so from a newer perspective in line with that recently articulated by Elbert, Weierstall, and Schauer (2010), who discuss it in terms of the development of appetites for aggression. Given our stated desire to understand processes of violence, discussion of the prehistory and history of violence is also essential here. In this context, we can further develop our thinking about processes that are said to be involved in the creation of groups and individuals with propensities to kill.

What Role Hunting?

An association among hunting, murder, and warfare is part of the traditional view in the West of seeing violence as a central feature of human nature (Cartmill 1993), including the biblical view that human history began with disobedience and murder. A kind of innate depravity view has also been prominent in science and in popular presentations. In his bestselling book, African Genesis, Robert Ardrey (1961) described a link between hunting and other violence most simply and starkly: “Man is a predator whose natural instinct is to kill with a weapon” (Ardrey 1961, quoted in Cartmill 1993: 13, as well as in Sussman and Hart 2010: 60–61). Ardrey saw war as an outgrowth of a territorial instinct meshing with a killing instinct derived from hunting. He, in turn, developed his ideas from the Australian/South African anthropologist Raymond Dart, who, with little evidence, hypothesized in the 1920s that we are all the descendants of a ruthless and violent ape ancestor. At the time Ardrey wrote, prominent European scholars also shared this perspective. The noted French archaeologist Leroi-Gourhan, for example, saw warfare as an extension of hunting; in fact, he described warfare as “man hunting” (quoted in Guilane and Zammit 2005: 19). Similarly, the Nobel prize-winning Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz emphasized the role of the earliest weapons in shaping our killing behavior. Paradoxically, he argued, since humans lack the claws, jaws, and teeth that allow other animals to kill so easily, we have not evolved the ritualized signals other animals have that inhibit the killing of conspecifics. Our ancestors’ development of lethal stone weapons thus freed us to kill each other without compunction. Biological anthropologists Sherwood Washburn and C. S. Lancaster also championed the argument that we, as a species, are innately given to killing. In anthropology, this view became known as the “Man-the-Hunter” perspective, and was widely accepted. In fact, in his book-length review of this and other attitudes toward hunting in history, Matthew Cartmill (1993) found that during the 1960s, it was simply taken for granted by biologically oriented scholars that human nature became what it is today through our (male) heritage of being bloodthirsty predators who battled competitors until we eventually came to sit atop the food chain.

Most anthropologists no longer support such a perspective. Over time, the evidence of anthropology has not born out the Man-the-Hunter view. Especially suspect is its more over-the-top imagery about bloodthirsty hunters. There is little evidence of big-game hunting in the time period during which hominids emerged; rather, the evidence points to a condition in which less dramatic methods of obtaining protein were used, such as by scavenging the remains of kills made by lions. Also, ethnographers studying contemporary foragers have learned that gathering, often done by women, typically provided more calories than did meat. Research on warfare and violent altercations also has shown that, rather than a natural desire to kill, an aversion to aggression and discomfort in violent situations is more typical of people, both men and women (Collins 2008; Grossman 2009). By the 1990s, the earlier enthusiasm for the hunting model was nearly entirely gone. Pierre Clastres reflected the general sentiment when he concluded in an archaeological review that “primitive warfare is not linked in any way to hunting; it is not deeply rooted in the reality of man as a species, but rather in the social being of primitive society” (quoted in Guilane and Zammit 2005: 20). Indeed, more recently there has emerged substantial evidence that human ancestors and their hominid cousins were as likely to be prey as they were to be predator (Sussman and Hart 2010).

Nonetheless, the idea that hunting played an important role in shaping human proclivities toward violence has not been completely abandoned. In the period between 2 and 3 million years ago, it was certainly the case that the expanding brains of the hominids that would become us needed more calories and protein, and this was not entirely obtained by scavenging. One method that has been put forward as a candidate for increasing protein consumption is hunting by way of long-distance running. While men cannot outsprint a kudu, they can keep up a steady pace for several hours in a way that can exhaust the ungulate. After it was run down, hunters could dispatch the panting animal, hardly able any longer to stand, with simple stone tools...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 On Killing, Murder, and Extreme Violence in Biological and Historical Perspective
• 2 The Multiple Worlds of Multiple Murderers
• 3 From Normal to Brutal: Atrocities and the Persons Who Commit Them
• 4 None Too Tidy: Interacting Variables in the Development of Serial Murder, Spree Killing, and Atrocities
• Conclusion: Beyond the Usual Distinctions
• About the Authors
• Index