The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (108 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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—William Shakespeare,
Measure for Measure
Measure for Measure
T
wo aspects of the decline of violence have profound implications for our understanding of human nature: (1) the violence; (2) the decline. The last six chapters have shown that human history is a cavalcade of bloodshed. We have seen tribal raiding and feuding that kills a majority of males, the disposal of newborns that kills a majority of females, the staging of torture for vengeance and pleasure, and killings of enough kinds of victims to fill a page of a rhyming dictionary: homicide, democide, genocide, ethnocide, politicide, regicide, infanticide, neonaticide, filicide, siblicide, gynecide, uxoricide, mariticide, and terrorism by suicide. Violence is found throughout the history and prehistory of our species, and shows no signs of having been invented in one place and spread to the others.
wo aspects of the decline of violence have profound implications for our understanding of human nature: (1) the violence; (2) the decline. The last six chapters have shown that human history is a cavalcade of bloodshed. We have seen tribal raiding and feuding that kills a majority of males, the disposal of newborns that kills a majority of females, the staging of torture for vengeance and pleasure, and killings of enough kinds of victims to fill a page of a rhyming dictionary: homicide, democide, genocide, ethnocide, politicide, regicide, infanticide, neonaticide, filicide, siblicide, gynecide, uxoricide, mariticide, and terrorism by suicide. Violence is found throughout the history and prehistory of our species, and shows no signs of having been invented in one place and spread to the others.
At the same time, those chapters contain five dozen graphs that plot violence over time and display a line that meanders from the top left to the bottom right. Not a single category of violence has been pinned to a fixed rate over the course of history. Whatever causes violence, it is not a perennial urge like hunger, sex, or the need to sleep.
The decline of violence thereby allows us to dispatch a dichotomy that has stood in the way of understanding the roots of violence for millennia: whether humankind is basically bad or basically good, an ape or an angel, a hawk or a dove, the nasty brute of textbook Hobbes or the noble savage of textbook Rousseau. Left to their own devices, humans will not fall into a state of peaceful cooperation, but nor do they have a thirst for blood that must regularly be slaked. There must be at least a grain of truth in conceptions of the human mind that grant it more than one part—theories like faculty psychology, multiple intelligences, mental organs, modularity, domain-specificity, and the metaphor of the mind as a Swiss army knife. Human nature accommodates motives that impel us to violence, like predation, dominance, and vengeance, but also motives that—under the right circumstances—impel us toward peace, like compassion, fairness, self-control, and reason. This chapter and its successor will explore these motives and the circumstances that engage them.
THE DARK SIDEBefore exploring our inner demons, I need to make the case that they exist, because there is a resistance in modern intellectual life to the idea that human nature embraces any motives that incline us toward violence at all.
1
Though the ideas that we evolved from hippie chimps and that primitive people had no concept of violence have been refuted by the facts of anthropology, one still sometimes reads that violence is perpetrated by a few bad apples who do all the damage and that everyone else is peaceful at heart.
1
Though the ideas that we evolved from hippie chimps and that primitive people had no concept of violence have been refuted by the facts of anthropology, one still sometimes reads that violence is perpetrated by a few bad apples who do all the damage and that everyone else is peaceful at heart.
It is certainly true that the lives of most people in most societies do not end in violence. The numbers on the vertical axes of the graphs in the preceding chapters have been graduated in single digits, tens, or at most hundreds of killings per 100,000 people per year; only rarely, as in tribal warfare or an unfolding genocide, are the rates in the thousands. It is also true that in most hostile encounters, the antagonists, whether humans or other animals, usually back down before either of them can do serious damage to the other. Even in wartime, many soldiers do not fire their weapons and are racked by posttraumatic stress disorder when they do. Some writers conclude that the vast majority of humans are constitutionally averse to violence and that the high body counts are merely signs of how much harm a few psychopaths can do.
So let me begin by convincing you that most of us—including you, dear reader—are wired for violence, even if in all likelihood we will never have an occasion to use it. We can begin with our younger selves. The psychologist Richard Tremblay has measured rates of violence over the course of the life span and shown that the most violent stage of life is not adolescence or even young adulthood but the aptly named terrible twos.
2
A typical toddler at least sometimes kicks, bites, hits, and gets into fights, and the rate of physical aggression then goes steadily down over the course of childhood. Tremblay remarks, “Babies do not kill each other, because we do not give them access to knives and guns. The question . . . we’ve been trying to answer for the past 30 years is how do children learn to aggress. [But] that’s the wrong question. The right question is how do they learn not to aggress.”
3
2
A typical toddler at least sometimes kicks, bites, hits, and gets into fights, and the rate of physical aggression then goes steadily down over the course of childhood. Tremblay remarks, “Babies do not kill each other, because we do not give them access to knives and guns. The question . . . we’ve been trying to answer for the past 30 years is how do children learn to aggress. [But] that’s the wrong question. The right question is how do they learn not to aggress.”
3
Now let’s turn to our inner selves. Have you ever fantasized about killing someone you don’t like? In separate studies, the psychologists Douglas Kenrick and David Buss have posed this question to a demographic that is known to have exceptionally low rates of violence—university students—and were stunned at the outcome.
4
Between 70 and 90 percent of the men, and between 50 and 80 percent of the women, admitted to having at least one homicidal fantasy in the preceding year. When I described these studies in a lecture, a student shouted, “Yeah, and the others are lying!” At the very least, they may sympathize with Clarence Darrow when he said, “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”
4
Between 70 and 90 percent of the men, and between 50 and 80 percent of the women, admitted to having at least one homicidal fantasy in the preceding year. When I described these studies in a lecture, a student shouted, “Yeah, and the others are lying!” At the very least, they may sympathize with Clarence Darrow when he said, “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”
The motives for imaginary homicides overlap with those on police blotters: a lover’s quarrel, a response to a threat, vengeance for an act of humiliation or betrayal, and family conflict, proportionally more often with stepparents than with biological parents. Often the reveries are played out before the mind’s eye in theatrical detail, like the jealous revenge fantasy entertained by Rex Harrison while conducting a symphony orchestra in
Unfaithfully Yours
. One young man in Buss’s survey estimated that he came “eighty percent of the way” toward killing a former friend who had lied to the man’s fiancée that he had been unfaithful to her and then made a move on the fiancée himself:
Unfaithfully Yours
. One young man in Buss’s survey estimated that he came “eighty percent of the way” toward killing a former friend who had lied to the man’s fiancée that he had been unfaithful to her and then made a move on the fiancée himself:
First, I would break every bone in his body, starting with his fingers and toes, slowly making my way to larger ones. Then I would puncture his lungs and maybe a few other organs. Basically give him as much pain as possible before killing him.
5
A woman said she had gone 60 percent of the way toward killing an exboyfriend who wanted to get back together and had threatened to send a video of the two of them having sex to her new boyfriend and her fellow students:
I actually did this. I invited him over for dinner. And as he was in the kitchen, looking stupid peeling the carrots to make a salad, I came to him laughing, gently, so he wouldn’t suspect anything. I thought about grabbing a knife quickly and stabbing him in the chest repeatedly until he was dead. I actually did the first thing, but he saw my intentions, and ran away.
Many actual homicides are preceded by lengthy ruminations just like this. The small number of premeditated murders that are actually carried out must be the cusp of a colossal iceberg of homicidal desires submerged in a sea of inhibitions. As the forensic psychiatrist Robert Simon put it in a book title (paraphrasing Freud paraphrasing Plato),
Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream
.
Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream
.
Even people who don’t daydream about killing get intense pleasure from vicarious experiences of doing it or seeing it done. People spend large amounts of their time and income immersing themselves in any of a number of genres of bloody virtual reality: Bible stories, Homeric sagas, martyrologies, portrayals of hell, hero myths, Gilgamesh, Greek tragedies, Beowulf, the Bayeux Tapestry, Shakespearean dramas, Grimm’s fairy tales, Punch and Judy, opera, murder mysteries, penny dreadfuls, pulp fiction, dime novels, Grand Guignol, murder ballads, films noirs, Westerns, horror comics, superhero comics, the Three Stooges, Tom and Jerry, the Road Runner, video games, and movies starring a certain ex-governor of California. In
Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment
, the literary scholar Harold Schechter shows that today’s splatter films are mild stuff compared to the simulated torture and mutilation that have titillated audiences for centuries. Long before computer-generated imagery, theater directors would apply their ingenuity to grisly special effects, such as “phony heads that could be decapitated from dummies and impaled on pikes; fake skin that could be flayed from an actor’s torso; concealed bladders filled with animal blood that could produce a satisfying spurt of gore when punctured.”
6
Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment
, the literary scholar Harold Schechter shows that today’s splatter films are mild stuff compared to the simulated torture and mutilation that have titillated audiences for centuries. Long before computer-generated imagery, theater directors would apply their ingenuity to grisly special effects, such as “phony heads that could be decapitated from dummies and impaled on pikes; fake skin that could be flayed from an actor’s torso; concealed bladders filled with animal blood that could produce a satisfying spurt of gore when punctured.”
6
The vast mismatch between the number of violent acts that run through people’s imaginations and the number they carry out in the world tells us something about the design of the mind. Statistics on violence underestimate the importance of violence in the human condition. The human brain runs on the Latin adage “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Even in peaceable societies, people are fascinated by the logic of bluff and threat, the psychology of alliance and betrayal, the vulnerabilities of a human body and how they can be exploited or shielded. The universal pleasure that people take in violent entertainment, always in the teeth of censorship and moralistic denunciation, suggests that the mind craves information on the conduct of violence.
7
A likely explanation is that in evolutionary history, violence was not so improbable that people could afford not to understand how it works.
8
7
A likely explanation is that in evolutionary history, violence was not so improbable that people could afford not to understand how it works.
8
The anthropologist Donald Symons has noticed a similar mismatch in the other major content of naughty reverie and entertainment, sex.
9
People fantasize about and make art out of illicit sex vastly more often than they engage in it. Like adultery, violence may be improbable, but when an opportunity arises, the potential consequences for Darwinian fitness are gargantuan. Symons suggests that higher consciousness itself is designed for low-frequency, highimpact events. We seldom muse about daily necessities like grasping, walking, or speaking, let alone pay money to see them dramatized. What grabs our mental spotlight is illicit sex, violent death, and Walter Mittyish leaps of status.
9
People fantasize about and make art out of illicit sex vastly more often than they engage in it. Like adultery, violence may be improbable, but when an opportunity arises, the potential consequences for Darwinian fitness are gargantuan. Symons suggests that higher consciousness itself is designed for low-frequency, highimpact events. We seldom muse about daily necessities like grasping, walking, or speaking, let alone pay money to see them dramatized. What grabs our mental spotlight is illicit sex, violent death, and Walter Mittyish leaps of status.
Now to our brains. The human brain is a swollen and warped version of the brains of other mammals. All the major parts may be found in our furry cousins, where they do pretty much the same things, such as process information from the senses, control muscles and glands, and store and retrieve memories. Among these parts is a network of regions that has been called the Rage circuit. The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp describes what happened when he sent an electrical current through a part of the Rage circuit of a cat:
Within the first few seconds of the electrical brain stimulation the peaceful animal was emotionally transformed. It leaped viciously toward me with claws unsheathed, fangs bared, hissing and spitting. It could have pounced in many different directions, but its arousal was directed right at my head. Fortunately, a Plexiglas wall separated me from the enraged beast. Within a fraction of a minute after terminating the stimulation, the cat was again relaxed and peaceful, and could be petted without further retribution.
10
The Rage circuit in the cat brain has a counterpart in the human brain, and it too can be stimulated by an electrical current—not in an experiment, of course, but during neurosurgery. A surgeon describes what follows:
The most significant (and the most dramatic) effect of stimulation has been the eliciting of a range of aggressive responses, from coherent, appropriately directed verbal responses (speaking to surgeon, “I feel I could get up and bite you”) to uncontrolled swearing and physically destructive behaviour. . . . On one occasion the patient was asked, 30 sec after cessation of the stimulus, if he had felt angry. He agreed that he had been angry, but that he no longer was, and he sounded very surprised.
11
Cats hiss; humans swear. The fact that the Rage circuit can activate speech suggests that it is not an inert vestige but has functioning connections with the rest of the human brain.
12
The Rage circuit is one of several circuits that control aggression in nonhuman mammals, and as we shall see, they help make sense of the varieties of aggression in humans as well.
12
The Rage circuit is one of several circuits that control aggression in nonhuman mammals, and as we shall see, they help make sense of the varieties of aggression in humans as well.
If violence is stamped into our childhoods, our fantasy lives, our art, and our brains, then how is it possible that soldiers are reluctant to fire their guns in combat, when that is what they are there to do? A famous study of World War II veterans claimed that no more than 15 to 25 percent of them were able to discharge their weapons in battle; other studies have found that most of the bullets that are fired miss their targets.
13
Now, the first claim is based on a dubious study, and the second is a red herring—most shots are fired in war not to pick off individual soldiers but to deter any of them from advancing.
14
Nor is it surprising that when a soldier targets an enemy in combat conditions, it isn’t easy to score a direct hit. But let’s grant that anxiety on the battlefield is high and that many soldiers are paralyzed when the time comes to pull the trigger.
13
Now, the first claim is based on a dubious study, and the second is a red herring—most shots are fired in war not to pick off individual soldiers but to deter any of them from advancing.
14
Nor is it surprising that when a soldier targets an enemy in combat conditions, it isn’t easy to score a direct hit. But let’s grant that anxiety on the battlefield is high and that many soldiers are paralyzed when the time comes to pull the trigger.
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