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<\/a><\/p>\nHow can we reconcile these two notions: first, that sin requires a knowledge that what we are doing is wrong and second, that no one really believes what they are doing is wrong at the time that they do it?<\/p>\n
I’m going to rely once again on\u00a0Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s\u00a0On Killing<\/em>. (As I’ve written about before<\/a>, his work has had quite an impact on me.) The primary thesis of his work is that human beings have a strong aversion towards killing other human beings, and that as a result most combat soldiers will not willingly take the life of their enemy even when their lives and their comrades lives depend on it.<\/p>\n Clearly the army that figures out how to overcome this inhibition will have a tremendous advantage over foes that have not. (Grossman suggests that several smaller wars in the 20th century reflected this imbalance, including the Falklands War.<\/a>) Modern militaries have stumbled onto psychological practices such as\u00a0operant conditioning<\/a> to create automatic reflexes that will override the innate inhibition and render combat forces frighteningly effective. Soldiers trained in such techniques still require a host of supporting infrastructure to prevent serious psychological trauma, however, as their inhibitions kick in after-the-fact with horror at their trained reactions. A failure of such infrastructure led to widespread post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam Veterans\u00a0after<\/em> their return home.<\/p>\n But there’s a simpler route to highly aggressive fighting forces: atrocity.\u00a0If you can successfully compel young, impressionable soldiers to commit horrible acts of violence against prisoners and non-combatants, you create a drastic tension between their innate reluctance to kill and their innate drive to preserve a heroic self-narrative. In these cases, many soldiers will react to their own participation in atrocity by furiously suppressing their sense of empathy with their enemy (a practice that is significantly easier if the enemy shares common ethnic or religious traits which the soldier does not). Having thus mutilated their own psyches and amputated their sense of empathy, these soldiers are subsequently much more prone to killing enemy combatants, rendering the army more effective in the short run. (Grossman argues that in the long run this a self-defeating strategy because it also increases the fighting spirit of the opposing forces who have both righteous anger and an assurance that surrender is not an option on their side.)<\/p>\n Taking this act of atrocity to be a template for sin, it is apparent that the initial act of sin–the killing of unarmed noncombatants–is not necessarily the most important element of the process. The atrocity is facilitated by a host of psychological factors that have been operating on the young soldier, forces like in-group cohesion, propaganda, obedience to authority, and of course the threat of harm. Grossman tells the story of a young German soldier who was ordered to execute civilians, refused, and was promptly executed himself. It’s astonishing, he says, that with the weight of all these factors some individual still find the will to resist even at the cost of their own lives. Such individuals are rare, however, and in the vast majority of cases once the orders for atrocity have been enacted most soldiers go along with it.<\/p>\n I’m not saying that we should not view that act itself as sinful, but as experiments like Milgram’s<\/a> and Zimbardo’s<\/a> both show, the difference between abuser and ordinary citizen is primarily one of circumstance. Circumstance does not seem like a terribly good indicator of moral stature. If Bob and Tom have the same character, but Bob engages in atrocity because his unit was ordered to do so and Tom doesn’t because his unit wasn’t (but would have made the same decisions), how much difference is there, really, between the two? This is why a focus on the\u00a0event<\/em> of sin can be misleading and counter-productive.<\/p>\n