Reviewing Killing

Reviewing Killing

   Last night I watched a disturbing documentary titled The Act of Killing, a POV film on PBS which airs online for another week.  Sadly, it is worth watching.  In the film, Indonesian soldiers and paramilitary recall how they killed millions of people, stabbing, strangling, shooting, beating, raping, all while young paramilitary or hired "gangsters" and all having done it proudly to save their country...today, they are still in power and the killing continues (the youth group many of them were in now has over 3 million uniformed members).

   What is so chilling about the film is that the men interviewed, now in their 60s and older, appear to have little remorse (although one described having nightmares and another, when reenacting a scene of how he killed only this time he was the one portraying the victim, seemed to suddenly be overcome with emotion).  These men were making a film of their achievements, a propaganda-like film of how justified and important they were in this killing, all of which helped to rid their country of communists and people they thought were communists (during interrogations, some of the gangsters talked of openly changing the words of their victims so as to "prove" that they had confessed to being a communist).

   What was sad was imagining that this could have been done at any point in history...Hitler and his men reminiscing, Mugabe, Pinochet, Mao, the Mafia.  The lack of remorse when people are ordered or led to believe that killing is for a good cause, that killing for money or power is okay, that their government (or the outside government that has influenced their government) is the right path to follow.  The people who watch from the outside and do nothing, either scared or complicit but surely destined to have equally-bad nightmares...and of course, the ones who have no problem sleeping at all.

   What's equally disturbing about the film is realizing that what these men describe is still going on throughout the world, people openly killing people and all with the approval of others and often their "right" government, even if newly created.  So why would something such as this prove so captivating, if that is the correct word.  Why does this dark side of humanity exist in some and not in others...is there a common thread that does let us know this is wrong, but okay at some point (killing an intruder in your home, threatening your child).  Is it ever okay to kill?  And if not, is that something that applies only to a human?  Apparently not with this article from 2011 in The Houston Chronicle, "Big game hunting draws the most hunters, with 11.6 million people spending 212 million days enjoying the sport."  Even back then, hunting animals brought in close to $34 billion (this is strictly counting recreational hunting and not commercial hunting).

   Talk with people who have dealt with murderers in prison and they will tell you that every now and then you will find that person with no remorse, that "cold-hearted" killer.  Psychologists might term this sociopathic or psychopathic behavior.  Some medical studies have found that key portions of the brain control or regulate these emotions of empathy for others, something summed up in The Neurobiology of Moral Behavior: Review and Neuropsychiatric Implications, a report from the National Institutes of Health.  In the report, they describe a "morality network" in the brain:  For years, scientists and philosophers have proposed a sixth human sense for morality.  If there is a “moral sense,” then there should be specific brain mechanisms for morality as well as brain disordered patients with impaired morality.  Convergent evidence that this is the case comes from studies of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in normals, neurological investigations of sociopaths, and the examination of patients with focal brain lesions or with frontotemporal dementia (FTD).  This neurobiological evidence points to an automatic, emotionally- mediated moral network that is centered in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), particularly in the right hemisphere.

   So with so much apparent "justified" killing still going on, are our brains slowly transitioning away from this "morality network."  Are we growing so used to seeing killing on the big screen, beheadings on the computer, animated shooting deaths in  X-boxes that we are heading for our own appearance in a POV film?   Is it worth thinking about that along with our composition of oxygen (65%), carbon (18.5%), hydrogen (9.5%) and nitrogen (3.3%), we might be losing a key component in the composition of our human body...morality in our brain.