Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present

by Russell Jacoby

THROUGHOUT HISTORY AND ACROSS CULTURES, the most common form of violence is that between family members and neighbors or kindred communities—in civil wars writ large and small. From assault to genocide, from assassination to massacre, violence usually emerges from inside the fold. You have more to fear from a spouse, an ex-spouse, or a coworker than you do from someone you don’t know.

In this brilliant polemic, Russell Jacoby argues that violence erupts most often, and most savagely, between those of us most closely related. An Indian nationalist assassinated Mohandas Gandhi, “the father” of India. An Egyptian Muslim assassinated Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. An Israeli Jew assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister and similarly a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Genocide most often involves kindred groups. The German Christians of the 1930s were so closely intertwined with German Jews that a yellow star was required to tell the groups apart. Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia, like the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, are often indistinguishable even to one another.

This idea contradicts both common sense and the collective wisdom of teachers and preachers, who declaim that we fear—and sometimes should fear—the “other,” the dangerous stranger. Citizens and scholars alike believe that enemies lurk in the street and beyond, where we confront a “clash of civilizations” with foreigners who challenge our way of life. Jacoby offers a more unsettling truth: it is not so much the unknown that threatens us, but the known. We attack our brothers—our kin, our acquaintances, our neighbors—with far greater regularity and venom than we attack outsiders.

Weaving together the biblical story of Cain and Abel, Freud’s “narcissism of minor differences,” insights on anti-Semitism and misogyny, as well as fresh analysesof “civil” bloodbaths from the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in the sixteenth century to genocide and terrorism in our own time, Jacoby turns history inside out to offer a provocative new understanding of violentconfrontation over the centuries. “In thinking about the bad, we reach for the good,” he says in his Introduction. This passionate, counterintuitive account affords us an unprecedented insight into the roots of violence.

Genres: History, Psychology, Anthropology, Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published April 5, 2011

About the author

Russell Jacoby (born April 23, 1945) is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), an author and a critic of academic culture. His fields of interest are twentieth-century European and American intellectual and cultural history, specifically the history of intellectuals and education.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trying to figure out a definitive / singular / even-workably broad thesis for 'the root of violence' is about as easy and productive endeavor as herding cats. Unless you just go either the a) broad and tautological route and say that it's just nature, violence is just going to be there or b) blame it on the early Genesis censures of big G in the sky and chalk it up punishment for one of the Old School, like eating apples, building towers, looking back at a city, or wanting to rape and angel. Neither a or b really tells us very much though, or at least not what we want to know which I imagine is something like how can we stamp out violence, how can we be better sons/daughters, how can we just make violence when it's morally correct to do so or something like that. The idea probably being, if we can find the root of violence we can then excise it, cure it, quarantine it or something like that. It is a noble aspiration in principle, even though I'm becoming to believe that we need maybe more violence in everyday life, not extreme violence mind you, but some people just need to walk the streets in fear that their actions could cause them to get punched in the face: I'm not advocating punching people willy-nilly, nor worked out my how this works as workable but I'm starting to think that a lot of the moronically assholish things people do could be curbed with some mindfulness and mindfulness could come from the awareness that their asshole behavior could get them popped in the nose. Like always I digress. Anyway, back to the first sentence, the problem with coming up with a root to violence is that there are always plenty of exceptions to the rule.

The basic thesis of this book is that the 'clash of civilizations' idea of violence is not necessarily wrong but it's not telling the whole story. Well, of course it wouldn't. Any kind of vulgar reductionist attempt at explaining anything by coining a new catchphrase is bound to be simplistic and half-baked (I'm looking at you Mr. End of History and Mr. The World is Flat, don't think just because you're well-paid to make prophetic announcements that we all don't know that you're full of dung). Bloodlust is kind of an antithesis to the Derrida/Habermas idea that cosmopolitanism and communication are the key to reducing the amount of barbarity in the world. The author cherry-picks some scenes from recent and not so recent history to show that some of the worst violence imaginable is committed by civilized people and by people who are well acquainted with their victims. Protestant vs. Catholic violence in France in the 16th century, the Thirty Years War, the Irish Civil War, the Holocaust, the genocidal civil wars in African countries in the past few decades, Serbs vs. Croats, Osama Bin Laden; he uses these all as examples to varying degrees to show that proximity doesn't foster understanding but instead can cause seriously intense antipathy. Through out the book the author (hey, Greg why don't you look up the author's name instead of just saying the author?) challenges the idea of the Other (perceived or real) as lying at the root of violence, and instead sort of says (I'm making this kind of up, extrapolating if you will) that the enemy is within, within our own communities as broadly as one would want to define community as.

The book has some excellent points, and I had a voyeuristic glee in reading about different types of atrocities committed by different groups of people. I also found it interesting the way that the author (still haven't looked up that name) incorporated ancient texts and mixed them with some Freud and helped to create some different ideas for thinking about violence; but a lot of what he was doing was interesting but ultimately more like a literary review of violence than expanding much new ground. But, is there new ground really to uncover about the roots of violence?

One of the main points that Jacoby (I did it, I looked up the author's name!) returns to over and over again is the holocaust and trying to counter the idea of the Jew as outsider as being the cause for the Holocaust and instead saying that it was the assimilated Jew that helped give rise to the Holocaust. Is it the radical Otherness or is it the fear that the Jew is just like us that led to the Holocaust? I don't see this is a real question, it's six of one, half a dozen of the other; I don't think one necessarily exists without the other. The arguments in favor of either viewpoint can all be countered by the opposing side, if there wasn't the idea of the Eastern European Orthodox Jew as radically other would there be the fear of the undetected Jew in society? If there were no assimilated Jews in society would the German's have cared to destroy a visible minority? Would there be a fear of this minority? I have no idea, and i don't think all of the history professors in the world do either, even with any Freudian theories of castration fear and circumcision to back them up. I'm not exactly sure if I agree with anything I just said, I think what I mean to say is that reductionist explanations don't really explain or illuminate very much; but they can help give premises to interesting thought exercises.

Two concepts in particular gave me a lot of thought in this book. One was the idea of the Other, and the second was communication. Jacoby seems to be taking pot-shots at the fetish surrounding communication that I think of stemming from Habermas's theories of Communicative Action. I have quite a few problems with the ideas of Habermas and the Liberal dream that unfettered communication will make people come to a good and just common consensus, I think the idea is naivety cloaked in books upon books and essays upon essays to dress it up as more than the exhortations of a grammar school teacher addressing third graders to be nice to one another. With all of my misgivings about the dreams of the harelipped professor of Frankfurt-am-Main I find Jacoby's own attempts to poke holes in the fetish of communication to be ineffectual. Neighbors kill one another in brutal ways in civil wars, husbands kill wives, people who have lived together for centuries kill each other over religious differences; Jacoby points to examples like this to show that communication doesn't necessarily make things better but actual endangers in some situations. But there is the mistake here that proximity and communication are the same thing. I can hate a member of my family, live under the same roof as them and never engage in anything that resembles communication. Pointing to Serbs and Croats who pass each other on the street one year and are killing each other the next and then saying that communication obviously didn't work in this case is confusing terms. I'm probably being a little simplistic and selective in my reading of certain parts of the book, but I don't think I'm being too unfair.

Similarly, I find the treatment of the Other in this book as being filled with some difficulties. I don't think the idea of the Other is as cut and dry as it is presented here, and I don't think that the author thinks so either, but I think in supporting his thesis he sometimes took some liberties. The Other is never really defined as a concept, it's as if we all know what the Other is intuitively but when the examples being looked at change in the dynamic of their scope the idea of the Other also changes. One a personal level the Other is anyone that isn't me, on a religious level the other is a group that isn't my religion; as in I'm a Christian so the Jew is the Other, but I can also say that I'm a Protestant and now the Catholic is the Other, and then I can say I'm a Methodist so the Baptist is the Other. This is obvious right? Right. But the problem becomes is which is the radical Other? Which is the Other that causes an existential dread in the case of religion, the kind of dread and fear and loathing that makes people want to kill? I'd agree with Jacoby in saying that proximity can help foster violence, but I'd say that it's the 'devil in the details' that makes the Other more pronounced. The little differences cause the most cognitive dissonance into ones own sense of self, in what they believe. For example, (I'm speaking in a voice here, this isn't me speaking, I haven't gone religious) as a Christian a Buddhist is very different from me, but they don't really infringe on my beliefs, I just think they are wrong, they are so wrong that they are in a world that doesn't occupy mine really, they aren't much of a threat. Jewish or Muslim people though share a lot of the same beliefs but they come to pretty different conclusions, they would bother me more than a Buddhist because of what the things we share and then the way they don't come to the same conclusion. This feeling of being bothered would be even stronger towards other Christians who believe a whole lot that I do but who dismiss something I believe in or add something I don't believe in. I'd say that it's these minor differences cause the most radical Other to emerge, they are the ones that put into question the things we really believe to make up who we are, they come closest to shattering the fragile reality we might have constructed, the small differences in those that are closest to us have the potential to be unavoidably glaring and shake us in ways that someone from an entirely different culture never could.

I've been thinking about this whole Other thing a lot this past week, and this is just kind of a vomiting up of some of the ideas I've had, and there is a lot I didn't say and maybe someday I'll try to write more about this but do so for my own amusement or at least not in a book review where I'm starting to go off topic.

To return to the book itself, I really did like this book, and like what I've been trying to say a couple of paragraphs above, where I had problems with the book were in little details that touched on things that I'm personally interested in, but in my case they give me things to think about and I've juggled ideas around and maybe I don't make any sense in what I've come up with so far, but I don't feel the need to find and kill the author for offending some subtle distinctions that he and I would disagree about.

[T · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Likeness does not necessarily lead to harmony. It may elicit jealousy and anger. Inasmuch as identity rests on what makes an individual unique, similitude threatens the self." (153)

This book is perhaps the most unique of Jacoby's. Whilst he continues working on similar themes of intellectual history, utopianism, politics, society, German psychoanalytic thought, and diversity, it has a much more marked focus outside of the twentieth century. For Jacoby Freud's 'narcissism of small differences' reveals how violence and conflict do not arise out of difference, but rather out of similarity. It is at the point where people are most integrated that violence occurs. Civil wars tend to be the most violent, Nazism persecuted and slaughtered the people most integrated into society, and coreligionists fought more fiercely between each other than between their ideological enemies. "Assimilation becomes a threat, not a promise. It spells homogenization, not diversity" (153). For Jacoby we should celebrate diversity, not fear it, because it is those who are most like us who have historically sought to harm us ...

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 2 out of 5]

Russell Jacoby begins his extended essay on the origins of violence with a disturbing tale from the mid-16th century, the assassination of the Protestant Juan Diaz by his Catholic brother Alfonso – a signal instance of the bloodletting that was the Reformation. Subsequent chapters detail equivalent atrocities – people killing people almost identical to themselves – Ireland; Israel; Iraq; Rwanda; the Sudan; Yugoslavia; civil wars in Spain, Russia, the US, Europe; the Holocaust. It appears that while we are satisfied with killing the foreigner, we want to humiliate, torture, disembowel and behead our next door neighbor, often on the slimmest pretext. Jacoby quotes an anecdote from Michael Ignatieff, who'd asked a Serb to explain the difference between Serbs and Croatians. The soldier took out a pack of cigarettes. "See this? These are Serbian cigarettes. Over there they smoke Croatian cigarettes." He then amends, "Those Croats, they think they're better than us. Think they're fancy Europeans. I'll tell you something. We're all just Balkan shit."

Jacoby knows how to tell a good story, and the first half of this short book is fascinating in a sick sort of way, chronicling the varieties of intramural cruelty. But it settles into flaccid vagaries once he invokes the musings of Freud ("the narcissism of minor differences"), antisemitism, castration anxiety, misogyny, and the mimetic theory of René Girard. Nothing much is illuminated, merely stirred about.

[Louise · Rating 2 out of 5]

In his Preface, Russell Jacoby says that his book is "putting together histories and reflections" to suggest that likeness breeds greater malice than "the other". The subtitle indicates that root of violence will be explored.

From Rome's civil wars (p. 65, erroneously cited as beginning with Caesar - while the first was Sula) to the French Catholics and the Huguenots to the Hutus and the Tutsis, Jacoby notes the brutal persecution of populations united in language, appearance and social customs. For every atrocity mentioned, there are large and powerful counter examples such as the decades of the Mongol campaign across Asia, the Rape of Nanking or the enslavement of new world natives and Africans....just to name only a few..

A large part of Jacoby's argument, that similarity provokes more violence than the "other", relies on the Holocaust. 20 pages (of this 158 pp book) are devoted to how Jews, but for religion, were indistinguishable from non-Jewish Germans. While the cultural integration is persuasively argued, its link to hatred and ultimatly, violence, is not.

Jacoby's chapter on more personal similarities breeding more contempt (than "the other") uses primarily mythical and literary examples, such as Dorian Gray and Narsissus. For every mention of twins as a curse (evidence being some tribes where the twins and the mother are killed) there are, surely, at least as many unnamed tribes where the twins are prized. Similarly, the highest profile examples of fratricide rely on examples such as Cain and Abel and Romulus and Remus.

There is a long discussion of what Freud called "the narcissism of minor differences" and how this effects the relationships of men and women. While this (along with 6 pages of offensive material from Otto Weininger) helps to develop the concept of women and Jews as being "other", it says more about the roots of sexism and anti-Semitism than the "root of violence".

One of the most intriguing topics was that of Rene Girard on "mimetic rivalry", which is described as the fear of losing one's self by mimicking another entity. The example is Islamic terrorists seeking to keep their culture pure from western values and behavior. It is the "resemblance embitters them". (p. 154).

While the primary title "Bloodlust" and the cover graphic sensationalize the topic, the role of proximity, "blood" and culture in large scale violence is a serious and important area of study. Jacoby brings together some interesting material but, the topic remains in need of a better book.

[VJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thesis is that human beings are more likely to do violence to those they know and with whom they share commonalities than they are to violate people considered to be different. Fratricide is more common than ordinary homicide. Many examples given to support the notion that familiarity breeds contempt.

Got me thinking about the cruelties heaped on Blacks in America, who were closer to Anglos than their blood kin, but who were the objects of hatred and violence for decades.

French Huguenots murdered by French Catholics. Europeans killing Europeans in WWI. Many examples of brother killing brother. The savagery meted out to those closest to us. Scandalous.

This book was very difficult for me to read. Too much violence. If you seek plenty of examples of brother killing brother, you can't go wrong with this volume.

I chose to rate it as amazing because of the overwhelming amount of fraticidal examples provided.

[Magtymguly · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thesis for this book is very interesting and convincing. I found the first two chapters (half) of the book to be interesting where it delves into the origins of fraticidal violence, making connections I had never thought of such as that between Cain & Abel and Romulus & Remus. As a student of international relations and political science, I especially found the second chapter on civil wars to be interesting. I thought the book got a little too into the weeds in chapter 3 where it solely focuses on Jewish identity in Europe. Chapter 4's emphasis on misogyny, psychoanalysis, and Freud was unexpected but very interesting, although at times hard to follow.

Overall, an interesting read with a strong first half that discusses violence from a perspective beyond the traditional explanation of tribalism being the root of conflict. The book does slow down and get a little too lost in the details in the second half, which is why I give it 4 stars.

[Ming Terk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Violence against each other is more often due to people being similar than people being different. Wars between 'Brothers' is more common than between 'Foreigners'. Civil wars from around the world, and the Mark of Cain are addressed. The arguments are usually convincing and informative, though at times long wounded. The final chapter is on sexuality, and I cannot see much relevance to the subject of violence. What a let down. I gave up the last 20 or so pages.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

If nothing else, my reading this book is an interesting demonstration of the power of the Internet and the Kindle Dx. I stumbled across an interview with the author back in May, downloaded a sample of the book onto my Kindle, thought it was was interesting, and ended up buying and reading it. I don't think I would have done any of those things without the Kindle. Certainly not as quickly. Chalk one up for the bloodless nerds and their technology.

The book itself is interesting, though it veered into directions I was not quite expecting. The basic thrust of Jacoby's argument is that, contrary to what most modern scholars and pundits would have us believe, the most extreme violence occurs to between people with strong similarities, rather than strong differences. To help demonstrate his point, he draws on examples ranging from historical events, to modern civil conflicts, to mythical tales of fratricidal brothers (including the titualr Cain and Abel), and Freudian psychology.

As I said, it is an enjoyable book, but its focus is a bit more broad ranging than I expected, or honestly, wanted, when I picked it up. That is more my fault than Jacoby's, but still worth noting. While Jacoby mentions the fact that we are in far greater danger from a family member than from the random stranger in the dark, he spends virtually no time taking about the realities of familial crime or violence on a smaller scale. I understand why he moves away from it, because his focus is a larger historical perspective, but I was hoping for more on that particular subject. Again, that may be my fault for not reading the reviews and descriptions more carefully, but I reserve the right to be a little disappointed anyway.

As a broader historical work, Jacoby has some interesting insights. I think his rejection of the entire "Clash of Civilizations" notion is worth thinking about, as are some of his perspectives on antisemitism in Germany leading up to the Second World War. I do wonder if he isn't cherry picking examples just to suit his theories, particularly in regard to the treatment of siblings and twins in mythology, but the book is at least thought provoking.

This book is as much about history and politics as it is about psychology. If that interests you, or if you're interested in a different persepctive on the whole "Clash of Civilization" notion, this is worth the read. If you are looking for some insights into interpersonal violence, there isn't a lot here...the concepts are just too broad to apply to specifics.

[William Kirkland · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there were an “X” Prize for solving the problem of human violence, Russell Jacoby‘s Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present would get past the first read, but likely not onto the short list. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t a very interesting book.

His argument, in a nutshell is that much, if not all, human violence is between those who are more similar rather than those who are more different; that the current widely accepted view that it is fear of the “Other” that drives violence, is wrong. After several chapters of examples, he turns to Freud’s ‘narcissism of small differences” to understand why this might be so
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[Scott Alessandro · Rating 1 out of 5]

Skip this book and instead read Jacoby's article about his book in the Chronicle of Hier Education. All the good stuff from the book is in that short essay. Jacoby quickly loses the thesis of his book. The book should be retitled the Roots of Violence based upon the treatment of Jews and one of Freud's obscure theories and even more obscure novels or articles I read form the 18th century. It is obvious that Jacoby is uncomfortable straying outside of his discipline and area of expertise. A shame as the concept behind the book is an excellent one. Find a co-author in history or political science and re-launch this book.

[Adrienne Kiser · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting subject matter, but often meandering and waaaay too based on misogyny and anti-Semitism for examples.