Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

hundreds of millions of years ago and was all that the brains of early reptiles and dinosaurs had to work with. Imagine a modern iPod that had to be built around (and depend upon) an old Commodore 64 that, in turn, had to be built around and depend upon (in all its actions and computations) a rusty abacus with only a few dull (but absolutely imperative) beads on its wires. The R-complex reptile brain concerns itself with territoriality, with ritual and repetition, with fight or flight decisions, with rage, with violence, with aggression, and with hierarchy. Always with hierarchy. Carl Sagan reminded us that the term “cold-blooded killer” is almost certainly accurate, since so much of extreme human violence is a surrender to the constant reptilian aggressive-hierarchical kill-or-be-killed urgings of the R-complex at the base of the root of our brains.

I despair at the rise of modern violence. I truly give in to despair at times, that deep, futureless pit of despair which Hopkins called carrion comfort.

All humans feed on violence, on the small exercises of power over another,

Don’t you see the irony of the place, Willi? After that little prank on the director of that witchcraft movie a few years ago? It was straight from the script…”

“Dr. Laski thinks that some people are receptive to…what did you call it, sir? A climate of violence. That’s it, isn’t it?” asked Gentry. “Yes.” “And that other people…or places…or times…sort of program these receptive folks into behaving in ways that otherwise would be unthinkable to them. ’Course that’s just my simple-minded synopsis.”

“What is a kapo?” asked Natalie. “A kapo is a Jew with a whip.”

“Learned treatises have been written about kapos and their identification with their Nazi masters,” said Saul. “Stanley Elkins and others have looked into this kind of concentration camp submission and how it compares to the docility and identification of black American slaves. Just this September I was part of a panel discussing the so-called Stockholm Syndrome, wherein hostages not only identify with their captors but provide active support.”

And this…this dominance through force of will has been an obsession with me for many years.

The man’s face seemed to be quivering, not shaking but flowing like an ill-fitted rubber mask sliding over the more solid features beneath it. The eyes had widened, as if in surprise or horror, and now they flicked back and forth like small animals in panic. For just an instant Gentry saw a different personality emerge in that thin face, there was a look of total terror and confusion visible in those captive eyes, and then the muscles of the face and neck went rigid, as if the mask had been pulled down more tightly.

In 1942 and 1943, the Germans were maintaining sixteen huge concentration camps such as Auschwitz, more than fifty smaller ones, hundreds of work camps, but only three Vernichtungslager death camps designed only for extermination: Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor. In the brief twenty months of their existence, over two million Jews died there.

still refused to believe in God…any God who betrayed His People so did not deserve my belief…

During that time, every worldly belonging of the Jews was confiscated, sorted, itemized, and stored. Even the women’s hair was cut in Camp II and made into felt or woven into slipper linings for U-boat crews.

I soon became obsessed with theories of violence and dominance in human affairs. I was amazed to learn that there was very little actual research in this area. There was ample data to explain the precise mechanisms of dominance hierarchy in a lion pride, there was voluminous research relating to the pecking order in most avian species, more and more information was coming in from primatologists on the role of dominance and aggression in the social groups of our nearest cousins, but almost nothing was known about the mechanism of human violence as it relates to dominance and social order.

“What was the root source of human violence? What role did violence and the threat of violence play in our everyday interactions? By answering these questions, I naïvely hoped to someday explain how a brilliant but deluded psychopath like Adolf Hitler could turn one of the great cultures of the world into a mindless, immoral killing machine. I began with the knowledge that every other complex animal species on earth had some mechanism to establish dominance and social hierarchy. Usually this hierarchy was established without serious injury. Even such fierce predators as wolves and tigers had precise signals of submission which would immediately end the most violent confrontation before death or crippling injury ensued. But what of Man? Were we, as so many assumed, lacking this instinctive submission-recognition signal and therefore doomed to eternal warfare, a type of intraspecies madness predetermined by our genes? I thought not.

I was more than familiar with the neurological studies suggesting that we inherited our hierarchical sense from the most primitive portions of the mind—the so-called reptile brain.

Take that FBI man you met in my office yesterday—Dickie Haines—I mean, everything he says is right an’ logical an’ up front. He looks right. Hell, he smells right. But there’s somethin’ about that guy that makes me trust him ’bout as much as I would a hungry weasel. Our Mr. Haines just isn’t fully with us somehow.

When I meet somebody I believe, I tend to believe ’em, that’s all. Gets me into heaps of trouble. “Second weakness, I tend to read a lot.

So I read mysteries—John D. MacDonald, Parker, Westlake—and I read the suspense stuff—Ludlum and Trevanian and le Carré and Deighton and I read the scary stuff—Stephen King, Steve Rasnic Tem…those guys.”

real nice fella, but about as sharp as the blunt end of a hog…

Natalie’s father had a saying for that behavior—Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.

thought of how strange it was that the tiresome subsistence diet of a people too poor or too ignorant to eat well inevitably becomes the traditional “soul food” of the next generation.

As was the case with so many young people I encountered these days, I could not tell if the boy was truly retarded or just pitifully ill educated. Most of the population under thirty appears to fall into one or the other category.

She was a satellite in search of a world around which to orbit. Any world would do as long as it did not require the cold, solitary ellipse of independence.

Today Philadelphia had engulfed Germantown the way some huge, bottom-eating carp would swallow an immeasurably more beautiful but tinier fish, leaving only the perfect white bones of its past to mix with the raw garbage in the terrible digestive juices of progress.

Harrington smiled. “It would have given me great pleasure to hear one of your lectures at Columbia. Perhaps we could have debated the ethics of the Third Reich.” “Perhaps,” said Saul. “And perhaps we could debate the relative sanity of a rabid dog. Still, there is only one solution to such an illness. Shoot the dog.”

“When I was in school in Chicago I got to do some work with city gangs there. A few of their leaders were jerks—one of them was a psychopath—but

most were pretty smart individuals. Put an alpha personality in a closed system and he or she’ll rise to the top of whatever represents the most competitive power ladder. In a place like this, that’s the local gang.” “What’s an alpha personality?”

“Students of animal behavior look at pecking order, group dominance, and call the top ram or sparrow or wolf or whatever the alpha male. Didn’t want to be sexist so I think of it in terms of personality. Sometimes I think discrimination and other stupid social roadblocks breed an inordinate number of alpha personalities. Maybe it’s a sort of natural select...

Saul Laski discussed something similar in his book, The Pathology of Violence. He was talking about how downtrodden and often unlikely societies tend to produce incredible warriors when national or cultural survival depends upon it…sort of specialized alpha personalities. Even Hitler fit that description in a sick, perverted way.”

Lawrence Kohlberg.

Kohlberg had discovered seven levels of moral development—supposedly consistent through disparate cultures, times, and places.

Level One was the essential infant—no sense of good or bad, all actions regulated by needs and wants, actions inhibited only by negative stimuli. The classic pleasure-pain basis for ethical judgments. By Level Two, humans responded to “right and wrong” by accepting the authority of power. The big people know best. A Level Three person was fixated on rules. “I followed orders.” Level Four ethics were dictated by the majority. A Level Five person devoted his or her life to creating and defending laws that best served the widest common good, while defending the legal rights even of those whose views the Level Five person could not accept. Level Five people made wonderful A.C.L.U. lawyers. Saul had known his share of Level Fives in New York. Level Sixes were able to transcend the legalistic fixation of Level Fives, focusing on the common good and higher ethical realities across national, cultural, and societal boundaries. Level Sevens responded only to universal principles. Level Sevens appeared to be represented by the occasional Jesuses, Gandhis, and Buddhas.

Kohlberg was not an i...

and the researcher enjoyed pointing out simple paradoxes arising from his own hierarchy of ...

was a Level Five nation, established and founded by the most incredible assortment of practical Level Sixes in any nation’s history, and was populated primarily by Level Fours and Threes. Kohlberg stressed that in day-to-day decisions we often ranged below our highest level of moral development, but we never went higher than our developmental level. Kohlberg would sadly cite the inevitable destruction of all Level Sevens’ teachings. Christ handing his legacy to the Level Three Paul, the Buddha being represented by generations of priests never capable of rising above Level Six and rarely reaching that. But the one thing Kohlbe...

human beings beyond the fetal stage who had no moral bearings whatsoever; not even pleasure/pain stimulus was a reliable guide to these people—if “people” was what they were. A Level Zero could walk up to a fellow citizen on the street, kill that person on a whim, and walk away without the slightest trace of guilt or afterthought. Level Zeroes did not want to be caught and punished, but did not base their actions upon avoidance of punishment. Nor was it a simple case of the pleasure of the forbidden criminal act outweighing fear of punishment. Level Zeroes could not differentiate criminal acts from everyday functions; they were morally blind. Hundreds of researchers were testing Kohlberg’s hypotheses, but...

“Essentially that was the problem with Nazi Germany. A psychosis is like a virus. It can multiply and spread almost at will when it is accepted by the host organism and transmitted freely.”

“Careful, man,” said Jackson, grinning broadly. “Don’t start playing no dozens with me, babe. White boys just don’t have the knack for good insults.” “In my cultural group,” said Saul, “we make a habit of trading insults with God. What better practice could one have for playing the dozens?”

Then there’s Swaggart over in Louisiana. He’s a smart ’un, Anthony. But I think he really wants to be a rock ’n’ roll star like his cousin…” “His cousin?” said Harod. “Jerry Lee Lewis,” said Sutter.

“The lady has suffered a massive stroke,” said Dr. Hartman. “Perhaps a series of them.” At Howard’s blank look, the doctor went on, “She’s had what we call a CVA, a cerebrovascular accident, what used to be called a cerebral hemorrhage. There has been a temporary cutoff of oxygen to the brain.

was fluent and idiomatically correct but overlaid with an accent that Natalie could not place—it was as if a West German had been taught his English from a Welshman who had learned his from a Brooklyn scholar.

Zionism was blatant bullshit a century ago, but today our border—Israel’s border—is the only purely political boundary that is visible from orbit. Where the trees end and the desert begins, there ends Israel.”

“We all use mercenaries when it comes to premeditated killing.

Sometimes all we have to do to eliminate A is to take a wild potshot at D, then get the word to D that C was paid by B to eliminate D on the orders of A, and sit back and wait for the fireworks.”

Dr. Hartman was quite proud of me. He said that I was quite unusual in that while I had undergone major sense deprivation

Denial was part of the dance of courtship in those days, a sort of fasting before the gourmet meal so as to sharpen the appetite. Today’s young gluttons know nothing of

such subtleties and restraint; any appetite to them is something to sate at once. No wonder that all pleasures hold the flat taste of long-opened champagne to them, all conquests the hollow core of disappointment.

When Saul had worked briefly with the NYPD as a consultant on the Son of Sam killings, a police lieutenant who was an expert on interrogations had told him that he always caught on to the smart guilty ones because they were too quick with the fluent, plausible stories. Innocent people tended toward guilty incoherence, the lieutenant had said.

Parris Island, marine camp. They gave me an all-expense paid vacation there a few police actions ago. They knew then how to turn boys into men and men into robots there in less’n ten weeks. Still do, from what I hear.”

“Eric Hoffer says that to the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.”