Happy Lynchers (repost)
I'm headed off to the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association (where, hopefully, I'll get some data of interest to readers of this blog); and I just taught a class on the psychology of lynching, so I hope readers will forgive me for my first-ever repost. (This post harks back to the early weeks of this blog -- May 2006. I only got 511 visitors in May. Now I get that many in about 3 days!)
To render the photos below less viscerally disturbing, I've blanked out sections. They remain, I think, ethically quite disturbing.
The blanked out parts of the pictures are, of course, the victims of lynchings (all African-American) in early 20th-century United States. I won't risk the sensibilities of readers any more than I already have by describing the details of the corpses, but to put it blandly, in the first and third pictures especially, they are grotesquely mutilated.
I post these pictures not (I hope) from any motive of voyeurism, but to share with you my sense that they powerfully raise one of the most important issues in moral psychology: the emotions of perpetrators of evil. Though it's a bit hard to see in these small pictures (the maximum size Blogger allows), I hope it's nonetheless evident that most of the lynchers look relaxed and happy -- though they're only feet from a freshly murdered corpse. It was not uncommon to bring small children along to lynchings, to collect souvenirs, to take photos and sell them as postcards. (These pictures are from a collection of just such postcards: James Allen's Without Sanctuary.)
Although I'm attracted to a roughly Mencian view of human nature, according to which something in us is deeply revolted by evil, when that evil is nearby and "in one's face" as it were, I find pictures like this somewhat difficult to reconcile with that view. Are these people inwardly revolted, under their smiles?
(The old comments and replies are here.)