Jonathan Glover is an English philosopher and ethicist. He went to college at Tonbridge School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. For thirty years, he was a professor of philosophy at New College, Oxford, and currently teaches ethics at London’s Kings College. Glover is also a research fellow at the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution in the United States.
Born in 1941, Glover writes books and teacher. His “working life consists of thinking, reading, writing and talking about philosophy. Talking includes teaching, which involves listening as well. I write mainly books, with only a few articles” (Glover). In 1989 the European Commission hired Glover to head a panel on embryo research in Europe. He is married to Vivette Glover, a prominent neuroscientist, and has three children. Glovers research focuses on ethical and practical moral questions facing society today. Much of his work asks serious questions about societal norms regarding ethics. He has argued that “conventional morality is not only too easy: it is usually too insulated from the imagination and from intellectual curiosity” (Glover). He not only investigates what is ethical, but why actions are determined bad or good by society. One of Glover’s first books, Causing Death and Saving Lives, was published in 1977, and addresses “practical moral questions about life and death decisions in the areas of abortion, infanticide, suicide, euthanasia, choices between people, capital punishment, and war” (Glover).
In Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century Glover examines the psychological reason that humans commit barbaric acts. His thesis is clear and intriguing. He argues that “man-made moral traditions and the cultivation of moral imagination” keeps humans from abusing each other, which is, as a society, absolutely necessary, because of the “monsters within us” (Glover 6). Morality is the shared cultural process of “caging and containing” the human tendency towards violence. His thesis also explains how evil can occur when society’s “moral imagination” is compromised, and an individuals moral identity is systematically eroded or transformed. He uses Hitler and Stalin as examples of individuals who shaped societal norms in a negative manner. Their “man-made morality” was not inherently unethical, with disastrous effects. Glover explains that “when human responses fail, moral identities are in danger of losing their connection to humanity. The humanity of the sense of moral identity is crucial” (Glover 104).
The book is broken up into chapters that deal primarily with military regimes. Glover examines 20th century atrocities, including Nazi genocide, communist pogroms and mass exterminations under Stalin in Russia, Mao in China, and Pol Pot in Cambodia. He points out that these crimes are not confined to the first half of the twentieth century. He analyses more recent tribal warfare and mass killings in Rwanda, Darfur and Bosnia. He identifies three types of “bulwarks” that creates barriers to ethical subversion. One is respect for human dignity, two is sympathy, and the third – which is the least resistive - is moral identity. This third type of bulwark - moral identity – involves associating ones very being with morality. When a persons identity involves being a “good person”, it is hard for them to do evil acts. However, this third type of bulwark is the least dependable of the three forms of protection against evil atrocities because notions of what is “good” tor “right” can be perverted and warped. For example, genocide of ethnic cleansing can be portrayed and generally accepted by a society as normal, necessary and right. Historically, this has been seen throughout history. There is no need to focus on just Nazi Germany, barbarism can be seen in the Crusades and later in Armenia, and Glover’s list goes on.
However, according to Glover, the twentieth century offered some of the more egregious examples of barbarism. In the 1800’s, an “enlightened” and religiously devout Europe saw a society that ascribed to an objective idea of morality. Then industrialization, nationalism and technology created hatred for “others”, and tools that could kill impersonally without seeing the victim. A good example of this kind of technology is the nuclear bomb uses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Killing became easier. As a philosopher, Glover looks at the evolution of philosophy to explain humanities increasing bloodlust. The book begins by examining Nietzsche's ideas of "cruelty," and the overman, the man who overcomes external morality, creating new values in the process (Glover 14). This ability to individually create morality is what Glover believes causes evil atrocities. Effective society works together to create sustainable morality that creates order, individuals take morality and bend it to meet their whims and desires, leading to bloodshed and violence. In a review for the War, Literature and the Arts Journal, historian Larry Ellis describes the high quality of moral analysis, and notes the book has a dark and repetitive tone, as readers “see the litany of human catastrophes Glover offers up for our scrutiny” (422). Ellis believes the book offers important conclusions that need to be addressed by society at large because “the horrors of the past century demand that we take his findings and suggestions to heart. Our very survival may depend on it” (423).
Jonathan Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century looks a at a simple philosophical question: Why was the twentieth century so evil? It offers some interesting answers, including societies that allowed morality to be defined by psychopaths, and not more objective moral traditions created by religion or historically shared cultural norms. I was interested in his ideas about why morality sank so low in the twentieth century. Most of the world had evolved out of the middle ages into an era that culturally emphasized enlightenment ideals like freedom and equality. Glover showed multiple examples of societies that advocated these ideals for their own people, while ruthlessly cutting down people who were foreign to them. Some of the book was difficult to read. Technology is often seen as “civilized”, but it actually offered the tools leaders like Hitler needed to make genocide possible. The decline of religion is also cited as a major cause of moral decay. Often, religion is portrayed as causing violence, but Glover suggests that religious doctrine actually restrained the barbarism throughout history. Without religion, it would have been much worse. As a student, I was always interested in the Holocaust because I could not wrap my brain around the magnitude of the evil. Glover’s book does a good job explaining the phenomenon behind an entire “civilized” society killing women and children in the name of “progress.”
Works Cited
Ellis, William. "A Review of Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth
Century." War, Literature and the Arts (n.d.): n. pag. Web.
Glover, Jonathan. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT:
Yale UP, 2000. Print.
Glover, Jonathan. "Bio." Jonathan Glover: A Philosophy Website. N.p., n.d. Web. 11
Dec. 2014. <http://www.jonathanglover.co.uk/>.
