A Slithy Tove.

• Author: Walden, George
• Position: Review

Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 464 pp., $27.95.

HUMANITY? A moral history? These are ambitious terms. Can this really be an account of the ethical forces that shaped or misshaped the lives of the entire human race through an entire century, from sexual mores and medical ethics to the morality of politics and international affairs? The scope of Jonathan Clover's Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century turns out to be more modest--largely a discussion of twentieth-century atrocities and criminal regimes from an ethical point of view.

We are, then, dealing not with the quotidian inhumanity of man to man, or his humanity for that matter, but with public policy that resulted in wars, massacres and repression. These we are invited retrospectively to condemn--a not insuperable challenge--while the author discusses how such aberrant behavior could possibly have come about. The targets are largely unmissable, and apart from one or two still controversial issues, such as Hiroshima, this is a highly consensual book. Once you place yourself on the side of humanity, sever the link between public and private morality, and see public policy as operating in a largely distinct realm, it is amazing how wide the consensus can become.

If the tide, advertisement-like, inflates our expectations, the style is a concession to the televisual age. Rarely are we required to read more than a page or two of consecutive print. With his snapshot passages, sometimes a mere half page, quirky subheadings and anecdotalism, Clover seems to be aiming at an audience whose attention might wander if it were not sustained by constant changes of focus. There is something filmic about the result: a Short Cuts of twentieth-century horrors, each followed by roundtable deliberation, if you can imagine such a thing. The implication is that a filmic approach to history is the best and perhaps only way to engage a wide, modern audience.

And of course that approach must be novel: "This project of bringing ethics and psychology closer to one another involves thinking about the implications of some of the things we now know civilized people are capable of doing to each other." The impression is that in grafting a moral dimension onto well-known events and discussing the psychology of those involved, the author is doing something new. In fact, the ethics of public policy is a comfortably established discipline--too comfortably sometimes to be disciplined--especially in American universities, and the psychological aspects add surprisingly little that is not common sense.

Glover's method...