Crime: Is there a link between the act of apparently gratuitous violence that leads to a death, and mass murder on a genocidal scale? Can we extrapolate from the individual psychology of a criminal to generalise about the nature of evil in the world?
These are the questions posed by Peter Charleton in this challenging book, which ranges from the behaviour of individual criminals to the conduct of genocidal wars such as the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan massacres.
Charleton is one of the leading criminal lawyers of his generation, a senior counsel who now mainly works for the State prosecuting serious crime, though, as he recalls in this book, he has also often worked for the defence. This book has arisen from his experience of 25 years at the coal-face of dealing with serious crime, crime that challenges our idea of what is human, and is an attempt to come up with a coherent explanation for what lies at the root of serious crime, especially murder.
Charleton looks to philosophy, psychology, history, myth and literature for an explanation, and advances the thesis that "there is a lie behind every crime". "In twenty-five years of practice in the criminal courts," he writes, "it has become evident that deceit is the primary instrument for doing evil." This deceit is not only of the victims; the most successful criminals also deceive themselves.
Gangland killers inflate their self-regard "so that they became volatile to any challenge". They live out a myth regarding their own status and that of their group.
Charleton goes on to examine how whole societies become trapped in lies, pointing out that the Inquisition used the same methods as those followed by totalitarian regimes in the 20th century. The central lie was that "enemies of God" or "enemies of the people" existed, and that the greater good justified their extermination.
Societies that target whole groups, like the Nazis' extermination of the Jews or the Turks in their persecution of the Armenians, see themselves as victims and the enemy as possessed of an ineradicable essence, passed through the generations, which must be destroyed. Charleton quotes Himmler: "Even the brood in the cradle must be crushed like a puffed-up toad."
Similar statements are to be found from the ideologues of the campaigns against the Armenians or the Tutsi minority in Rwanda, or from someone like Lt Calley, architect of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, who said: "We weren't in My Lai to kill human beings really. We were there to kill an ideology that is carried by, I don't know. Pawns. Blobs. Pieces of flesh."
What Charleton finds disturbing is how widespread such feelings are: "The human mind must contain some structure of indescribable evil: call it the shadow, or the death instinct, it does not matter." Consciousness is that part of the mind which sees the truth, and there may also be "unconscious powers at the disposal of people who affirm life".
This book is informative and stimulating, but leaves the reader with more questions than answers. Neither truth nor lies are defined; rather they are presented as absolutes, which are applicable to a multiple of situations.
Truth and myth are not so easily divided. Victims exist, and sometimes criminals have emerged from lives of almost unbelievable deprivation and abuse; just as some groups - indeed, Jews among them - have been victims of genocidal oppression that has marked their subsequent political development and attitude to the lives of others.
Truth is not the same thing as self-awareness, and lies are not the same thing as self-deceit. The wellsprings of murderous hatred are manifold, and there may not be, in the end, a single explanation for the presence of evil in the world.
Carol Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times
Lies in a Mirror: An Essay on Evil and Deceit By Peter Charleton Blackhall Publishing, 301pp. €40hb/€25pb