The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (114 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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The fifth and most consequential cause of violence is ideology, in which true believers weave a collection of motives into a creed and recruit other people to carry out its destructive goals. An ideology cannot be identified with a part of the brain or even with a whole brain, because it is distributed across the brains of many people.
PREDATIONThe first category of violence is not really a category at all, because its perpetrators have no destructive motive like hate or anger. They simply take the shortest path to something they want, and a living thing happens to be in the way. At best it is a category by exclusion: the absence of any inhibiting factor like sympathy or moral concern. When Immanuel Kant stated the second formulation of his Categorical Imperative—that an act is moral if it treats a person as an end in itself and not as a means to an end—he was in effect defining morality as the avoidance of this kind of violence.
Predation may also be called exploitative, instrumental, or practical violence.
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It coincides with Hobbes’s first cause of quarrel: to invade for gain. It is Dawkins’s survival machine treating another survival machine as a part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is the interpersonal equivalent of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is merely the continuation of policy by other means. It is Willie Sutton’s answer to the question of why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” It lies beneath the advice of a farmer to increase a horse’s efficiency by castrating it with two bricks. When asked, “Doesn’t that hurt,” the farmer replies, “Not if you keep your thumbs out of the way.”
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It coincides with Hobbes’s first cause of quarrel: to invade for gain. It is Dawkins’s survival machine treating another survival machine as a part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is the interpersonal equivalent of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is merely the continuation of policy by other means. It is Willie Sutton’s answer to the question of why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” It lies beneath the advice of a farmer to increase a horse’s efficiency by castrating it with two bricks. When asked, “Doesn’t that hurt,” the farmer replies, “Not if you keep your thumbs out of the way.”
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Because predatory violence is just a means to a goal, it comes in as many varieties as there are human goals. The paradigm case is literal predation—hunting for food or sport—because it involves no animosity toward the victim. Far from hating their quarry, hunters valorize and totemize them, from Paleolithic cave paintings to trophies above the mantels in gentlemen’s clubs. Hunters may even empathize with their prey—proof that empathy alone is not a bar to violence. The ecologist Louis Liebenberg studied the remarkable ability of the !Kung San to infer the whereabouts and physical condition of their game from a few faint tracks as they pursue them across the Kalahari Desert.
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They do it with empathy—putting themselves in the hooves of the animal and imagining what it is feeling and where it is tempted to flee. There may even be an element of love. One night after the ninth inning of a baseball game, I was too comatose to get off the couch or even change the channel and passively watched the following program on the cable sports network. It was a show about fishing, and consisted entirely of footage of a middle-aged man in an aluminum boat on a nondescript stretch of water pulling in one large bass after another. With each catch he brought the fish close to his face and stroked it, making little kissy noises and cooing, “Ooh, aren’t you a beauty! You’re a pretty one! Yes, you are!”
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They do it with empathy—putting themselves in the hooves of the animal and imagining what it is feeling and where it is tempted to flee. There may even be an element of love. One night after the ninth inning of a baseball game, I was too comatose to get off the couch or even change the channel and passively watched the following program on the cable sports network. It was a show about fishing, and consisted entirely of footage of a middle-aged man in an aluminum boat on a nondescript stretch of water pulling in one large bass after another. With each catch he brought the fish close to his face and stroked it, making little kissy noises and cooing, “Ooh, aren’t you a beauty! You’re a pretty one! Yes, you are!”
The chasm between the perpetrator’s perspective—amoral, pragmatic, even frivolous—and the victim’s is nowhere wider than in our predation of animals. It’s safe to say that the bass, if given the chance, would not reciprocate the fisherman’s affection, and most people would not want to know the opinion of a broiler chicken or a live lobster on whether the mild pleasure we get from eating their flesh rather than a plate of eggplant justifies the sacrifice they will make. The same incuriosity enables coldhearted predatory violence against humans.
Here are a few examples: Romans suppressing provincial rebellions; Mongols razing cities that resist their conquest; free companies of demobilized soldiers plundering and raping; colonial settlers expelling or massacring indigenous peoples; gangsters whacking a rival, an informant, or an uncooperative official; rulers assassinating a political opponent or vice versa; governments jailing or executing dissidents; warring nations bombing enemy cities; hoodlums injuring a victim who resists a robbery or carjacking; criminals killing an eyewitness to a crime; mothers smothering a newborn they feel they cannot raise. Defensive and preemptive violence—doing it to them before they do it to you—is also a form of instrumental violence.
Predatory violence may be the most extraordinary and perplexing phenomenon in the human moral landscape precisely because it is so mundane and explicable. We read of an atrocity—say, rebel soldiers encamped on a rooftop in Uganda who passed the time by kidnapping women, tying them up, raping them, and throwing them to their deaths—shake our heads, and ask, “How could people do these things?”
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We refuse to accept obvious answers, like boredom, lust, or sport, because the suffering of the victim is so obscenely disproportionate to the benefit to the perpetrator. We take the victim’s point of view and advert to a conception of pure evil. Yet to understand these outrages, we might be better off asking not why they happen but why they don’t happen more often.
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We refuse to accept obvious answers, like boredom, lust, or sport, because the suffering of the victim is so obscenely disproportionate to the benefit to the perpetrator. We take the victim’s point of view and advert to a conception of pure evil. Yet to understand these outrages, we might be better off asking not why they happen but why they don’t happen more often.
With the possible exception of Jain priests, all of us engage in predatory violence, if only against insects. In most cases the temptation to prey on humans is inhibited by emotional and cognitive restraints, but in a minority of individuals these restraints are absent. Psychopaths make up 1 to 3 percent of the male population, depending on whether one uses the broad definition of antisocial personality disorder, which embraces many kinds of callous troublemakers, or a narrower definition that picks out the more cunning manipulators.
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Psychopaths are liars and bullies from the time they are children, show no capacity for sympathy or remorse, make up 20 to 30 percent of violent criminals, and commit half the serious crimes.
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They also perpetrate nonviolent crimes like bilking elderly couples out of their life savings and running a business with ruthless disregard for the welfare of the workforce or stakeholders. As we saw, the regions of the brain that handle social emotions, especially the amygdala and orbital cortex, are relatively shrunken or unresponsive in psychopaths, though they may show no other signs of pathology.
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In some people, signs of psychopathy develop after damage to these regions from disease or an accident, but the condition is also partly heritable. Psychopathy may have evolved as a minority strategy that exploits a large population of trusting cooperators.
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Though no society can stock its militias and armies exclusively with psychopaths, such men are bound to be disproportionately attracted to these adventures, with their prospect of plunder and rape. As we saw in chapter 6, genocides and civil wars often involve a division of labor between the ideologues or warlords who run them and the shock troops, including some number of psychopaths, who are happy to carry them out.
84
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Psychopaths are liars and bullies from the time they are children, show no capacity for sympathy or remorse, make up 20 to 30 percent of violent criminals, and commit half the serious crimes.
81
They also perpetrate nonviolent crimes like bilking elderly couples out of their life savings and running a business with ruthless disregard for the welfare of the workforce or stakeholders. As we saw, the regions of the brain that handle social emotions, especially the amygdala and orbital cortex, are relatively shrunken or unresponsive in psychopaths, though they may show no other signs of pathology.
82
In some people, signs of psychopathy develop after damage to these regions from disease or an accident, but the condition is also partly heritable. Psychopathy may have evolved as a minority strategy that exploits a large population of trusting cooperators.
83
Though no society can stock its militias and armies exclusively with psychopaths, such men are bound to be disproportionately attracted to these adventures, with their prospect of plunder and rape. As we saw in chapter 6, genocides and civil wars often involve a division of labor between the ideologues or warlords who run them and the shock troops, including some number of psychopaths, who are happy to carry them out.
84
The psychology of predatory violence consists in the human capacity for means-end reasoning and the fact that our faculties of moral restraint do not kick in automatically in our dealings with every living thing. But there are two psychological twists in the way that predatory violence is carried out.
Though predatory violence is purely practical, the human mind does not stick to abstract reasoning for long. It tends to backslide into evolutionarily prepared and emotionally charged categories.
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As soon as the objects being preyed upon take protective measures in response, emotions are likely to run high. The human prey may hide and regroup, or they may fight back, perhaps even threatening to destroy the predator preemptively, a kind of instrumental violence of their own that gives rise to a security dilemma or Hobbesian trap. In these cases the predator’s state of mind may shift from dispassionate means-ends analysis to disgust, hatred, and anger.
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As we have seen, perpetrators commonly analogize their victims to vermin and treat them with moralized disgust. Or they may see them as existential threats and treat them with hatred, the emotion that, as Aristotle noted, consists of a desire not to punish an adversary but to end its existence. When extermination is not feasible and perpetrators have to continue to deal with their victims, either directly or with the participation of third parties, they may treat them with anger. The predators may respond to the defensive reprisals of their prey as if
they
were the ones under attack, and experience a moralized wrath and a thirst for revenge. Thanks to the Moralization Gap, they will minimize their own first strike as necessary and trivial while magnifying the reprisal as unprovoked and devastating. Each side will count the wrongs differently—the perpetrator tallying an even number of strikes and the victim an odd number—and the difference in arithmetic can stoke a spiral of revenge, a dynamic we will explore in a later section.
85
As soon as the objects being preyed upon take protective measures in response, emotions are likely to run high. The human prey may hide and regroup, or they may fight back, perhaps even threatening to destroy the predator preemptively, a kind of instrumental violence of their own that gives rise to a security dilemma or Hobbesian trap. In these cases the predator’s state of mind may shift from dispassionate means-ends analysis to disgust, hatred, and anger.
86
As we have seen, perpetrators commonly analogize their victims to vermin and treat them with moralized disgust. Or they may see them as existential threats and treat them with hatred, the emotion that, as Aristotle noted, consists of a desire not to punish an adversary but to end its existence. When extermination is not feasible and perpetrators have to continue to deal with their victims, either directly or with the participation of third parties, they may treat them with anger. The predators may respond to the defensive reprisals of their prey as if
they
were the ones under attack, and experience a moralized wrath and a thirst for revenge. Thanks to the Moralization Gap, they will minimize their own first strike as necessary and trivial while magnifying the reprisal as unprovoked and devastating. Each side will count the wrongs differently—the perpetrator tallying an even number of strikes and the victim an odd number—and the difference in arithmetic can stoke a spiral of revenge, a dynamic we will explore in a later section.
There is a second way self-serving biases can fan a small flame of predatory violence into an inferno. People exaggerate not just their moral rectitude but their power and prospects, a subtype of self-serving bias called positive illusions.
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Hundreds of studies have shown that people overrate their health, leadership ability, intelligence, professional competence, sporting prowess, and managerial skills. People also hold the nonsensical belief that they are inherently lucky. Most people think they are more likely than the average person to attain a good first job, to have gifted children, and to live to a ripe old age. They also think that they are
less
likely than the average person to be the victim of an accident, crime, disease, depression, unwanted pregnancy, or earthquake.
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Hundreds of studies have shown that people overrate their health, leadership ability, intelligence, professional competence, sporting prowess, and managerial skills. People also hold the nonsensical belief that they are inherently lucky. Most people think they are more likely than the average person to attain a good first job, to have gifted children, and to live to a ripe old age. They also think that they are
less
likely than the average person to be the victim of an accident, crime, disease, depression, unwanted pregnancy, or earthquake.
Why should people be so deluded? Positive illusions make people happier, more confident, and mentally healthier, but that cannot be the explanation for why they exist, because it only begs the question of
why
our brains should be designed so that only unrealistic assessments make us happy and confident, as opposed to calibrating our contentment against reality. The most plausible explanation is that positive illusions are a bargaining tactic, a credible bluff. In recruiting an ally to support you in a risky venture, in bargaining for the best deal, or in intimidating an adversary into backing down, you stand to gain if you credibly exaggerate your strengths. Believing your own exaggeration is better than cynically lying about it, because the arms race between lying and lie detection has equipped your audience with the means of seeing through barefaced lies.
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As long as your exaggerations are not laughable, your audience cannot afford to ignore your self-assessment altogether, because you have more information about yourself than anyone else does, and you have a built-in incentive not to distort your assessment
too
much or you would constantly blunder into disasters. It would be better for the species if no one exaggerated, but our brains were not selected for the benefit of the species, and no individual can afford to be the only honest one in a community of selfenhancers.
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why
our brains should be designed so that only unrealistic assessments make us happy and confident, as opposed to calibrating our contentment against reality. The most plausible explanation is that positive illusions are a bargaining tactic, a credible bluff. In recruiting an ally to support you in a risky venture, in bargaining for the best deal, or in intimidating an adversary into backing down, you stand to gain if you credibly exaggerate your strengths. Believing your own exaggeration is better than cynically lying about it, because the arms race between lying and lie detection has equipped your audience with the means of seeing through barefaced lies.
88
As long as your exaggerations are not laughable, your audience cannot afford to ignore your self-assessment altogether, because you have more information about yourself than anyone else does, and you have a built-in incentive not to distort your assessment
too
much or you would constantly blunder into disasters. It would be better for the species if no one exaggerated, but our brains were not selected for the benefit of the species, and no individual can afford to be the only honest one in a community of selfenhancers.
89
Overconfidence makes the tragedy of predation even worse. If people were completely rational, they would launch an act of predatory aggression only if they were likely to succeed and only if the spoils of the success exceeded the losses they would incur in the fighting. By the same token, the weaker party should concede as soon as the outcome was a foregone conclusion. A world with rational actors might see plenty of exploitation, but it should not see many fights or wars. Violence would come about only if the two parties were so closely matched that a fight was the only way to determine who was stronger.
But in a world with positive illusions, an aggressor may be emboldened to attack, and a defender emboldened to resist, well out of proportion to their odds of success. As Winston Churchill noted, “Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.”
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The result can be wars of attrition (in both the game-theoretic and military sense), which, as we saw in chapter 5, are among the most destructive events in history, plumping out the tail of high-magnitude wars in the power-law distribution of deadly quarrels.
90
The result can be wars of attrition (in both the game-theoretic and military sense), which, as we saw in chapter 5, are among the most destructive events in history, plumping out the tail of high-magnitude wars in the power-law distribution of deadly quarrels.
Military historians have long noted that leaders make decisions in war that are reckless to the point of delusion.
91
The invasions of Russia by Napoleon and, more than a century later, by Hitler are infamous examples. Over the past five centuries, countries that initiated wars have ended up losing them between a quarter and a half of the time, and when they won the victories were often Pyrrhic.
92
Richard Wrangham, inspired by Barbara Tuchman’s
The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
and by Robert Trivers’s theory of self-deception, suggested that military incompetence is often a matter not of insufficient data or mistakes in strategy but of overconfidence.
93
Leaders overestimate their prospects of winning. Their bravado may rally the troops and intimidate weaker adversaries, but also may put them on a collision course with an enemy who is not as weak as they think and who may be under the spell of an overconfidence of its own.
91
The invasions of Russia by Napoleon and, more than a century later, by Hitler are infamous examples. Over the past five centuries, countries that initiated wars have ended up losing them between a quarter and a half of the time, and when they won the victories were often Pyrrhic.
92
Richard Wrangham, inspired by Barbara Tuchman’s
The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
and by Robert Trivers’s theory of self-deception, suggested that military incompetence is often a matter not of insufficient data or mistakes in strategy but of overconfidence.
93
Leaders overestimate their prospects of winning. Their bravado may rally the troops and intimidate weaker adversaries, but also may put them on a collision course with an enemy who is not as weak as they think and who may be under the spell of an overconfidence of its own.
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