HUMANITY: A MORAL HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURYBy Jonathan Glover, Yale, $ 14.95 Adorno once famously remarked that poetry would no longer be possible after Auschwitz. But the moral catastrophes of the 20th century seem to have disabled moral philosophy more than they have made poetry impossible. In the face of death camps, genocide, ethnic war, torture, carpet-bombing, the possibility of nuclear extinction, in short, the sheer versatility of evil that the 20th century has witnessed, moral philosophy appears particularly mute. For great reflections on the horrors of our time, one might turn to Primo Levi or Ceslawz Milosz or even a Solzhenitsyn, but it is rare to find a moral philosopher who can help us reckon with these catastrophes. Moral philosophy has flourished as an academic discipline, and the range of arguments it offers are impressively sophisticated. Yet the horrific experiences of this century seem to elude its clarifying gaze, call into question the whole institution of morality, if not human nature itself. Following Collingwood's exhortation that the chief business of 20th century philosophy ought to be to come to terms with 20th century history, Jonathan Glover, a distinguished moral philosopher whose earlier work, Causing Death and Saving Lives, is a mini-classic on its subject, makes the horrors of the 20th century the central question for moral philosophy. The book provides a vivid history of human nature in extremity. Glover tries to come to terms with the moral significance of World War II, Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, and the Holocaust, Pol Pot, Rwanda and a range of other catastrophes. The book is clearly and vividly written, without cant or pretension. The book operates at two different registers. On the one hand, Glover examines the morality of particular actions. Was the Allied targeting of civilians during the bombing of Dresden justified? Was the dropping of the atomic bomb justified? What is the morality of humanitarian intervention? These questions are dealt with great finesse and clear-headedness and display moral philosophy at its best. On the other hand, when examining the moral significance of the big horrors like the Holocaust, Stalinism and Pol Pot, Glover's focus is less on the question: what is the morality of these actions? In some ways, the answer is too obvious: these actions are unmitigated moral horrors. Rather his focus is on the moral psychology that produces and legitimates these actions in the first place. In short, his argument is that the challenge for moral philosophy is not primarily figuring out the right thing to do. Rather, we should pay greater attention to the psychological dispositions that produce these actions in the first place. Glover provides an account of many dispositions that render our usual moral resources impotent: the love of cruelty for its own sake, the allure of Manicheanism which divides the world into neat dualisms, a will to simplicity that finds any difference or disagreement threatening, a plain unreflectiveness about one's own motives and dispositions, an easy ability to deny other people's humanity by construing them as mere abstractions. His discussion of these dispositions draws on a wide range of sources: survivors' testimonies, the reflections of perpetrators, novels and poems, official explanations. The manifold incarnations of these psychological proclivities appear in a variety of characters: soldiers on the frontline in wars, petty bureaucrats, military decision-makers, politicians, and often ordinary people all across the world. What makes the book compelling is not the originality of its argument, but the cumulative force of various reflections on violence and cruelty that Glover has gathered and which give his narrative much of its force. The avoidance of cruelty will require political restraints on a global scale. Yet Glover is sceptical that politics can be the whole story. Rather, the destructive side of human psychology needs to be tempered by a more adequately humanized ethics. Quite what Glover means by a more humanized ethics is never entirely clear. It involves something like the thought that human beings ought to resist, and be more sceptical of, all those ideas, fantasies, and delusions that disable the normal workings of sympathy and the moral imagination. I think what he has in mind is the argument forcefully articulated by Kierkegaard in his discussion of the Old Testament. Kierkagaard, in his discussion of Abraham's sacrifice pointed out that the greatest danger to the ethical arises when individuals subordinate themselves or others to higher causes in the name of which all sacrifices can be justified. Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, nationalism, religious fundamentalism have this in common: they immobilize the ethical because they treat individuals not as ends in themselves but as instruments of this or that cause, or this or that identity. What they efface is the thought poignantly expressed by Emerson - that no society ought to be considered larger than a single individual. To humanize ethics is to always keep individuals, and their inviolability firmly in view; it is to insist that any ideology or collective idolatry that converts individuals into mere abstractions ought to be resisted. Glover raises but never quite answers the following question: given the pervasiveness of cruelty why do moral philosophers, or for that matter citizens often avoid facing this central fact about the modern world? His answer seems to be simply that we are often in denial. A more acute answer was provided in the 16th century in Montaigne's Essays, still the acutest analysis of the sources of cruelty. If we always kept cruelty firmly in view, Montaigne suggested, we would most likely become misanthropes, people who simply hated the world. Cruelty is too deep a threat to reason, which is why philosophers seldom contemplate it. The most delicate of psychological tasks is to face the facts of cruelty without succumbing to a moral paralysis that comes from a sense that the world is a horrific vale of tears. Glover is right to insist, following Montaigne, that the avoidance of cruelty is seldom acknowledged as being the first of our political tasks. And, like Montaigne, he rightly insists that promises of collective redemption more often than not lead us to suspend the demands of ethics. But whether groups of individuals can resist the temptation to reach outside themselves in ways that prevent them from recognizing the humanity of others is still an open question. Read Humanity for an important moral challenge; and then read Montaigne's Essays for the cultivation of a sceptical disposition that is the best antidote to the allure of all that justify cruelty.