The Wisdom of Psychopaths (20 page)

When you’ve been at the top of your game for as long as Bob Hare has, you’re entitled to be a little bit choosy about who you hang out with at conferences. So when it came around to the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy’s biennial bash in Montreal in 2011, and e-mailing the distinguished professor to fix up a meeting, I felt it best to keep things formal. Were a time window to present itself during the course of the proceedings, how about a coffee, I intimated?

The response was instantaneous. “I prefer fine Scotch to coffee,” Hare shot back. “You’ll find me in the hotel bar. I’ll buy.”

He was right. On all three counts.

I decide to start off cautiously. “So what the hell do
you
score on the PCL-R, then, Bob?” I ask, over a twenty-year-old single malt.

He laughs.

“Oh, very low,” he says. “Around 1 or 2. My students tell me that I really should work on it a bit more. But I did do something ‘psychopathic’ not so long ago. I splashed out on a brand-new sports car. A BMW.”

“Great!” I say. “Maybe your students have more of an effect on you than you realize.”

My second question is more serious: “When you look around you at modern-day society, do you think, in general, that we’re becoming more psychopathic?”

This time, he takes a bit longer to answer. “I think, in general, yes, society
is
becoming more psychopathic,” he says. “I mean, there’s stuff going on nowadays that we wouldn’t have seen twenty, even ten, years ago. Kids are becoming anesthetized to normal sexual behavior by early exposure to pornography on the Internet. Rent-a-friend sites are getting more popular on the Web, because folks are either too busy or too techy to make real ones.
And I read a report the other day that linked a significant rise in the number of all-female gangs to the increasingly violent nature of modern video game culture. In fact, I think if you’re looking for evidence that society is becoming more psychopathic, the recent hike in female criminality is particularly revealing. And don’t even get me started on Wall Street!”

Hare’s position makes a great deal of sense to those who take even a passing interest in what they read in the newspapers, see on TV, or stumble upon online. In Japan in 2011, a seventeen-year-old boy parted with one of his own kidneys so he could go out and buy an iPad. In China, following an incident in which a two-year-old baby was left stranded in the middle of a marketplace and run over, not once but twice, as passersby went casually about their business, an appalled electorate has petitioned the government to pass a “Good Samaritan” law to prevent such a thing from ever happening again.

On the other hand, however, bad things have always happened in society. And no doubt always will.
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has recently flagged this in his book
The Better Angels of Our Nature
. In fact, he goes one step further. Far from being on the increase, Pinker argues, violence is actually in decline. The reason that vicious slayings and other horrific crimes make the front pages of our papers isn’t because they’re commonplace. But rather, the complete reverse.

Take homicide, for instance.
Trawling through the court records of a number of European countries, scholars have computed that rates
have fallen dramatically down the years. In fourteenth-century Oxford, for example, it seemed, relative to today, that everyone was at it, the rate back then being 110 murders per 100,000 people per year, compared to just 1 murder per 100,000 people in mid-twentieth-century London.
Similar patterns have also been documented elsewhere—in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia.

The same goes for war. Pinker calculates that even in the conflict-ravaged twentieth century, around 40 million people died on the battlefield out of the approximately 6 billion who lived—which equates to a figure of just 0.7 percent. Incorporate, into that estimate, the war-related demise of those who died from disease, famine, and genocide and the death toll rises to 180 million. That sounds like a lot, but statistically speaking, it’s still pretty insignificant, weighing in, give or take, at a modest 3 percent.

Contrast this with the corresponding figure for prehistoric societies—a whopping 15 percent—and you begin to get the picture. The beat-up Neanderthal skull that Christoph Zollikofer and his colleagues dug up in southwest France, if you recall, is just the tip of the iceberg.

The questions, of course, that immediately spring to mind when one is confronted by such figures are twofold. Firstly, do they fit with the idea that society is becoming more, and not less, psychopathic? Secondly, if less, what has happened in the intervening years to still, so dramatically, our murderous, violent impulses?

Taking the latter question first, the obvious answer, or at least the one that probably tumbles most readily out of the majority of people’s explanation closets, is law. In 1651, in
Leviathan
, it was Thomas Hobbes who first advanced the contention that without top-down state controls we’d turn, rather effortlessly, into a bunch of brutish savages. There’s more than a grain of truth in such a notion. But Pinker argues from a more bottom-up perspective, and while certainly not denying the importance of legal restraints, also insinuates a gradual process of cultural and psychological maturation:

“
Beginning in the eleventh or twelfth [century], and maturing in the seventeenth and eighteenth, Europeans increasingly inhibited
their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration,” he points out. “A culture of honor—the readiness to take revenge—gave way to a culture of dignity—the readiness to control one’s emotions. These ideals originated in explicit instructions that cultural arbiters gave to aristocrats and noblemen, allowing them to differentiate themselves from the villains and boors. But they were then absorbed into the socialization of younger and younger children, until they became second nature. The standards also trickled down from the upper classes to the bourgeoisie that strove to emulate them, and from them to the lower classes, eventually becoming a part of the culture as a whole.”

From both a historic and a sociological perspective, this makes perfect sense. Yet concealed within Pinker’s observations are a couple of critical precepts with more immediate implications: subtle, sociobiological clues that, if examined in greater detail, may help square the circle of an interesting cultural paradox and go some way to answering the first of our two questions: the perception of a society on the one hand becoming increasingly less violent, and a society on the other hand becoming apparently more psychopathic.

Consider, for example, in Pinker’s elegant exposition, the importance of the “cultural arbiter” as a conduit of ideological change. Traditionally, in days gone by, such arbiters would typically have been clergymen. Or philosophers. Or poets. Or even, in some cases, monarchs. Today, however, with society becoming ever more secularized, and with the exponential expansion of an infinitely virtual universe, they’re a different breed entirely: pop stars and actors and media and video game moguls, who, rather than disseminating the dictates of dignity, now offer them up on an altar of creative psychopathy.

You’ve just got to turn on the television. On NBC’s
Fear Factor
we see grossed-out contestants devouring worms and insects. On
The Apprentice
we hear the casual admonition: “You’re fired.” Simon Cowell wasn’t exactly known for his eggshell-walking abilities, was he? And I shudder to think what’s happening in Ann Robinson’s pants as she fixes a losing player in her prurient, surgically enhanced gaze and
announces, like some demented dominatrix diva: “You are the weakest link. Goodbye.”

But the cultural transmission of normative strains of behavior constitutes just one side of Pinker’s sociobiological equation. Their absorption into society as conventional codes of conduct, until such time as they “become second nature,” is another matter entirely. Take the finance industry, for instance … Greed and corruption have always encroached upon the fringes of big business—from Civil War profiteers in the U.S. to the insider-trading scandals that simmered beneath the surface of capitalist Thatcherite Britain back in the 1980s. Yet the new millennium has seemingly ushered in a wave of corporate criminality like no other. Investment scams, conflicts of interest, lapses of judgment, and those evergreen entrepreneurial party tricks of good old fraud and embezzlement are now utterly unprecedented. Both in scope and in fiscal magnitude.

Corporate-governance analysts cite a confluence of reasons for today’s sullied business climate. Avarice, of course—the backbone of Gordon Gekkoism—is one of them. But also in the mix is so-called guerrilla accounting. As Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange expected continued gains and the speed and complexity of business increased exponentially, rule-bending and obfuscation suddenly became de rigueur.

“
With infinitely more complex securities, accounting practices, and business transactions,” observes Seth Taube, a senior commercial litigation lawyer, “it’s much easier to hide fraud.”

Clive R. Boddy, a former professor at the Nottingham Business School, comes right out and says it—
and in a recent issue of the
Journal of Business Ethics
, contends that it’s psychopaths, pure and simple, that are at the root of all the trouble. Psychopaths, Boddy explicates, in language somewhat reminiscent of that used by Bob Hare and Paul Babiak in the previous chapter, take advantage of the “relatively chaotic nature of the modern corporation,” including “rapid change, constant renewal” and the high turnover of “key personnel”—circumstances that not only permit them to wend their way, through a combination of “extroverted personal charisma and charm,” to
the corner offices of major financial institutions, but that also render “their behavior invisible,” and, even worse, make them “appear normal and even to be ideal leaders.”

Of course, once in situ, such corporate Attilas are then, according to Boddy’s analysis, “able to influence the moral climate of the whole organization” and wield “considerable power.” He closes with a damning indictment. It is psychopaths, he concludes, who are to blame for the global financial crisis, because their “single-minded pursuit of their own self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement to the exclusion of all other considerations has led to an abandonment of the old-fashioned concept of noblesse oblige, equality, fairness, or of any real notion of corporate social responsibility.” There’s no denying he might well be onto something.

On the other hand, however, there’s society in general, proclaims Charles Elson, head of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware—who proposes that rather than laying the blame solely at the door of the corporate fat cats, it should, instead, also be pinned on a culture of moral malfeasance, in which truth is stretched on a rack of sententious self-interest, and ethical boundaries blurred way beyond anything of conscionable cartographical interest.

The watershed, according to Elson, was President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, and the fact that his administration, his family, and (to a large extent) his legacy survived relatively intact in the aftermath. Be that as it may, honor and trust continue to falter elsewhere. The police are under fire for institutional racism. Sports are under fire for the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs. And the Catholic Church is under fire for sexually abusing minors.

The law itself has even gotten in on the act. At the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping trial in Salt Lake City, the attorney representing Brian David Mitchell—the homeless street preacher and self-proclaimed prophet who abducted, raped, and kept the fourteen-year-old Elizabeth captive for nine months (according to Smart’s testimony he raped her pretty much every day over that period, by the way)—urged the sentencing judge to go easy on his client, on
the grounds that “
Ms. Smart overcame it. Survived it. Triumphed over it.”

When the lawyers start whipping up that kind of tune, the dance could wind up anywhere.

I put it to Pinker, over lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, that we’ve got a bit of a conundrum on our hands. On the one hand we have evidence that society is becoming less violent, while on the other there’s evidence that it’s getting more psychopathic.

He raises a good point. “Okay. Let’s say that society
is
becoming more psychopathic,” he counters. “That doesn’t necessarily entail that there’s going to be an upsurge in violence. The majority of psychopaths, as far as I understand it, are actually nonviolent. They inflict predominantly emotional, rather than physical, pain …

“Of course, if psychopathy really starts getting a toehold, then we might see a minimal increase in violence compared to what we would have seen, say, forty or fifty years ago. But what’s probably more likely is that we’ll start to detect a difference in the pattern of that violence. It might, for example, become more random. Or more instrumental.

“I think that society is going to have to get very psychopathic indeed for us to start living up to how we were, say, back in the Middle Ages. And, from a purely practical point of view, that level of manifestation is simply not attainable.

“It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to find that subtle fluctuations in personality or interpersonal style have been occurring over the past few decades. But the mores and etiquette of modern civilization are far too deeply ingrained in us, far too embedded within our better natures, to be subverted by a swing, or what’s probably more likely, a nudge, toward the dark side.”

Pinker’s right about psychopathy not being sustainable over the long term. As we saw with the aid of game theory in the previous chapter, it’s a biological nonstarter. He’s also right about changes in
the motivation for violence.
In a recent study by the Crime and Justice Centre at King’s College, London, 120 convicted street robbers were asked, quite simply, why they did it. Their answers revealed a great deal about modern British street life. Kicks. Spur-of-the-moment impulses. Status. And financial gain. In precisely that order of importance. Exactly the kind of casual, callous behavior patterns one often sees in psychopaths.