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 (156 page)

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Even with all these reasons why no romantic would really step into a time machine, the nostalgic have always been able to pull out one moral card: the profusion of modern violence. At least, they say, our ancestors did not have to worry about muggings, school shootings, terrorist attacks, holocausts, world wars, killing fields, napalm, gulags, and nuclear annihilation. Surely no Boeing 747, no antibiotic, no iPod is worth the suffering that modern societies and their technologies can wreak.

And here is where unsentimental history and statistical literacy can change our view of modernity. For they show that nostalgia for a peaceable past is the biggest delusion of all. We now know that native peoples, whose lives are so romanticized in today’s children’s books, had rates of death from warfare that were greater than those of our world wars. The romantic visions of medieval Europe omit the exquisitely crafted instruments of torture and are innocent of the thirtyfold greater risk of murder in those times. The centuries for which people are nostalgic were times in which the wife of an adulterer could have her nose cut off, a seven-year-old could be hanged for stealing a petticoat, a prisoner’s family could be charged for easement of irons, a witch could be sawn in half, and a sailor could be flogged to a pulp. The moral commonplaces of our age, such as that slavery, war, and torture are wrong, would have been seen as saccharine sentimentality, and our notion of universal human rights almost incoherent. Genocide and war crimes were absent from the historical record only because no one at the time thought they were a big deal. From the vantage point of almost seven decades after the world wars and genocides of the first half of the 20th century, we see that they were not harbingers of worse to come, nor a new normal to which the world would grow inured, but a local high from which it would bumpily descend. And the ideologies behind them were not woven into modernity but atavisms that ended up in the dustbin of history.

The forces of modernity—reason, science, humanism, individual rights—have not, of course, pushed steadily in one direction; nor will they ever bring about a utopia or end the frictions and hurts that come with being human. But on top of all the benefits that modernity has brought us in health, experience, and knowledge, we can add its role in the reduction of violence.

To writers who
have
noticed declines of violence, the sheer abundance of them, operating on so many scales of time and magnitude, has an aura of mystery. James Payne wrote of a temptation to allude to “a higher power at work,” of a process that seems “almost magical.”
¹⁸Robert Wright nearly succumbs to the temptation, wondering whether the decline of zero-sum competition is “evidence of divinity,” signs of a “divinely imparted meaning,” or a story with a “cosmic author.”
¹⁹

I can easily resist the temptation, but agree that the multiplicity of datasets in which violence meanders downward is a puzzle worth pondering. What do we make of the impression that human history contains an arrow? Where is this arrow, we are entitled to wonder, and who posted it? And if the alignment of so many historical forces in a beneficial direction does not imply a divine sign painter, might it vindicate some notion of moral realism—that moral truths are out there somewhere for us to discover, just as we discover the truths of science and mathematics?
²⁰

My own view is that the Pacifist’s Dilemma at least clarifies the mystery, and shows how the nonrandom direction of history is rooted in an aspect of reality that informs our conceptions of morality and purpose. Our species was born into the dilemma because our ultimate interests are distinct, because our vulnerable bodies make us sitting ducks for exploitation, and because the enticements to being the exploiter rather than the exploited will sentence all sides to punishing conflict. Unilateral pacifism is a losing strategy, and joint peace is out of everyone’s reach. These maddening contingencies are inherent in the mathematical structure of the payoffs, and in that sense they are in the nature of reality. It is no wonder that the ancient Greeks blamed their wars on the caprice of the gods, or that the Hebrews and Christians appealed to a moralistic deity who might jigger the payoffs in the next world and thereby change the perceived incentive structure in this one.

Human nature, as evolution left it, is not up to the challenge of getting us into the blessedly peaceful cell in the upper left corner of the matrix. Motives like greed, fear, dominance, and lust keep drawing us toward aggression. And though a major work-around, the threat of tit-for-tat vengeance, has the potential to bring about cooperation if the game is repeated, in practice it is miscalibrated by self-serving biases and often results in cycles of feuding rather than stable deterrence.

But human nature also contains motives to climb into the peaceful cell, such as sympathy and self-control. It includes channels of communication such as language. And it is equipped with an open-ended system of combinatorial reasoning. When the system is refined in the crucible of debate, and its products are accumulated through literacy and other forms of cultural memory, it can think up ways of changing the payoff structure and make the peaceful cell increasingly attractive. Not least among those tactics is the superrational appeal to another abstract feature of reality: the interchangeability of perspectives, the nonspecialness of our parochial vantage points, which corrodes the dilemma by blending the payoffs of the two antagonists.

Only an inflated sense of our own importance could turn our desire to escape the Pacifist’s Dilemma into a grand purpose of the cosmos. But the desire does seem to tap into contingencies of the world that are not exactly physical, and so it is different from the desires that were the mothers of other inventions such as refined sugar or central heating. The maddening structure of a Pacifist’s Dilemma is an abstract feature of reality. So is its most comprehensive solution, the interchangeability of perspectives, which is the principle behind the Golden Rule and its equivalents that have been rediscovered in so many moral traditions. Our cognitive processes have been struggling with these aspects of reality over the course of our history, just as they have struggled with the laws of logic and geometry.

Though our escape from destructive contests is not a cosmic purpose, it
is
a human purpose. Defenders of religion have long claimed that in the absence of divine edicts, morality can never be grounded outside ourselves. People can pursue only selfish interests, perhaps tweaked by taste or fashion, and are sentenced to lives of relativism and nihilism. We can now appreciate why this line of argument is mistaken. Discovering earthly ways in which human beings can flourish, including stratagems to overcome the tragedy of the inherent appeal of aggression, should be purpose enough for anyone. It is a goal that is nobler than joining a celestial choir, melting into a cosmic spirit, or being reincarnated into a higher life-form, because the goal can be justified to any fellow thinker rather than being inculcated to arbitrary factions by charisma, tradition, or force. And the data we have seen in this book show that it is a goal on which progress can be made—progress that is halting and incomplete, but unmistakable nonetheless.

A final reflection. In writing this book I have adopted a voice that is analytic, and at times irreverent, because I believe the topic has inspired too much piety and not enough understanding. But at no point have I been unaware of the reality behind the numbers. To review the history of violence is to be repeatedly astounded by the cruelty and waste of it all, and at times to be overcome with anger, disgust, and immeasurable sadness. I know that behind the graphs there is a young man who feels a stab of pain and watches the life drain slowly out of him, knowing he has been robbed of decades of existence. There is a victim of torture whose contents of consciousness have been replaced by unbearable agony, leaving room only for the desire that consciousness itself should cease. There is a woman who has learned that her husband, her father, and her brothers lie dead in a ditch, and who will soon “fall into the hand of hot and forcing violation.”
²¹It would be terrible enough if these ordeals befell one person, or ten, or a hundred. But the numbers are not in the hundreds, or the thousands, or even the millions, but in the hundreds of millions—an order of magnitude that the mind staggers to comprehend, with deepening horror as it comes to realize just how much suffering has been inflicted by the naked ape upon its own kind.
²²

Yet while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, that species has also found ways to bring the numbers down, and allow a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes.
²³For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.

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NOTES

Preface

1. Estimating probability from availability in memory: Slovic, 1987; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973.

2. Long Peace: Coined by Gaddis, 1986.

3. Discussions of the decline of violence in my previous books: Pinker, 1997, pp. 518–19; Pinker, 2002, pp. 166–69, 320, 330–36.

4. Other books on the decline of violence: Elias, 1939/2000; Human Security Report Project, 2011; Keeley, 1996; Muchembled, 2009; Mueller, 1989; Nazaretyan, 2010; Payne, 2004; Singer, 1981/ 2011; Wright, 2000; Wood, 2004.

Chapter 1: A Foreign Country

1. Survey data: Bennett Haselton and I presented 265 Internet users with five pairs of historical periods and asked them which they thought had higher rates of violent death: prehistoric hunter-gatherer bands or the first states; contemporary hunter-gatherer bands or modern Western societies; homicide in 14th-century England or 20th-century England; warfare in the 1950s or the 2000s; homicide in the United States in the 1970s or the 2000s. In each case respondents thought the later culture was more violent, by a factor of 1.1 to 4.6. In each case, as we shall see, the earlier culture was more violent, by a factor of 1.6 to more than 30.

2. Ötzi: B. Cullen, “Testimony from the Iceman,”
Smithsonian
, Feb. 2003; C. Holden, “Iceman’s final hours,”
Science
,
316
, Jun. 1, 2007, p. 1261.

3. Kennewick Man: McManamon, 2004; C. Holden, “Random samples,”
Science, 279,
Feb. 20, 1998, p. 1137.

4. Lindow Man: Joy, 2009.

5. Severed skull with preserved brain: “2000-year-old brain found in Britain,”
Boston Globe,
Dec. 13, 2008.

6. Murdered family: C. Holden, “A family affair,”
Science
,
322
, Nov. 21, 2008, p. 1169.

7. Homeric warfare: Gottschall, 2008.

8. Agamemnon encourages genocide: Homer, 2003, p. 101.

9. “Fast ships with shallow drafts”: Gottschall, 2008, p. 1.

10. “Breached with surprising ease”: Gottschall, 2008, pp. 143–44.

11. “Many sleepless nights”:
Iliad
9.325–27, quoted in Gottschall, p. 58.

12. The Hebrew Bible: Kugel, 2007.

13. “Should our sister”: Genesis 34:25–31.