In 1941, en route from a ghetto to a concentration camp in Ukraine, a Nazi soldier beat my grandfather to death. My father witnessed this murder. His is just one of millions of similar stories, of course, and I grew up aware of how death hovered on the other side of life, and brutality on the underside of humanity. The ‘sapiens’ in Homo sapiens does not fully describe our species: we are as violent as we are smart. This might be why we are the only Homo genus left over in the first place, and why we have been so destructively successful at dominating our planet. But still the question nags away: how are ordinary people capable of such obscene acts of violence?

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