Allow me a confession, before I dive into my review. In my work on evil and power (New Demons. Rethinking Power and Evil Today, 2015) I acknowledge that social psychology, before philosophy, managed to avoid an excessively dualistic interpretation of political evil, which locked it away as an “absolute other.” More pressured by facts than philosophy, social psychology has also provided much needed empirical evidence, shedding light on those “crimes of obedience” at the core of Arendt’s “banality of evil.” Looking for insights into the mind of the perpetrators of evil, the famous studies by Milgram and Zimbardo came to the striking conclusion that perfectly ordinary people were capable of committing extraordinarily evil deeds. In the wake of these studies, other social psychologists have blurred the lines between absolute demons and innocent victims, making space for a gray area populated with more mediocre demons, not-so-innocent bystanders, and more complex portrayals of victims.

Yet, no matter how open I have been to the discipline, I am still left with some diffidence. This is in no small part due to the fact that I do not know it in depth, and that - as a philosopher - I am not conversant with its methods. I am always on the lookout for data without a deep hermeneutic re-elaboration, or data that do little but confirm the researcher’s initial hypothesis.

The work of Kristen Renwick Monroe, which unfortunately I did not have the opportunity to read earlier while writing my book, has in many ways disconfirmed my prejudices. While in Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s works we find ourselves in the closed and stuffy environment of the laboratory, where - I believe - the subjects’ answers are affected by the artifice, in Monroe’s interviews we can feel the contradictions and ambivalence of life. The narration attempts to recreate real experience, whereas the social laboratory strives to strip it off. Moreover, her sensibility and sensitivity in interpreting the interviews staves off the analytical coldness that often afflicts some empirical work in the social sciences.

In her important 2012 book, Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide, which constitutes the necessary theoretical companion to the book under review, Monroe explicitly situates herself within a scholarly tradition that appreciates the messiness of the human experience. There, she writes that actions “emanate not so much from conscious choice but rather from deep-seated instincts, predispositions, and habitual patterns of behavior that are related to our central identity. These spring from diverse forces, such as genetic predispositions, social roles, or culturally inculcated norms. Culture provides a range of self-images, but actors gravitate around the image that strikes a chord with their genetic propensities, with a powerful filter coming from situational or contextual factors” (p. 707 e-book version).

In that insightful and thorough book, Monroe devotes most of her attention to perpetrators of the Nazi genocide and the literature surrounding them. In A Darkling Plain, on the other hand, she turns to the survivors and expands her scope beyond Nazi Germany. The book is less interested in further developing Monroe’s theoretical assumptions than in engaging the reader with the stories of her subjects, who mostly retain their “humanity” through deeply traumatic experiences. These experiences range widely in their historical and geographical context: We go from World War II, to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, to the Pol Pot regime, to the Armenian genocide. Monroe chooses to divide her interviews in three different sections: The first collects a variety of traumatic experiences attached to World War II; the second is entitled “Other Voices, Other Wars: From Indochina to Iraq;” the third covers civil wars, genocide, and dictators. I was not utterly persuaded by this architecture. The first categorization is convincing in that it covers victimhood from many perspectives under the umbrella of the war: We have the story of a veteran from the South Pacific, the tale of the child of an SS father escaping Germany after the war, we hear from a young girl interned in a U.S. camp for Japanese Americans, and from one of the conspirators who plotted Hitler’s assassination.

In the other sections, such coherence falters—it is not fully clear, for example, why the Khmer Rouge regime is categorized under wars rather than civil wars and dictatorship. On the other hand, the most interesting interviews come in fact from these last two sections.

Here, we find Sara and Kimberly, and the tale of their experiences under Pol Pot. One is compelled to compare their different reactions to this same event. Sara cannot escape the rage caging her. The wound of what she has endured and what she has lost cannot heal, and the only passion inhabiting her is the quest for revenge. This prevents her from making sense of the past, but also from opening to the world and to the relationships of her present. She obsessively remembers all the privileges she enjoyed before, and was forced to give up. Kimberly follows a different path in one of the most significant interviews. She holds a precious ability to elaborate her experience and recount it. She takes us through a journey inside the dark dynamics of the mind, when it finds itself constrained by almost total domination: the crumbling of relationships of trust and solidarity; isolation; the loss of any past identity, even a sexual one; the inability to think; the impossibility to project. All that is left is a sort of elementary and mechanical behavior, focused on nothing but immediate strategies for survival. Yet, something “rescues” Kimberly’s subjectivity from a nihilistic outcome: Despite everything that a “totalitarian re-education” seeks to destroy and imbue into its victims, this young Cambodian woman manages to nurture the root of the emotional and relational identity which had formed her. In particular, she secures (during fleeting meetings with her father) confirmation of her pre-totalitarian “who,” as Arendt would put it. A “who” who was the object and subject of love connections, and for this reason manages to elaborate her trauma and gather from it the empathic force for re-engendering cooperation and strong communal connections, as Monroe’s interpretation seems to run. In sum, Kimberly seems to present herself as the most successful example of someone who, despite the wounds of history, keeps her humanity intact. This expression returns frequently in the questions to the interviewees: “How did you keep your humanity when you saw all the killings…?”

I understand the general meaning of the term, but why does such a sensitive and cautious social scientist, as Monroe has proven herself to be in her works, use such a slippery term? The author is aware of the polysemy of the word and the concept. In the chapter she devotes to the categorization of the psychological mechanisms that recur in the interviewees’ statements, Monroe declares the multiplicity of the meanings of humanity. Yet her conclusions do not seem to me wholly convincing. Humanity is in the end too generically equated to well-being and to a satisfactory emotional life.

I certainly do not want to enter the sophistications of the never ending philosophical debate around what it means to be human. But I believe that different locutions would have been more fitting and precise. Because deep down what the author is interrogating is not the humanity or inhumanity of the agents she encounters. Because denial, indifference, egoism, cruelty and evil, too, are part of humanity. I think that what is at stake here is the question of the conditions of possibility for ethical subjectivity. In other words, the question of which posture, which ethos a (let’s say) normal subject adopts with respect to her own self, others, and the world in the face of a rupture, of personal and historical trauma.

There are many interesting testimonies to this: from the one by Rose, an old woman keeping the memory of the Armenian genocide, to that of Fabiola’s, who leaves Nicaragua when the Sandinistas seize power; from the story of Marie, who manages to escape Lebanon during the civil war, but cannot forgive and asks only to forget, to the one of Okello who, having survived the Uganda of Idi Amin, thanks to the communitarian orientation in which he grew up finds his way back to courage and trust in sharing; from the story of Reza, who lives through the dark period of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, to that of Leyla, the Iranian college teacher who stands up against the ayatollah’s guidelines on education, and risks her life to hide students in her home. And another comparison between two different ways to react to a same event, the second Iraq war, proves particularly illuminating. Doc, who was a military corpsman during the war, has no regrets for what he has done in the six months he spent in Iraq. If he has killed innocent civilians, he did it because such is war—an undertaking which cannot help collateral damage. He is, and remains, a soldier in any circumstance. Even in his leisurely time he keeps the tension of war awake. The videogames he plays constantly are not mere evasion, but rather a training for his military role. Hence the absence of guilty feelings, regrets, ambivalence, and contradictions. Executing orders, even orders to kill beyond military objectives, is in any case for him the most rational and righteous strategy. Sebastian, on the other hand, offers a rather different narration: His identity as a soldier crumbles in the face of the racism and cynicism of many of his colleagues. That he exposes himself to denounce the abuses of his fellow soldiers, that he succeeds in feeling pity, in keeping in touch with the pain of the victims, strengthens his personality in an altruistic direction.

Kristen Monroe’s perspective is unquestionably a precious contribution to research in social and political psychology devoted to outline the so called “Altruistic Personality.” A crucial element of this personality is the formation of an open identity, educated to a specific idea of self, not as an autonomous entity, but as the result of meaningful relationships—a personality which in some cases can risk its survival to heal someone else’s wounds. Monroe attributes greater weight to the emotional side in the formation of this identity. For her it is crucial whether this identity succeeds in opening itself to a “transformative encounter,” an emotional encounter with the suffering of others, which brings the subject to suspend ordinary moral codes. There is no doubt that this emotional capacity is a crucial factor in determining an agent’s conduct. And certainly the possibility of being struck by the pain in the face of the Other, as Levinas would put it, has to do with the most meaningful experiences shaping our identity as ethical identities. But how many identities do these agents have, or come to have?

In the concluding pages of her work, where she recapitulates the criteria guiding her research, Monroe seems to consider identity as a substratum which, though touched and modified by events and encounters, remains one. Moreover, identity seems to gather its value and strength precisely in this capacity to be one and univocal. On the other hand, I believe that many of the persons interviewed put in front of us a different, and philosophically interesting, reality. If Doc does not let himself be touched by the shocking force of the reality of war, is it not because in reality he is entirely possessed by only one identity? That Sara remains imprisoned in anger, is it not due to an identity structuring itself exclusively on the sum of what she owns? That Kimberly, Leyla, or Sebastian instead manage to open themselves to the world with generosity, doesn’t it depend on the impossibility for them to adhere to one exclusive identity? In other words, isn’t it the play of the making and unmaking of an identity, the continuous agon between one identity and the other, between identification and dis-identification, that “saves” us from closure within our own selves?