Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online
Authors: Philip Bobbitt
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (72 page)
House understood the titanic forces that were carefully if precariously balanced by the Agreement.
To those who are saying that the Treaty is bad and should never have been made and that it will involve Europe in infinite difficulties in its enforcement, I feel like admitting it. But I would also say in reply that empires cannot be shattered and new states raised upon their ruins without disturbance… The same forces that have been at work in the making of this peace would be at work to hinder the enforcement of a different kind of peace.
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There would be no final peace until nation-states had completely supplanted the state-nations that dominated the conference, until, that is, Wilson and Lenin and Hitler had destroyed the old state system, and, finally, until the new system had chosen among the three nation-state alternatives after three-quarters of a century of war.
Wilson and House had attempted to reform the deep structure of state sovereignty. Ironically, it was precisely the American system of limited sovereignty that crushed their plans, for it was the U.S. Senate's refusal to consent to the treaty that prevented ratification of the Versailles agreement and then thwarted U.S. participation in the League of Nations. The treaty came up for a vote twice, once in November 1919 and again in March 1920. The latter vote would surely have led to Senate consent had not the president instructed Democratic senators to vote against his own treaty because it was encumbered with a reservation to Article X of the provisions for the League (the Lodge Reservation). Article X empowered the League Council to advise member states to respond to aggression with sanctions and with armed force. The Lodge Reservation would have required that, in confronting a finding of aggression by the League Council, the United States could comply only if authorized to do so by Congress. As one of the members of The Inquiry had noted at Versailles, “[a treaty commitment to intervene] would be void… as Congress under the Constitution ha[s] the power to declare war. A war automatically arising upon a condition subsequent, pursuant to a treaty provision, is not a war declared by Congress.”
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This misreading of the U.S. Constitution, which in fact contemplates several legitimate routes to war in addition to that of a formal declaration,
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was used to decisive effect by the opponents of the treaty. House, however, was willing to accept something like the Lodge Reservation on the grounds that in practice the treaty, and the League, would be construed according to necessity. It was possible the other treaty partners would reject the Reservation; it was more likely that future presidents would not accept an unconstitutional restriction on their powers and would act within the treaty's confines unfettered by the Reservation. House, however, did not know the extent of the massive stroke that Wilson had suffered in September, nor did he know that presidential affairs were being conducted by Mrs. Wilson and the president's physician. He received no reply to his frantic entreaties about ratification and, indeed from the moment of Wilson's breakdown, was never again in close communication with the president. Once Wilson lost the one political adviser capable of steering him through the system he deeply revered but could not entirely navigate, his plans for enfolding the great powers within a similar system were dashed. Without his benign Mephistopheles, Wilson was returned to his Faustian study.
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13, 1964, a little after 3 a.m., a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Catherine Genovese returned home to her apartment at 82 – 70 Austin Street in the Kew Gardens section of Queens in New York City. She was the night manager of a bar in a nearby community. Austin Street was a middle-class, tree-lined avenue flanked by apartment houses whose ground floors were given over to retail stores. The building where “Kitty” Genovese, as she was called by almost everyone in the neighborhood, lived was one such apartment house, a mock-Tudor structure with storefronts bordering the main street and separate entryways along the side and back to the apartments above. Adjacent to the apartment house was a suburban train station and commuter parking lot, which fronted on Austin Street.
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Kitty Genovese parked her car in the train station parking lot, turned off the car lights, locked the door, and started to walk the one hundred feet to her entryway. Apparently she noticed something that alarmed her, because she then turned away from the direction of her entryway and toward the street, walking rapidly up Austin Street, where a half block away there was a police call box. She got only as far as a streetlight in front of the neighborhood bookstore before a man caught up with her, grabbed her, struggled with her, and stabbed her. She screamed. Lights went on in the ten-story apartment house at 82 – 67 Austin Street that faced the bookstore. Kitty Genovese cried, “Oh my God, he stabbed me! Please help me, please help me.”
From one of the upper windows in the apartment house, a man called down, “Let that girl alone.” Other lights were turned on. The attacker fled back up Austin Street toward a white sedan parked in the commuter parking lot and he crouched there. No one from any of the apartment houses came down to the street. Kitty Genovese struggled to her feet and turned back, away from the call box, toward the side of the building by the parking lot beyond which her apartment lay. But before she could even get to the corner of the building, the assailant was on her again. She cried out, “I'm dying! I'm dying!” as he repeatedly stabbed her.
Windows were opened again and lights were turned on in many apartments. The attacker ran to his car, got in, and drove away. A city bus passed. It was 3:35 a.m. No one came to Kitty Genovese's aid from any of the buildings that overlooked Austin Street. She staggered to her feet, and again began to try to reach her apartment, which lay on the far side of the building from where she had been attacked. She was, however, now too weak to reach her entry. She made it about halfway, and unable to go further, she crawled under the stairs of another entry at 82 – 62 Austin Street, and tried to hide there. Her attacker, having circled the scene at a distance, then drove back again to the parking lot, got out of his car, and methodically searched the entryways until he found Kitty Genovese and fatally stabbed her. He returned to his car and departed. Still no one came to her assistance. Indeed it was not until almost 4 a.m. that a call was finally made to the police. Throughout the assault, not one person telephoned the police or any of the emergency services. The man who ultimately did call explained that he had only done so after much deliberation; in fact, he had asked a friend on Long Island for advice, and that person had persuaded him to call the police.
Over the next few days police took statements from thirty-eight persons who had witnessed the crime. The nation was stunned by the appalling account of so many bystanders doing nothing while such a brutal crime was committed. People groped for an explanation of what had happened. Why didn't her neighbors help Kitty Genovese? In 1964, many experts on human behavior were sought out to provide an explanation for the apparent apathy evident in the circumstances of the Genovese murder.
One psychiatrist attributed the tragedy to a constant feeling in New York that society was unjust. “It's in the air of all New York, the air of injustice… the feeling that you might get hurt if you act, whatever you do you will be the one to suffer.” A sociologist at Barnard College offered an alternative view: it was an example of the “disaster syndrome.” The result of witnessing a catastrophe such as a tornado or a murder destroyed the witnesses' feeling that the world was a rational place and resulted in an “affect denial” that caused them to withdraw psychologically from the event by ignoring it. Another psychiatrist proposed that it was the confusion of fantasy with reality, fed by the continual watching of television, that was responsible. “We underestimate the damage that these accumulated
images do to the brain. The immediate effect can be delusional, equivalent to a post-hypnotic suggestion.”
A psychiatrist suggested that the murderer vicariously gratified the sadistic impulses of those who witnessed the murder. “Persons with mature and well-integrated personalities would not have acted in this way.”
Dr. Karl Menninger, the director of the Menninger Clinic, attributed the tragedy to “public apathy that is a manifestation of aggressiveness.” And one theologian suggested that “de-personalizing in New York had gone further than we realized,” to which he added, “Don't quote me.”
One is inclined to be skeptical about such “explanations.” They seem to provide, if they provide anything, a commentary on the world of the speaker more than the world of the event. And yet such shocking instances of bystander behavior are not uncommon, even if few of them are attended by the publicity of the Kitty Genovese murder. In January of 2000, a boy was beaten on a Boston bus while passengers looked on and did nothing.
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In September of 2000, a woman was lured into a luxury apartment in a suburb of Fort Worth and murdered. Although all of the neighbors heard what one of them described as “piercing, gut-wrenching scream[s]” and listened for half an hour while the woman was murdered, nobody called the police.
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When such incidents occur, many explanations are put forward. “I would assign this to the effect of the megalopolis, which makes closeness very difficult,” said one psychoanalyst at the time of the Genovese killing. “Apathy” was cited by many commentators as an explanation. Also, some referred to a “lack of concern for our fellow man.” But the thirty-eight witnesses of Kitty Genovese's murder did not simply look at the scene once and then ignore it. Rather they continued to stare out their windows. One couple turned out their apartment lights to get a clearer view.
What does explain this? Some of the most fruitful psychological research into the subject of emergency intervention was undertaken as a consequence of the Genovese murder. Two psychologists, John Darley at Princeton University and Bibb Latane of Ohio State University, spent four years in a program of research into what determines bystander intervention in emergencies. In a remarkable series of experiments, staging “emergencies” in stores, offices, and laundromats, ranging from epileptic seizures to thefts and disorderly conduct, they managed to discredit virtually all the usual explanations. Darley and Latane hypothesized that the paralysis that seemed to grip bystanders resulted from what they called a “diffusion of responsibility” that occurred in situations as diverse as when a woman falls and sprains an ankle, smoke pours into a room through a ventilating system, or a cash register is robbed.
Latane and Darley found that the crowd behavior in the Kitty Genovese case was very much like that of crowds in other emergency situations. Car accidents, drownings, fires, and attempted suicides all seem to attract bystanders who watched these dramas in helpless fascination. Riveted by the events, the bystanders were distressed and anxious, often full of remorse afterwards, but unwilling to act at the time. Their behavior was, as Latane and Darley put it, “[n]either helpful nor heroic; but it was not indifferent or apathetic either.”
In general, people in nonemergency situations are quite willing to help when asked. Why aren't we even more willing in emergencies, in which the need for help is so much greater? Darley and Latane concluded that it was something about the nature of emergencies and not some pathology of the individuals who made up the crowd that accounted for the bewildering disassociation of bystanders in such situations. Emergencies, by their very nature, often involve actual harm or the threat of harm. An emergency can cost the life not only of the victim but of the intervenor, and the result even of a successful intervention rarely makes anyone better off afterwards than before the emergency event. Moreover, emergencies are, by definition, anomalous and rare events. Few individuals are prepared by training or practice to know how to handle such situations. Emergencies are unforeseen, and arise suddenly without warning. The bystander does not have time for consultation because the emergency, of all events, requires immediate, urgent action. Nor does the individual confronting an emergency come face-to-face simply with a single choice, but rather with a whole series of determinations, which he or she must usually make alone, even in the midst of a crowd.
The bystander must notice that something is happening, and then interpret the event as a real emergency. Further, he must decide that he has some personal responsibility for coping with it. At each stage of this process, the ambiguity of the event can paralyze a bystander, who is then forced to recycle through the entire process of decision. Is the event really an assault or just a noisy disagreement between two lovers? Are those screams of terror or peals of excited, nervous laughter? One witness to the Genovese murder said, “We thought it was a lovers' quarrel and I went back to bed.” And if it is decided that the event really is an assault and some action ought to be taken, who should take it? Another witness to the events on Austin Street said, “I didn't want to get involved.” It wasn't his job: it was for the police, or for Kitty Genovese's friends—he didn't know the woman—or perhaps for the woman herself to get out of the jam in which she found herself. To be “involved” meant taking on incalculable risks: suppose the man was arrested and tried; the person who called the
police would have to testify; suppose the murderer was acquitted; might he then come after the witness? And finally, what exactly is the thing to be done: by the time most people had sorted out the salient facts, it was probably too late for the police to be contacted, arrive on the scene, and intervene in time to save the woman's life. Yet the middle-aged onlookers were scarcely in a position to tackle an armed killer themselves. They were not trained to act in such situations, had no experience of such horrors, and really had no idea what to do. Most people who saw the Genovese murder said simply, “I don't know—I don't know why I didn't do anything.”
To summarize, we can say that there are five distinct stages through which the bystander must successively pass before effective action can be taken: (1) Notice: he must become aware that some unusual occurrence is taking place; (2) Recognition: he must be able to assess the event and define it as an emergency; (3) Decision: he must then decide that something must be done, that is, he must find a convincing reason for action to be taken; (4) Assignment: the bystander must then assign some person, himself or another, or some institution to be responsible for action; he must answer the question “who should act in these circumstances?” (5) Implementation: having decided what action should be taken, he must then see that it is actually done. If at any stage in this sequence a crucial ambiguity is introduced, then the whole process must begin again. The presence of ambiguity in urban life, not the callousness of urban dwellers, is precisely what makes emergency intervention in cities so problematic. In Johnson City, Texas, one is likely to know whether the man who has just slumped against the doorway is John, who recently had a coronary bypass, or Jack, the town drunk. In Queens, it is less likely that one knows, or that one can predict what will happen if one intervenes.
So it was with the horrifying events of the three years 1991 – 1994 in the former state of Yugoslavia: fascinated, frightened, appalled, the civilized world was anything but apathetic. And yet, like Kitty Genovese's murderer, the killers in Bosnia returned again and again, once the threat of outside intervention dissipated, leaving the rest of us as anguished bystanders.
Someday people will ask questions about the terrible crimes in Bosnia that are reminiscent of those asked after the murder of Kitty Genovese: How could the civilized, comfortable, and safe world have let those crimes happen? For much of the sequence of events in Bosnia has a parallel with the crimes on Austin Street, especially the pattern of aggression that falters when confronted but which returns when it is not suppressed, and also the pattern of rationalization that organizes our thinking, and prevents decisive action in emergencies. The results of Darley and Latane's research offer a key to understanding what went wrong for more than three years in Yugoslavia as well as what went wrong that night in Queens. And this understanding can yield insights into the nature of the society of nation-states,
a society that was just as shaken by the horror it witnessed but did nothing to stop as was the small community of neighbors in Queens.