Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (140 page)
BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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So while recent biological evolution may, in theory, have tweaked our inclinations toward violence and nonviolence, we have no good evidence that it actually has. At the same time, we do have good evidence for changes that could not possibly be genetic, because they unfolded on time scales that are too rapid to be explained by natural selection, even with the new understanding of how recently it has acted. The abolition of slavery and cruel punishments during the Humanitarian Revolution; the reduction of violence against minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals during the Rights Revolutions; and the plummeting of war and genocide during the Long Peace and the New Peace, all unfolded over a span of decades or even years, sometimes within a single generation. A particularly dramatic decline is the near-halving of the homicide rate during the Great American Crime Decline of the 1990s. The decay rate of that decline, around 7 percent a year, is powerful enough to drag a measure of violence down to 1 percent of its original level over just two generations, all without the slightest change in gene frequencies. Since it is indisputable that cultural and social inputs can adjust the settings of our better angels (such as self-control and empathy) and thereby control our violent inclinations, we have the means to explain all the declines of violence without invoking recent biological evolution. At least for the time being, we have no need for that hypothesis.
MORALITY AND TABOOThe world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest. The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit. The torture of heretics and conversos, the burning of witches, the imprisonment of homosexuals, and the honor killing of unchaste sisters and daughters are just a few examples. The incalculable suffering that has been visited on the world by people motivated by a moral cause is enough to make one sympathize with the comedian George Carlin when he said, “I think motivation is overrated. You show me some lazy prick who’s lying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis, and I’ll show you someone who’s
not causing any fucking trouble
!”
not causing any fucking trouble
!”
Though the net contribution of the human moral sense to human well-being may well be negative, on those occasions when it is suitably deployed it can claim some monumental advances, including the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment and the Rights Revolutions of recent decades. When it comes to virulent ideologies, morality may be the disease, but morality is also the cure. The mentality of taboo, like the mentality of morality of which it is part, also can pull in either direction. It can turn religious or sexual nonconformity into an outrage that calls for ghastly punishment, but it can also prevent the mind from sliding into dangerous territory such as wars of conquest, the use of chemical and nuclear weapons, dehumanizing racial stereotypes, casual allusions to rape, and the taking of identifiable human lives.
How can we make sense of this crazy angel—the part of human nature that would seem to have the strongest claim to be the source of our goodness, but that in practice can be more diabolical than our worst inner demon?
To understand the role of the moral sense in the decline of violence, we have to solve a number of psychological enigmas. One is how people in different times and cultures can be driven by goals that they experience as “moral” but that are unrecognizable to our own standards of morality. Another is why the moral sense does not, in general, push toward the reduction of suffering but so often increases it. A third is how the moral sense can be so compartmentalized: why upstanding citizens can beat their wives and children; why liberal democracies can practice slavery and colonial oppression; why Nazi Germany could treat animals with unequaled kindness. A fourth is why, for better and for worse, morality can be extended to thoughts as well as deeds, leading to the paradox of taboo. And the overriding puzzle, of course, is: What changed? What degree of freedom in the human moral sense has been engaged by the processes of history to drive violence downward?
The starting point is to distinguish morality per se, a topic in philosophy (in particular, normative ethics), from the human moral sense, a topic in psychology. Unless one is a radical moral relativist, one believes that people can in some sense be
mistaken
about their moral convictions; that their justifications of genocide, rape, honor killings, and the torture of heretics are erroneous, not just distasteful to our sensibilities.
165
Whether one is a moral realist and believes that moral truths are objectively out there somewhere like mathematical truths, or simply allows that moral statements have some degree of warrant in terms of consistency with universally held convictions or the best understanding that arises out of our collective rational deliberation, one can distinguish questions of morality from questions of moral psychology. The latter ask about the mental processes that people
experience
as moral, and they can be studied in the lab and field, just like any other cognitive or emotional faculty.
mistaken
about their moral convictions; that their justifications of genocide, rape, honor killings, and the torture of heretics are erroneous, not just distasteful to our sensibilities.
165
Whether one is a moral realist and believes that moral truths are objectively out there somewhere like mathematical truths, or simply allows that moral statements have some degree of warrant in terms of consistency with universally held convictions or the best understanding that arises out of our collective rational deliberation, one can distinguish questions of morality from questions of moral psychology. The latter ask about the mental processes that people
experience
as moral, and they can be studied in the lab and field, just like any other cognitive or emotional faculty.
The next step in understanding the moral sense is to recognize that it is a distinctive mode of thinking about an action, not just the avoidance of an action. There are important psychological distinctions between avoiding an action because it is deemed immoral (“Killing is wrong”) and avoiding it because it is merely disagreeable (“I hate cauliflower”), unfashionable (“Bellbottoms are out”), or imprudent (“Don’t scratch mosquito bites”).
166
166
One difference is that disapproval of a moralized act is
universalized.
If you think cauliflower is distasteful, then whether other people eat it is of no concern to you. But if you think that murder and torture and rape are immoral, then you cannot simply avoid these activities yourself and be indifferent to whether other people indulge in them. You have to disapprove of
anyone
committing such acts.
universalized.
If you think cauliflower is distasteful, then whether other people eat it is of no concern to you. But if you think that murder and torture and rape are immoral, then you cannot simply avoid these activities yourself and be indifferent to whether other people indulge in them. You have to disapprove of
anyone
committing such acts.
Second, moralized beliefs are
actionable
. While people may not unfailingly carry out Socrates’ dictum that “To know the good is to do the good,” they tacitly aspire to it. People see moral actions as intrinsically worthy goals, which need no ulterior motive. If people believe that murder is immoral, they don’t need to be paid or even esteemed to refrain from murdering someone. When people do breach a moral precept, they rationalize the failure by invoking some countervailing precept, by finding an exculpatory excuse, or by acknowledging that the failure is a regrettable personal weakness. Other than devils and storybook villains, no one says, “I believe murder is a heinous atrocity, and I do it whenever it serves my purposes.”
167
actionable
. While people may not unfailingly carry out Socrates’ dictum that “To know the good is to do the good,” they tacitly aspire to it. People see moral actions as intrinsically worthy goals, which need no ulterior motive. If people believe that murder is immoral, they don’t need to be paid or even esteemed to refrain from murdering someone. When people do breach a moral precept, they rationalize the failure by invoking some countervailing precept, by finding an exculpatory excuse, or by acknowledging that the failure is a regrettable personal weakness. Other than devils and storybook villains, no one says, “I believe murder is a heinous atrocity, and I do it whenever it serves my purposes.”
167
Finally, moralized infractions are
punishable
. If one believes that murder is wrong, one is not just entitled to see a murderer punished, but one is
obligated
to make it happen. One may not, as we say, let someone get away with murder. Now just substitute “idolatry” or “homosexuality” or “blasphemy” or “subversion” or “indecency” or “insubordination” for “murder,” and you can see how the human moral sense can be a major force for evil.
punishable
. If one believes that murder is wrong, one is not just entitled to see a murderer punished, but one is
obligated
to make it happen. One may not, as we say, let someone get away with murder. Now just substitute “idolatry” or “homosexuality” or “blasphemy” or “subversion” or “indecency” or “insubordination” for “murder,” and you can see how the human moral sense can be a major force for evil.
Another design feature of the moral sense is that many moral convictions operate as norms and taboos rather than as principles the believer can articulate and defend. In the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s famous six-stage progression of moral development, from a child’s avoidance of punishment to a philosopher’s universal principles, the middle two stages (which many people never get out of) consist of conforming to norms to be a good boy or girl, and maintaining conventions to preserve social stability. When reasoning through the moral dilemma that Kohlberg made famous, in which Heinz must break into a drugstore to steal an overpriced drug that will save his dying wife, people in these stages can muster no better justification for their answers than that Heinz shouldn’t steal the drug because stealing is bad and illegal and he is not a criminal, or that Heinz should steal the drug because that’s what a good husband does.
168
Fewer people can articulate a principled justification, such as that human life is a cardinal value that trumps social norms, social stability, or obedience to the law.
168
Fewer people can articulate a principled justification, such as that human life is a cardinal value that trumps social norms, social stability, or obedience to the law.
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has underscored the ineffability of moral norms in a phenomenon he calls moral dumbfounding. Often people have an instant intuition that an action is immoral, and then struggle, often unsuccessfully, to come up with reasons
why
it is immoral.
169
When Haidt asked participants, for example, whether it would be all right for a brother and sister to have voluntary protected sex, for a person to clean a toilet with a discarded American flag, for a family to eat a pet dog that had been killed by a car, for a man to buy a dead chicken and have sex with it, or for a person to break a deathbed vow to visit the grave of his mother, they said no in each case. But when asked for justifications, they floundered ineffectually before giving up and saying, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.”
why
it is immoral.
169
When Haidt asked participants, for example, whether it would be all right for a brother and sister to have voluntary protected sex, for a person to clean a toilet with a discarded American flag, for a family to eat a pet dog that had been killed by a car, for a man to buy a dead chicken and have sex with it, or for a person to break a deathbed vow to visit the grave of his mother, they said no in each case. But when asked for justifications, they floundered ineffectually before giving up and saying, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.”
Moral norms, even when ineffable, can sometimes be effective brakes on violent behavior. In the modern West, as we have seen, the avoidance of some kinds of violence, such as mercy-killing an abandoned child, retaliating for an insult, and declaring war on another developed state, consist not in weighing the moral issues, empathizing with the targets, or restraining an impulse, but in not having the violent act as a live option in the mind at all. The act is not considered and avoided; it is unthinkable or laughable.
The combination of radical cultural differences in which behaviors are moralized with moral dumbfounding in our own culture may create the impression that norms and taboos are arbitrary—that there may be a culture out there somewhere in which it is immoral to utter a sentence with an even number of words or to deny that the ocean is boiling hot. But the anthropologist Richard Shweder and several of his students and collaborators have found that moral norms across the world cluster around a small number of themes.
170
The intuitions that we in the modern West tend to think of as the core of morality—fairness, justice, the protection of individuals, and the prevention of harm—are just one of several spheres of concern that may attach themselves to the cognitive and emotional paraphernalia of moralization. Even a glance at ancient religions like Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism reminds us that they moralize a slew of other concerns, such as loyalty, respect, obedience, asceticism, and the regulation of bodily functions like eating, sex, and menstruation.
170
The intuitions that we in the modern West tend to think of as the core of morality—fairness, justice, the protection of individuals, and the prevention of harm—are just one of several spheres of concern that may attach themselves to the cognitive and emotional paraphernalia of moralization. Even a glance at ancient religions like Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism reminds us that they moralize a slew of other concerns, such as loyalty, respect, obedience, asceticism, and the regulation of bodily functions like eating, sex, and menstruation.
BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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