I thought I understood what John Paul was trying to say. “So the grammar of genocide was just a way of adapting to food shortages?” I said.
“That’s right.” John Paul nodded. “The grammar of genocide is a vestigial module from a time when humans were not yet able to regulate their food supply. When other animals want to exert influence over their entire group, they use pheromones or scent to pass on their message and influence the group. But the nose was a relatively weak sensory organ, at least in humans. The best way to spread influence over a large group of individuals became language. If a person wanted to communicate with an entire group, rather than one to one, language was the only way to do it.”
Acts of enlightened cruelty.
Mass murder for the sake of survival.
I shuddered. However primitive a group of people was, if they could communicate and show altruistic tendencies within their group, it became impossible to deny that they were in their own way a fully fledged society. The grammar of genocide didn’t result from people becoming increasingly aggressive on an individual basis. I thought back to what John Paul had told me during our previous encounters—that the Jews in Nazi Germany also spoke using the grammar of genocide. No. This definitely wasn’t a module that affected people at an individual level. It was a module that started functioning only on a structural level after it had been transmitted to a given number of people within a group. Their value judgments were bent in a certain direction. There’s a genocide brewing. There’s a massacre on the horizon. The mood was set. And then once that society passed a certain threshold, those people who had a conscience-related module suppressed by the grammar of genocide would start taking matters into their own hands and engage in all sorts of atrocities.
But then I remembered Williams’s story about the lemmings. Individuals didn’t tend to evolve in ways that caused them to act against their own self-interest. The phenomenon of lemming mass suicide was virtually unheard of in real life.
“The grammar of genocide isn’t some sort of self-destructive curse.” John Paul smiled. “Because, after the killings, the population is back down to a manageable number. An adequate food supply is once again ensured. Equilibrium is reached. The group’s will to preemptively forgive the act of genocide and to collectively mask their consciences as they do so is a great advantage in the evolutionary stakes, not a disadvantage. It’s hardly surprising that this characteristic gets passed down to the next generation—it’s the ultimate example of a successful adaptive mechanism toward one’s environment.”
“So what! There’s an ancient adaptive mechanism left in the human mind that can spur humans on to kill each other on a grand scale? Big deal! How the hell does that justify your going from one impoverished country to another killing people? What is it that you even want? To prove that people are basically evil?”
“No. It’s all because of me.” A woman’s voice. The owner of the voice must have been hiding, but she was now out in the open, and her slender white arm now pointed an old German Luger directly at John Paul’s head.
Lucia Sukrova.
She started walking toward us, guided by the moonlight.
John Paul’s gaze remained fixed on me—or rather the scene behind me. The moon’s iridescence made Lucia’s face look as cold as a corpse’s. As beautiful as a corpse’s.
“When your wife died, when Sarajevo disappeared, you couldn’t forgive yourself for being in bed with me at the time. You couldn’t forgive yourself for betraying your wife and daughter.” Lucia pressed the muzzle of her gun into the back of John Paul’s head. She was crying. Her white cheeks were shiny with tears.
“That’s why you had to convince yourself … that betrayal and violence … that there is an inescapable human instinct to hurt other people. You’ve been proving how black and twisted human nature is just so that you could escape from your own guilt and despair. And you’ve killed so many people in the process—”
“No, Lucia. You’re wrong. I haven’t done all this to try and prove anything.”
“Then why?”
“I discovered an ancient function of the brain. But at the same time I know full well that love is just as powerful an instinct—no, more powerful, really—than brutality. It’s a basic biological function. I may have discovered a genocidal organ, but it hasn’t shaken my basic faith in the fundamental goodness of humanity. Not one bit.”
At this point I realized something really weird. There wasn’t even the smallest cloud of despair hanging over John Paul. His gaze remained true and untroubled. He was as lucid, as calm, and as sane as ever. How could this be?
I took a step toward him, ignoring the gun in his hand. “So let me get this straight. If you’re not killing all these people out of despair, what other possible reason could there be?”
The pause seemed to stretch out to infinity.
And then the Lord of Genocide answered:
“To protect the people I love.”
5
When did patriotism become the primary motive for war?
The kamikaze pilots who smashed their own planes into aircraft carriers in order to protect their mothers and sisters. The French Resistance fighters who died trying to regain their country. The U-boat crew who suffered a briny death in order to shield their fatherland from invasion.
To fight for the greater good. Before the birth of the nation-state, that motive would have been right at the bottom of the list, if it featured at all. People fought in wars to advance their own interests or to make money. War was a specialist subject. Even if a soldier felt allegiance with the group that he was fighting alongside, it would never have occurred to him to think on the scale of “for the sake of all the people in my country.” Citizens did go to war, almost always in the form of a mercenary transaction: pay me this much, and I’ll lend you my arms for this length of time. Patriotism never even entered the picture until after the establishment of the national army. How could it? The concept of a standing army, a body of loyal troops that could be called upon at a moment’s notice, simply didn’t exist. Take the British fleet that against all odds miraculously managed to break the invincible Spanish Armada. It was a historic battle that changed the course of history forever by establishing British naval supremacy—and yet over half of the ships that fought that battle were souped-up merchant frigates, armed just for the occasion. Since time immemorial, war meant hiring mercenary forces as and when you needed them.
In other words, the very psychology of sacrificing yourself for your country was an extremely recent development. Taking a historic perspective, PMCs and independent contractors were actually the norm, and national armies such as the US or British armed forces were the aberrations. It was only recently that the business of war changed to become what we now know as modern warfare.
Ordinary citizens only started going to war out of patriotism after war became theirs—in other words, after they started feeling that the country was governed in their own interests. The exact form didn’t matter; it could be a representative democracy as in America, or a popular form of limited constitutional monarchy, as in Britain. The people were happy with their leaders and the leaders had taken them to war, so the people were happy with the war. It was their war. And if it was their war, well then, it was the most natural thing in the world that they should take responsibility for it. Dress that responsibility up with fancy ribbons and voilà: patriotism.