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This essay originally appeared in First of the Month (4th issue, 8/1 2000)

Grossman-ism:
Media Violence and
Mad Social Science

  Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman (U.S.A., RET.) is the author of On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, and now, with Gloria DeGaetano, “a nationally recognized educator in the field of media violence”, of Stop Teaching Our Kids To Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence.  Lt. Col. Grossman, a former paratrooper who has taught psychology at West Point and is now a professor of military science in Arkansas, has Good News and Bad News to reveal.  The Good News is the attractive and inspiriting proposition that most people have a powerful instinctual disinclination to kill other human beings, and under normal conditions, including their own presence on a battlefield in immediate proximity to homicidal strangers, will refuse to do so.  The Bad News is that modern media culture produces an abnormal condition in which ordinary children are all too likely to become much more effective killers than, say, a typical American GI facing the SS in Normandy.  And Col. Grossman is supremely confident that he can prove both of these contentions.  His attempts to do so, in these two fantastic and extremely dispiriting parodies of rational argument, are fascinating illustrations of the intellectual level of much contemporary American social science. 

                How does Grossman know that ordinary people are wonderfully disinclined to kill on another?  He relies on the groundbreaking work of the famous S.L.A. Marshall, who published Men Against Fire in 1946.  Marshall therein revealed his discovery about what ordinary human beings will do on a battlefield.   By rigorously investigating behavior in combat, interviewing the men of at least four hundred American rifle companies in the European theater during the Second World War, Marshall had found out something of unparalleled significance:  he discovered that in any given body of American infantry, no more than a quarter will ever fire their personal weapons at an enemy.  The normal percentage willing to kill was even lower, generally around fifteen percent. 

                Marshall explained his “ratio of fire” in various ways, sometimes with reference to general principles of human psychology, sometimes with specific attention to the psychology of civilized urbanites, who while not necessarily cowards, were strikingly unwilling to become killers:  “These men may face danger but they will not fight."   And why not?  “The fear of aggression has been expressed to him so strongly and absorbed by him so deeply…that it is part of the normal man’s emotional makeup.  It stays his trigger finger even though he is hardly aware that it is a restraint upon him.”  Then again, at other times Marshall seemed to suspect that most people were cowards, or at least shiftless:  “In the workshop or the office, or elsewhere in society, a minority of men and women carry the load…the majority in any group seek lives of minimum risk and expenditure of effort plagued by doubts of themselves or fears for their personal security.”  Similarly, since only a few of us are “forceful”, since most lack “initiative”, we “simply go along for the ride.”, and “When the infantryman’s mind is gripped by fear, his body is gripped by inertia, fear’s Siamese twin…”.

                Grossman inclines toward Marshall’s more generous and optimistic interpretation:  he believes that inhibitions against taking another’s life—against what the sociobiologists would call `intraspecific violence’—are the source of the alleged refusal to fire.  However, Grossman does not believe that only moderns suffer from this splendid inhibition: he believes that the military historian Paddy Griffiths has shown that it was present during the American Civil War, he approvingly quotes the classicist Arthur Nock to the effect that hoplite warfare among the ancient Greeks “was only slightly more dangerous than American football”, he is impressed by Ardant du Picq’s nineteenth century researches into combat in the ancient world, on the strength of which he has decided that one of Alexander’s battles, which he apparently takes to be a perfectly representative one, was “an almost bloodless pushing match”.  And he is much impressed by the military historian Richard Holmes’s researches into infantry combat in the Falklands, where Argentine troops seem to have fired much less than British ones, a phenomenon Grossman interprets in light of his prevailing thesis:  British troops are trained in such a fashion that life-preserving inhibition can be overcome, a process now pandemic in modern societies via the instrumentalities of video games and film.

                So to recap the combined argument of the two books, human being will not easily kill one another; in fact, they are almost fantastically unwilling to do so, even when their own lives are at risk.  However, it is possible to extinguish this inhibition through training, training previously available only to those few modern armies which had profited from S.L.A. Marshall’s groundbreaking research.  Horrifically, the process of disinhibition, chiefly via desensitization, is almost perfectly if unwittingly duplicated by video games, so that ordinary American children may now be on the moral level of the Waffen SS.  The evidence:  unprecedented levels of intraspecific violence are now pandemic in this country, and rising hideously quickly in all cultures exposed to modern media.  The link between desensitization and violence is said to be demonstrated in studies conducted by vast numbers of social scientists—many of them apparently psychologists—each of them presumably as scrupulous, cautious and intellectually subtle as Lt. Col. Grossman.  And if we doubt these claims, we are talking through our hats:  decades of social science have proved these contentions, just as Marshall proved the original assertion. Or so Grossman repeatedly tells us.

                As it happens, Marshall proved nothing of the kind.  By the late nineteen eighties Marshall’s statistical argument for his “ratio of fire”  had been debunked as a fantastic fraud.  I should declare an interest:  I was one of the people—by far the least distinguished, and certainly the one who performed the least original research--who discovered this fact.  Although a lot of people have looked for it, no evidence has ever emerged that Marshall had interviewed a single rifle company in the European theater, let alone the four, or five, or six hundred that he at various times claimed to have interviewed.  But Marshall had interviewed some in the Pacific, who had fought on Makin Island, and on Kwajalein, and my only real “research” involved finding the record of what Marshall had there discovered.   As it happens, those men showed no striking refusal to fire—in fact, Marshall discovered that on Makin, at least, they fired far too much, as one might suspect would be the case with green troops:  “Much aimless shooting by `trigger-happy men occurred…In the early morning its volume increased…A wave of shooting hysteria swept through the area and men started blazing at bushes and trees until the place was `simply ablaze with fire’…shouted orders to the men to cease firing proved ineffectual…flat terrain and limited area made control of fire abnormally difficult.” 

                If Marshall had invented the 400-600 “ratio of fire” company interviews—and the evidence of this is very strong—what else did he invent?  Quite a lot:  some family lore, a lot of colorful stories, much of his biography (Grossman describes Marshall as a combat veteran, but while Marshall at various times claimed to have fought with three regiments in two divisions in three countries, there is no independent evidence that he ever fought, anywhere), even his name (he amended it to provide the additional letter which made his initials the manly “S.L.A.M.”). 

                Marshall went on to become a very good anecdotal military historian, writing books not undergirded by the spurious social scientific apparatus that originally made Men Against Fire, and its author, so famous, but what, if anything, had he actually discovered during his WWII researches?  It is hard to say.  My guess is that he discovered--`intuited’ may be the better word--that most men do not in fact fire their personal weapons in combat quite so frequently as popular film representations of combat suggest, although he grossly misinterpreted the significance of this fact by psychologizing it into a failure/refusal to fire.  WWII infantry had a number of good reasons for not firing—to conserve ammunition, to avoid drawing fire, etc.—but Marshall’s implied picture of combat in Men Against Fire—as essentially homogeneous—concedes no good reason for not firing, and ignored the fact that combat was in fact asymmetrical.   “Being in combat” often meant being under indirect fire, to which one could not reply.  When I began the research which was a small part of the collective enterprise of unmasking Marshall, I interviewed a single combat veteran, my father, and discovered that his eleven weeks of combat, for which he had been trained as a sniper and initially employed as a scout, included being a member of a platoon almost annihilated by tree-bursts, being overrun by tanks, mortared, fired on by machine guns and leading a lot of patrols, but that on none of these particular occasions did he fire a rifle.   Marshallian combat in Men Against Fire is characterized by a uniformity of event, and is implicitly everywhere the same; real combat was startlingly various.

                What about the rest of Grossman’s “research”, which we are told reinforces Marshall’s original discovery?  One cannot pronounce in advance of competent scholarly debate, and remember that it took forty years to unmask Marshall, but my first reaction is that Holmes’s discoveries about the Argentine troops on the Falklands may tell us much about the behavior of demoralized and badly trained Third World conscripts shipped off to a wasteland bordering Antarctica, and subsequently abandoned by feckless officers and a brutal government,  than it tells us about a universal human inhibition against intraspecific violence.  I have not read Paddy Griffiths’s work on some battles of the American Civil War, but the universal claim Grossman seeks to bolster thereby runs afoul of what I do know about some Civil War battles.  If memory serves, the C.S.A. troops entrenched at, among other places, Fredericksburg, do not seem to have shown this allegedly universal inhibition—was human nature oddly different there?   Of the Napoleonic evidence, again, under some conditions many troops will find it impossible to fire—all but a handful of troops charging in column, for example—but this does not suggest a universal human instinct, it suggests a tactical shortcoming.  And if soldiers in the ancient world suffered from an inhibition about intraspecific violence, it would have come as news to the Athenian prisoners blinded on Sicily, as well as to the six thousand Samnite prisoners slaughtered by Sulla’s troops, or the vast numbers systematically disemboweled by Roman legionaries following their standard tactics over many centuries. 

Grossman is much given to psychologizing monocausal explanation, with the result that many of his military historical dicta are absurd.  Take a single example:  “Gunpowder’s superior noise, its superior posturing ability, made it ascendant on the battlefield.  The longbow would still have been used in the Napoleonic Wars if the raw mathematics of killing was all that mattered, since both the longbow’s firing rate and its accuracy were much greater than that of the smoothbore musket.  But a frightened man,  thinking with his midbrain and going “ploink, ploink, ploink with a bow, doesn’t stand much of a chance against an equally frightened man going “BANG!BANG!” with a musket.”  The traditional explanation for the decline of the longbow is less subtle:  an arrow could not penetrate plate armor, whereas an arquebus ball could, and did, and gunpowder thus rendered the longbow thoroughly obsolete by the mid-16^th century, around which time the last Dialogue Between Hermes and An English Solider was published.

Grossmanism, then, is a compound of various forms of historical illiteracy, aggravated by a perfect absence of common sense.  The assertion that video games have produced an ever-more violent American population runs afoul of the simple fact that rates of violent crime in this country have been falling for most of the last decade, precisely the period in which video game use has exploded.  The argument that disinhibition of an imaginary instinct via immersion in violent visual imagery is the only possible source of increasing popular violence—an argument that is repeatedly shrieked throughout the chapters of Stop Teaching Our Kids To Kill--runs afoul of the fact that some of the cultures least exposed to violent visual images—medieval England, for example—had horrific levels of personal violence, while cultures immersed in staggeringly violent visual imagery—for example, contemporary Japan, where popular theaters featuring sado-masochistic burlesque do a land office business—have some of the lowest rates of personal violence recorded by modern societies.  One could make a case for the proposition that exposure to massive quantities of violent visual imagery is inversely correlated with the propensity to commit actual violence:  the Taliban, who look at no representational images of any kind, may be usefully compared to male Italian teenagers, who assimilate vast quantities of sadomasochistic fumetti but are nonetheless relatively shy about murdering women, or one another—oh, that the Taliban were so restrained.  The American frat boys of my childhood, raised on relatively decorous horse opera, fought in bars, broke the hands of thieves, and were generally a great deal more violent than are my own undergraduate students—who play the video games Grossman so dreads.  Aztec children, to the best of my knowledge, did not play video games, nor did Zulu children, nor Assyrian children, nor Commanche children.  The armies that conducted the Thirties Year War were not copiously exposed to pictorial violence, unless one counts representations of the crucifixion.  The contemporary American middle class, less violent than most populations recorded in all of history, is surely the most immersed in representations of violence, of any recorded culture.  Once upon a time, psychologists usefully distinguished between the meaning of fantasizing a thing as opposed to doing it, but those days seem to be very long gone.

.  And yet Grossmanism, as a cultural product, despite its almost fantastic hysteria and silliness, is not restricted to these two slim volumes.  Contemporary social science does indeed produce reams of “research” of this kind.  Off of college campuses, it is, happily, widely ignored.  The interesting and indeed disturbing question is why gross parodies of reason are taken so seriously by groups nominally trained to revere rational argument.  Brooding over this review, I was pondering Grossmanism with a friend the other day; “if you don’t know any history”, he remarked, you don’t know anything at all:.  That, I think, is indeed part of the story:  a genuine ignorance of history is probably a pre-condition for this sort of warmed-over Rousseauvian sentimentality about an extremely violent human past, and contemporary American social scientists are pretty innocent of history, particularly of the range of historical evidence that makes historians intensely hostile to this sort of overarching claim; historians are by nature splitters, not lumpers.  A reverence for quantitative methods is also part of the story:  Grossman, after writing off the most recent evidence as indeterminate, proudly disdains data for American violence which predate FBI statistics, appearing innocent of the problem that the FBI started accumulating statistics fairly recently, and did so at the start of a long fall in American crime rates, followed by a long rise, so in essence two data points become the statistical universe for conclusions about allegedly fundamental human traits.  Marshall, too, fell afoul of this reverence for quantitative methods, and as a result invented the statistics that would instantiate his claim.  Finally, Grossmanist “thought” is wonderfully prepared to write off all of our ancestors’ experience as unscientific—they are assumed to have perfectly misunderstood themselves, and the vast array of their art and literature and political philosophy that concerned itself with war and violence is readily written off as no better than fantasy.

And thereby hangs a tale:  Grossmanism is part of that very crisis of intellectual authority it subsequently bemoans. Eerily quick to ignore the millennia of thinking that predates his own, Grossman is subsequently astonished that hoi polloi ignore savants like himself.  The authority of the past, so scorned, is thus revenged, after a fashion--but revenge is proverbially only a kind of wild justice.  A version of Gresham’s Law dictates that bad forms of argument drive out good ones, and the left-liberal pieties expressed in these two volumes are no less scientistic, pseudo-rational and historically illiterate than are the Rightist pieties so enshrouded down the row at the bookstore.   Bleak times.