The evidence of evil, like the evidence of good, obeys the universal laws of entropy Heat cools, matter disintegrates, memories fade. It was not until the European Enlightenment that this religious intuition was secularised, when it became a commonplace to think of human beings possessing a common nature and a common set of moral obligations. And only in our century, in the last fifty years, has it become possible to declare a set of universal human rights. So the history of genocide teaches us something about the history of the century in general: ours has been the first to perfect mass murder and the first to understand the exact sense in which this is a crime. While human life may have existed on the planet for a million years, it is possible that only in the last thousand have men believed that we belong to a single tribe. The crime of genocide could not exist as a moral category until this consciousness was established.

This was the work of the monotheistic religions, who bound the tribes together by preaching that all men were subject of the same master. They remain permanent human temptations: the way to a utopia so appealing that for millennia the violence used to achieve it was not perceived as a crime. Beyond the hate, however, the authorities promise a calm after the cleansing storm and a world freed of enemies and fear. What could be more sensible than to rid the forest of the tribe whose existence menaces your own? Until very recent times, it was not self-evident that other tribes belonged to the same species. This utopia both glorifies venal motive and silences residual scruple.At the end of this century, we can see from Bosnia and Rwanda that such impulses have not ended with the defeat of fascism and the collapse of communism. Most genocides begin with orders from above, with rabid invocations of the people’s need to cleanse themselves of pollution.

But genocide is such a radical cleansing, such a violation of the normal order of things, that it must enlist the highest of motives, the biggest of dreams. No one can see your face.” No one can see your expression when you categorically deny that it is your turn to feed the goldfish.Writers are beginning to catch on to the problems of modern office life and have come to understand the potential horror inherent in sitting and facing sub-human colleagues – people you would not normally stand next to in a bus queue if you could help it – in closed spaces for eight-hour stretches. The realisation that the office can at the same time be an escape from our problems and the very source of our irritations has been a long time coming. “As many of us spend a lot of time working in front of screens, having people around, faces to look at, can also at times be a release from stress.”So sitting back to back like the goldfish trio is not a good thing “You speak without looking at each other. “Resentment may surface simply because we want to be alone.” But the office is also a place we go to avoid being alone with ourselves, a place where we have an extended family – albeit of relative strangers – of confidants and colleagues. Suddenly we are frowning and swearing and counting the number of times said sociopath has kicked the leg of our desk in the last 10 minutes.”Certainly, the problem with open-plan offices is that we are always face to face with people,” Neil Crawford suggests. Suddenly we are sharing small cramped spaces with veritable sociopaths of dubious personal hygiene or pet care ability.

All of which falls into sorry pieces in the arena of the shared office Suddenly we are made to confront our fear of the different. We build our lives around the people and places which feel familiar, comfortable, suitable – in short, which feel like us. True, cheesy people will often befriend chalky ones, but generally, we surround ourselves with imitations of ourself. Who was going to feed it? Who was going to pay for the fish food? Who was going to clean the tank? Who was going to look after it during the holidays? Who was going to organise a rota?Undoubtedly, part of the problem for us is that, as a species, we shun otherness. But is this friction worse in the modern working environment or have we just become better at noticing it?According to Neil Crawford, psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic and expert in work relationships, a bit of both. “The last 30 to 50 years has seen a large increase in the understanding of the origins of difficulties at work.