But I’m Dr Jekyll

Sometimes in conversations where the topic is that of some horrific, brutal, and/or cruel act, someone will declare that “it just shows the inhumanity of people,” or words to that effect. Statements such as this suggest that our human nature is basically nasty and brutish. It is a dismal verdict for the human race.

Statements like this one are tantamount to justifying the brutal acts; in fact, these statements come very close to defending them, on the basis that brutality is simply the base nature of the human race.

This miserable view of humanity’s innateness is akin to characterising humanity as Mr Hyde in the Robert Louis Stevenson classic, The Stange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.¹  Stevenson’s horror story, published in 1886, follows two characters (Jekyll and Hyde) through London streets and houses with one of them (Dr Jekyll) being of upright and gentlemanly manner, and the other (Edward Hyde) a murderer and person of low morals. As the story progresses, the reader comes to realise that the two are one-and-the-same. An elixir transforms the one into the other.

Yet, if the person pronouncing this morbid baseness is questioned about their own character, most are likely to say something like, ‘But I’m Dr Jekyll.’ The innate wickedness just attributed to the whole human species is rejected as not applying to them.

Both of course – Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – are found in all of us. Thinking of oneself as a Dr Jekyll and not as Mr Hyde is an easy way to absolve oneself of any guilt, or participation in any of the atrocities of the world.

Stevenson was well aware of this tendency and its effect. In the final chapter of The Stange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – titled Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case – Henry Jekyll maintains that,

‘It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered.’

“And thus his conscience slumbered” is an illuminating sentence. It tells us that if we can attribute nastiness to some other and not ourselves then we can slumber on in innocence and ignore the brutality that occurs in the world.

It was this slumber and innocence that Nazi war criminals claimed at the Nuremberg trials. Many argued that they were simply doing their job. Hannah Arendt, who wrote much about totalitarianism and Nazism attended some of those trials.

In particular Arendt attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann, an official in the Schutzstaffel (the SS) and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. She wrote a book - Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (published in 1963) – outlining her observations and analysis of Eichmann and others.

What Arendt found to be truly terrifying about Eichmann was that he was not psychopathic, he was a common man. Almost anyone could have become a war criminal. But Arendt does not offer this up as justification for Eichmann’s actions. She does not excuse him. He still had choice, even in a totalitarian state. The consequences of making that choice are political, she said, even if the person is powerless in that state.

Robert Louis Stevenson was writing about just such situations fifty years before the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.

Reading The Stange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde one hundred and forty years after its first publication there are at least two major lessons we can take from it.

1. All of us can find a Dr Jekyll and a Mr Hyde inside us.
2. We must not allow our conscience to slumber.

 

Notes:

1. Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Stange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, p 60. Penguin Books, London, 2002. First published 1886.