How Does A Conservationist Turn Into A Thug?

Answer: one step at a time.

A fascinating article from the New Yorker describes the life of Mark and Delia Owens, biologists and conservationists who spent decades living in the middle of the bush in various countries in Africa but especially Zambia. Disheartened by the problem of poachers and its terrible magnitude, they started lobbying governments and the like but to no avail. So they were forced to confront poachers directly, by scaring them with their plane and the like. Over the years the campaign grew and grew until Mark found himself commanding a counter-poaching unit out of his campsite in the bush.

The Owenses seem to have turned to vigilantes over the space of many years: Mark ended up operating many armed units that were not sanctioned by the government (but were tacitly approved through various winks and nods). Unlike Kenya, Zambia had no official shoot-to-kill policy for poachers in national parks. And yet there have been frequent cases of people “disappearing” in the bush. When a US company turned up to film a documentary about the Owenses’ conservation efforts, according to the person filming, their son shot and killed a poacher to get footage for the camera and show an example of how tough they were.

A lot of the article focuses on the investigation of this alleged murder. This is a tangled case with lots of contradictory eyewitness testimony. The case is still open and has contributed to the Owenses being expelled from Zambia. Regardless of what actually happened on that day, it seems undeniable that the Owenses became thugs, for instance ordering raids on neighbouring village, threatening villagers at gunpoint to reveal information about poachers and beating up locals they suspected of poaching (with scanty evidence).

The article has been discussed in a few blogs in terms of several points of view. For instance, this hard-edged thuggish form of animal conservation can be seen as a form of colonialist paternalism of the what-do-Africans-know-about-conservation sort? Certainly from reading about conversations with Mark I got a feeling that he’s not interested in local perspectives on how to stop poaching, it’s his way and that’s it. But what I find most interesting is this slow but steady glide to extremism, whereby we have good people start out with noble intentions and at every step nothing very dramatic happens and yet the end result is an utterly cavalier attitude to human life and human rights.

This reminds me of the 1st of April edition of Declaring Independence radio, where Ed Brayton interviewed social psychologist Carol Tavris who wrote Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. I’ve heard her on another podcast as well and she’s brilliant. One of the experiments she recounted demonstrates this very process of sliding towards a position you would have seen as profoundly immoral to start with.

Two uni students are both of a moderate opinion about cheating. They go into an exam which is very important for their academic career, and it’s a tough one. Both have the opportunity to cheat. For whatever reason student A cheats and student B doesn’t. Very soon, their moral positions start to shift as a way of explaining and justifying their decisions to themselves. Student A is now likely to claim that cheating is no big deal. Student B is now likely to be an anti-cheating zealot. Both started as moderates yet both will claim that their final positions were what they always believed!

This is an example of cognitive dissonance. The logic we use in these situations is precisely backwards from what you’d expect. To go back to Mark Owens, his starting assumption is “I am a good person”. This is something most of us share — an assumption essential for our self-esteem and mostly unshakeable. And yet he has a second fact to contend with: “I threaten and beat up villagers on my whim of a suspicion of poaching”. However there is a tension, a dissonance, between these 2 statements based on most people’s morality. So the natural defence mechanism is to add a third statement: “threatening and beating up villagers on a whim is fine [because of the greater good of helping save endangered species].” This is a modified version of any original moral statement Owens might have had about these issues. This is often expressed quite blatantly, as per the article on Delia: It was then that she asked me to leave the property. “Why don’t you understand that we’re good people?” she asked. “We were just trying to help.”

One of the things I’ve been going on about on the blog (part 1, part 2) is that the line that separates you from someone you find morally repugnant is a thin one. We all do this. It need not be about thuggery, but someone who speeds when driving is probably more likely to claim that the speed laws are unjust. None of this has anything to do with whether the laws are just — but being aware of the problem might help your judgements be a bit less self-serving. If we drop “I am a good person” as an absolute, unshakable cognitive requirement then we might self-depricate a lot more. But our moral compass is more likely to remain in well-functioning state, as opposed to pointing in whatever direction it needs to in order to match our latest decisions. And of course, the surest sign that you’re in moral trouble is if your only defence is “but I’m a good person!”