The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (100 page)
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Authors: Steven Pinker
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BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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But nothing has transformed childhood as much as the risk of kidnapping by strangers, a textbook case in the psychology of fear.
207
Since 1979, when six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared on his way to a school bus stop in lower Manhattan, kidnapped children have riveted the nation’s attention, thanks to three interest groups that are dedicated to sowing panic among the nation’s parents. The grief-stricken parents of murdered children understandably want something good to come out of their tragedies, and several have devoted their lives to raising awareness of child abductions. (One of them, John Walsh, campaigned to have photographs of missing children featured on milk cartons, and hosted a lurid television program,
America’s Most Wanted
, which specialized in horrific kidnap-murders.) Politicians, police chiefs, and corporate publicists can smell a no-lose campaign from a mile away—who could be against protecting children from perverts?—and have held ostentatious ceremonies to announce protective measures named after missing children (Code Adam, Amber Alerts, Megan’s Law, the National Missing Children Day). The media too can recognize a ratings pump when they see one, and have stoked the fear with round-the-clock vigils, documentaries in constant rotation (“It is every parent’s nightmare . . .”), and a
Law and Order
spinoff dedicated to nothing but sex crimes.
207
Since 1979, when six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared on his way to a school bus stop in lower Manhattan, kidnapped children have riveted the nation’s attention, thanks to three interest groups that are dedicated to sowing panic among the nation’s parents. The grief-stricken parents of murdered children understandably want something good to come out of their tragedies, and several have devoted their lives to raising awareness of child abductions. (One of them, John Walsh, campaigned to have photographs of missing children featured on milk cartons, and hosted a lurid television program,
America’s Most Wanted
, which specialized in horrific kidnap-murders.) Politicians, police chiefs, and corporate publicists can smell a no-lose campaign from a mile away—who could be against protecting children from perverts?—and have held ostentatious ceremonies to announce protective measures named after missing children (Code Adam, Amber Alerts, Megan’s Law, the National Missing Children Day). The media too can recognize a ratings pump when they see one, and have stoked the fear with round-the-clock vigils, documentaries in constant rotation (“It is every parent’s nightmare . . .”), and a
Law and Order
spinoff dedicated to nothing but sex crimes.
Childhood has never been the same. American parents will not let their children out of their sight. Children are chauffeured, chaperoned, and tethered with cell phones, which, far from reducing parents’ anxiety, only sends them into a tizzy if a child doesn’t answer on the first ring. Making friends in the playground has given way to mother-arranged playdates, a phrase that didn’t exist before the 1980s.
208
Forty years ago two-thirds of children walked or biked to school; today 10 percent do. A generation ago 70 percent of children played outside; today the rate is down to 30 percent.
209
In 2008 the nine-year-old son of the journalist Lenore Skenazy begged her to let him go home by himself on the New York subway. She agreed, and he made it home without incident. When she wrote about the vignette in a
New York Sun
column, she found herself at the center of a media frenzy in which she was dubbed “America’s Worst Mom.” (Sample headline: “Mom Lets 9-Year-Old Take Subway Home Alone: Columnist Stirs Controversy with Experiment in Childhood Independence.”) In response she started a movement—Free-Range Children—and proposed National Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day, intended to get children to learn to play by themselves without constant adult supervision.
210
208
Forty years ago two-thirds of children walked or biked to school; today 10 percent do. A generation ago 70 percent of children played outside; today the rate is down to 30 percent.
209
In 2008 the nine-year-old son of the journalist Lenore Skenazy begged her to let him go home by himself on the New York subway. She agreed, and he made it home without incident. When she wrote about the vignette in a
New York Sun
column, she found herself at the center of a media frenzy in which she was dubbed “America’s Worst Mom.” (Sample headline: “Mom Lets 9-Year-Old Take Subway Home Alone: Columnist Stirs Controversy with Experiment in Childhood Independence.”) In response she started a movement—Free-Range Children—and proposed National Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day, intended to get children to learn to play by themselves without constant adult supervision.
210
Skenazy is not, in fact, America’s worst mom. She simply did what no politician, policeman, parent, or producer ever did: she looked up the facts. The overwhelming majority of milk-carton children were not lured into vans by sex perverts, child traffickers, or ransom artists, but were teenagers who ran away from home, or children taken by a divorced parent who was embittered by an unfavorable custody ruling. The annual number of abductions by strangers has ranged from 200 to 300 in the 1990s to about 100 today, around half of whom are murdered. With 50 million children in the United States, that works out to an annual homicide rate of one in a million (0.001 per hundred thousand, to use our usual metric). That’s about a twentieth of the risk of drowning and a fortieth of the risk of a fatal car accident. The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you
wanted
your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you’d have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.
211
wanted
your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you’d have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.
211
One might reply that the safety of a child is so precious that even if these precautions saved a few lives a year, they would be worth the anxiety and expense. But the reasoning is spurious. People inescapably trade off safety for other good things in life, as when they set aside money for their children’s college education rather than installing a sprinkler system in their homes, or drive with their children to a vacation destination rather than letting them play video games in the safety of their bedrooms all summer. The campaign for perfect safety from abductions ignores costs like constricting childhood experience, increasing childhood obesity, instilling chronic anxiety in working women, and scaring young adults away from having children.
And even if minimizing risk
were
the only good in life, the innumerate safety advisories would not accomplish it. Many measures, like the milk-carton wanted posters, are examples of what criminologists call crime-control theater: they advertise that something is being done without actually doing anything.
212
When 300 million people change their lives to reduce a risk to 50 people, they will probably do more harm than good, because of the unforeseen consequences of their adjustments on the vastly
more
than 50 people who are affected by them. To take just two examples, more than twice as many children are hit by cars driven by parents taking their children to school as by other kinds of traffic, so when more parents drive their children to school to prevent them from getting killed by kidnappers, more children get killed.
213
And one form of crime-control theater, electronic highway signs that display the names of missing children to drivers on freeways, may cause slowdowns, distracted drivers, and the inevitable accidents.
214
were
the only good in life, the innumerate safety advisories would not accomplish it. Many measures, like the milk-carton wanted posters, are examples of what criminologists call crime-control theater: they advertise that something is being done without actually doing anything.
212
When 300 million people change their lives to reduce a risk to 50 people, they will probably do more harm than good, because of the unforeseen consequences of their adjustments on the vastly
more
than 50 people who are affected by them. To take just two examples, more than twice as many children are hit by cars driven by parents taking their children to school as by other kinds of traffic, so when more parents drive their children to school to prevent them from getting killed by kidnappers, more children get killed.
213
And one form of crime-control theater, electronic highway signs that display the names of missing children to drivers on freeways, may cause slowdowns, distracted drivers, and the inevitable accidents.
214
The movement over the past two centuries to increase the valuation of children’s lives is one of the great moral advances in history. But the movement over the past two decades to increase the valuation to infinity can lead only to absurdities.
GAY RIGHTS, THE DECLINE OF GAY-BASHING, AND THE DECRIMINALIZATION OF HOMOSEXUALITYIt would be an exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing explained the nature of logical and mathematical reasoning, invented the digital computer, solved the mind-body problem, and saved Western civilization. But it would not be much of an exaggeration.
215
215
In a landmark 1936 paper, Turing laid out a set of simple mechanical operations that was sufficient to compute any mathematical or logical formula that was computable at all.
216
These operations could easily be implemented in a machine—a digital computer—and a decade later Turing designed a practicable version that served as a prototype for the computers we use today. In the interim, he worked for the British decryption unit during World War II and helped to crack the cipher used by the Nazis to communicate with their U-boats, which was instrumental in defeating the German naval blockade and turning around the war. When the war was over, Turing wrote a paper (still widely read today) that equated thinking with computation, thereby offering an explanation of how intelligence could be carried out by a physical system.
217
For good measure, he then tackled one of the hardest problems in science—how the structure of an organism could emerge from a pool of chemicals during embryonic development—and proposed an ingenious solution.
216
These operations could easily be implemented in a machine—a digital computer—and a decade later Turing designed a practicable version that served as a prototype for the computers we use today. In the interim, he worked for the British decryption unit during World War II and helped to crack the cipher used by the Nazis to communicate with their U-boats, which was instrumental in defeating the German naval blockade and turning around the war. When the war was over, Turing wrote a paper (still widely read today) that equated thinking with computation, thereby offering an explanation of how intelligence could be carried out by a physical system.
217
For good measure, he then tackled one of the hardest problems in science—how the structure of an organism could emerge from a pool of chemicals during embryonic development—and proposed an ingenious solution.
How did Western civilization thank one of the greatest geniuses it ever produced? In 1952 the British government arrested him, withdrew his security clearance, threatened him with prison, and chemically castrated him, driving him to suicide at the age of forty-two.
What did Turing do to earn this stunning display of ingratitude? He had sex with a man. Homosexual acts were illegal in Britain at the time, and he was charged with gross indecency, under the same statute that in the preceding century had broken another genius, Oscar Wilde. Turing’s persecution was motivated by a fear that homosexuals were vulnerable to being entrapped by Soviet agents. The fear became risible eight years later when the British war secretary John Profumo was forced to resign because he had had an affair with the mistress of a Soviet spy.
At least since Leviticus 20:13 prescribed the death penalty for a man lying with mankind as he lieth with a woman, many governments have used their monopoly on violence to imprison, torture, mutilate, and kill homosexuals.
218
A gay person who escaped government violence in the form of laws against indecency, sodomy, buggery, unnatural acts, or crimes against nature was vulnerable to violence from his fellow citizens in the form of gay-bashing, homophobic violence, and antigay hate crimes.
218
A gay person who escaped government violence in the form of laws against indecency, sodomy, buggery, unnatural acts, or crimes against nature was vulnerable to violence from his fellow citizens in the form of gay-bashing, homophobic violence, and antigay hate crimes.
Homophobic violence, whether state-sponsored or grassroots, is a mysterious entry in the catalog of human violence, because there is nothing in it for the aggressor. No contested resource is at stake, and since homosexuality is a victimless crime, no peace is gained by deterring it. If anything, one might expect straight men to react to their gay fellows by thinking: “Great! More women for me!” By the same logic, lesbianism should be the most heinous crime imaginable, because it takes women out of the mating pool two at a time.
But homophobia has been more prominent in history than lesbophobia.
219
While many legal systems single out male homosexuality for criminalization, no legal system singles out lesbianism, and hate crimes against gay men outnumber hate crimes against gay women by a ratio of almost five to one.
220
219
While many legal systems single out male homosexuality for criminalization, no legal system singles out lesbianism, and hate crimes against gay men outnumber hate crimes against gay women by a ratio of almost five to one.
220
Homophobia is an evolutionary puzzle, as is homosexuality itself.
221
It’s not that there’s anything mysterious about homosexual
behavior
. Humans are a polymorphously perverse species, and now and again seek sexual gratification from all manner of living and nonliving things that don’t contribute to their reproductive output. Men in all-male settings such as ships, prisons, and boarding schools often make do with the available object that resembles a female body more closely than anything else in the vicinity. Pederasty, which offers a softer, smoother, and more docile object, has been institutionalized in a number of societies, including, famously, the elite of ancient Greece. When homosexual behavior is institutionalized, not surprisingly, there is little homophobia as we know it. Women, for their part, are less ardent but more flexible in their sexuality, and many go through phases in life when they are happily celibate, promiscuous, monogamous, or homosexual; hence the phenomenon in American women’s colleges of the LUG (lesbian until graduation).
222
221
It’s not that there’s anything mysterious about homosexual
behavior
. Humans are a polymorphously perverse species, and now and again seek sexual gratification from all manner of living and nonliving things that don’t contribute to their reproductive output. Men in all-male settings such as ships, prisons, and boarding schools often make do with the available object that resembles a female body more closely than anything else in the vicinity. Pederasty, which offers a softer, smoother, and more docile object, has been institutionalized in a number of societies, including, famously, the elite of ancient Greece. When homosexual behavior is institutionalized, not surprisingly, there is little homophobia as we know it. Women, for their part, are less ardent but more flexible in their sexuality, and many go through phases in life when they are happily celibate, promiscuous, monogamous, or homosexual; hence the phenomenon in American women’s colleges of the LUG (lesbian until graduation).
222
The real puzzle is homosexual
orientation
—why there should be men and women who consistently prefer homosexual mating opportunities to heterosexual ones, or who avoid mating with the opposite sex altogether. At least in men, homosexual orientation appears to be inborn. Gay men generally report that their homosexual attractions began as soon as they felt sexual stirrings shortly before adolescence. And homosexuality is more concordant in identical than in fraternal twins, suggesting that their shared genes play a role. Homosexuality, by the way, is one of the few examples of a nature-nurture debate in which the politically correct position is “nature.” If homosexuality is innate, according to the common understanding, then people don’t choose to be gay and hence can’t be criticized for their lifestyle; nor could they convert the children in their classrooms or Boy Scout troops if they wanted to.
orientation
—why there should be men and women who consistently prefer homosexual mating opportunities to heterosexual ones, or who avoid mating with the opposite sex altogether. At least in men, homosexual orientation appears to be inborn. Gay men generally report that their homosexual attractions began as soon as they felt sexual stirrings shortly before adolescence. And homosexuality is more concordant in identical than in fraternal twins, suggesting that their shared genes play a role. Homosexuality, by the way, is one of the few examples of a nature-nurture debate in which the politically correct position is “nature.” If homosexuality is innate, according to the common understanding, then people don’t choose to be gay and hence can’t be criticized for their lifestyle; nor could they convert the children in their classrooms or Boy Scout troops if they wanted to.
The evolutionary mystery is how any genetic tendency to avoid heterosexual sex can remain in a population for long, since it would have consigned the person to few or no offspring. Perhaps “gay genes” have a compensating advantage, like enhancing fertility when they are carried by women, particularly if they are on the X chromosome, which women have in two copies—the advantage to women would need to be only a bit more than half the disadvantage to men for the gene to spread.
223
Perhaps the putative gay genes lead to homosexuality only in certain environments, which didn’t exist while our genes were selected. One ethnographic survey found that in almost 60 percent of preliterate societies, homosexuality was unknown or extremely rare.
224
Or perhaps the genes work indirectly, by making a fetus susceptible to fluctuations in hormones or antibodies which affect its developing brain.
223
Perhaps the putative gay genes lead to homosexuality only in certain environments, which didn’t exist while our genes were selected. One ethnographic survey found that in almost 60 percent of preliterate societies, homosexuality was unknown or extremely rare.
224
Or perhaps the genes work indirectly, by making a fetus susceptible to fluctuations in hormones or antibodies which affect its developing brain.
Whatever the explanation, people with a homosexual orientation who grow up in a society that does not cultivate homosexual behavior may find themselves the target of a society-wide hostility. Among traditional societies that take note of homosexuality in their midst, more than twice as many disapprove of it as tolerate it.
225
And in traditional and modern societies alike, the intolerance can erupt in violence. Bullies and toughs may see an easy mark on whom they can prove their machismo to an audience or to one another. And lawmakers may have moralistic convictions about homosexuality that they translate into commandments and statutes. These beliefs may be products of the cross-wiring between disgust and morality that leads people to confuse visceral revulsion with objective sinfulness.
226
That short circuit may convert an impulse to avoid homosexual partners into an impulse to condemn homosexuality. At least since biblical times homophobic sentiments have been translated into laws that punish homosexuals with death or mutilation, especially in Christian and Muslim kingdoms and their former colonies.
227
A chilling 20th-century example was the targeting of homosexuals for elimination during the Holocaust.
225
And in traditional and modern societies alike, the intolerance can erupt in violence. Bullies and toughs may see an easy mark on whom they can prove their machismo to an audience or to one another. And lawmakers may have moralistic convictions about homosexuality that they translate into commandments and statutes. These beliefs may be products of the cross-wiring between disgust and morality that leads people to confuse visceral revulsion with objective sinfulness.
226
That short circuit may convert an impulse to avoid homosexual partners into an impulse to condemn homosexuality. At least since biblical times homophobic sentiments have been translated into laws that punish homosexuals with death or mutilation, especially in Christian and Muslim kingdoms and their former colonies.
227
A chilling 20th-century example was the targeting of homosexuals for elimination during the Holocaust.
During the Enlightenment, the questioning of any moral precept that was based on visceral impulse or religious dogma led to a new look at homosexuality.
228
Montesquieu and Voltaire argued that homosexuality should be decriminalized, though they didn’t go so far as to say that it was morally acceptable. In 1785 Jeremy Bentham took the next step. Using utilitarian reasoning, which equates morality with whatever brings the greatest good to the greatest number, Bentham argued that there is nothing immoral about homosexual acts because they make no one worse off. Homosexuality was legalized in France after the Revolution, and in a smattering of other countries in the ensuing decades, as figure 7–23 shows. The movement picked up in the middle of the 20th century and blasted off in the 1970s and 1990s, as the gay rights movement was fueled by the ideal of human rights.
228
Montesquieu and Voltaire argued that homosexuality should be decriminalized, though they didn’t go so far as to say that it was morally acceptable. In 1785 Jeremy Bentham took the next step. Using utilitarian reasoning, which equates morality with whatever brings the greatest good to the greatest number, Bentham argued that there is nothing immoral about homosexual acts because they make no one worse off. Homosexuality was legalized in France after the Revolution, and in a smattering of other countries in the ensuing decades, as figure 7–23 shows. The movement picked up in the middle of the 20th century and blasted off in the 1970s and 1990s, as the gay rights movement was fueled by the ideal of human rights.
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