The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (124 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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Male aggression has a sexual component. In interviews, many soldiers describe battlefield routs in explicitly erotic terms. One Vietnam veteran said, “To some people, carrying a gun was like having a permanent hard-on. It was a pure sexual trip every time you got to pull the trigger.”
234
Another agreed: “There is . . . just this incredible sense of power in killing five people.... The only way I can equate it is to ejaculation. Just an incredible sense of relief, you know, that I did this.”
235
Institutionalized torture is often sexualized as well. Female Christian martyrs were depicted as having been sexually mutilated, and when the tables were turned in medieval Christendom, the instruments of torture were often directed at women’s erogenous zones.
236
As with the martyrologies, later genres of macabre entertainment such as pulp fiction, Grand Guignol, and “true crime” tabloids often put female protagonists in peril of sexual torture and mutilation.
237
And government torturers in police states have often been reported to be aroused by their atrocities. Lloyd deMause recounts testimony from a survivor of the Holocaust:
234
Another agreed: “There is . . . just this incredible sense of power in killing five people.... The only way I can equate it is to ejaculation. Just an incredible sense of relief, you know, that I did this.”
235
Institutionalized torture is often sexualized as well. Female Christian martyrs were depicted as having been sexually mutilated, and when the tables were turned in medieval Christendom, the instruments of torture were often directed at women’s erogenous zones.
236
As with the martyrologies, later genres of macabre entertainment such as pulp fiction, Grand Guignol, and “true crime” tabloids often put female protagonists in peril of sexual torture and mutilation.
237
And government torturers in police states have often been reported to be aroused by their atrocities. Lloyd deMause recounts testimony from a survivor of the Holocaust:
The SS camp commander stood close to the whipping post throughout the flogging.... His whole face was already red with lascivious excitement. His hands were plunged deep in his trouser pockets, and it was quite clear that he was masturbating throughout.... On more than thirty occasions, I myself have witnessed SS camp commanders masturbating during floggings.
238
If serial killers represent the taste for rough sex taken to an extreme, the gender difference among serial killers, who come in both sexes, is instructive. Schechter is skeptical of self-anointed “profilers” and “mind hunters,” like the Jack Crawford character in
Silence of the Lambs
, but he allows for one kind of inference from the modus operandi of a serial killer to a characteristic trait: “When police discover a corpse with its throat slit, its torso cut open, its viscera removed, and its genitals excised, they are justified in making one basic assumption: the perpetrator was a man.”
239
It’s not that girls can never grow up to be serial killers; Schechter recounts the stories of several black widows and angels of death. But they go about their pastimes differently. Schechter explains:
Silence of the Lambs
, but he allows for one kind of inference from the modus operandi of a serial killer to a characteristic trait: “When police discover a corpse with its throat slit, its torso cut open, its viscera removed, and its genitals excised, they are justified in making one basic assumption: the perpetrator was a man.”
239
It’s not that girls can never grow up to be serial killers; Schechter recounts the stories of several black widows and angels of death. But they go about their pastimes differently. Schechter explains:
There are unmistakable parallels between [male serial killers’] kind of violence—phallic-aggressive, penetrative, rapacious, and (insofar as it commonly gratifies itself upon the bodies of strangers) undiscriminating—and the typical pattern of male sexual behavior. For this reason, it is possible to see sadistic mutilation-murder as a grotesque distortion . . . of normal male sexuality....Female psychopaths are no less depraved than their male counterparts. As a rule, however, brutal penetration is not what turns them on. Their excitement comes—not from violating the bodies of strangers with phallic objects—but from a grotesque, sadistic travesty of intimacy and love: from spooning poisoned medicine into the mouth of a trusting patient, for example, or smothering a sleeping child in its bed. In short, from tenderly turning a friend, family member, or dependent into a corpse—from nurturing them to death.
240
With so many sources for sadism, why are there so few sadists? Obviously the mind must be equipped with safety catches against hurting others, and sadism erupts when they are disabled.
The first that comes to mind is empathy. If people feel each other’s pain, then hurting someone else will be felt as hurting oneself. That is why sadism is more thinkable when the victims are demonized or dehumanized beings that lie outside one’s circle of empathy. But as I have mentioned (and as we shall explore in the next chapter), for empathy to be a brake on aggression it has to be more than the habit of inhabiting another person’s mind. After all, sadists often exercise a perverted ingenuity for intuiting how best to torment their victims. An empathic response must specifically include an alignment of one’s own happiness with that of another being, a faculty that is better called sympathy or compassion than empathy. Baumeister points out that an additional emotion has to kick in for sympathy to inhibit behavior: guilt. Guilt, he notes, does not just operate after the fact. Much of our guilt is anticipatory—we refrain from actions that would make us feel bad if we carried them out.
241
241
Another brake on sadism is a cultural taboo: the conviction that deliberate infliction of pain is not a thinkable option, regardless of whether it engages one’s sympathetic inhibitions. Today torture has been explicitly prohibited by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
242
Unlike ancient, medieval, and early modern times when torture was a form of popular entertainment, today the infliction of torture by governments is almost entirely clandestine, showing that the taboo is widely acknowledged—though like most taboos, it is at times hypocritically flouted. In 2001 the legal scholar Alan Dershowitz addressed this hypocrisy by proposing a legal mechanism designed to eliminate sub rosa torture in democracies.
243
The police in a ticking-bomb scenario would have to get a warrant from a disinterested judge before torturing the lifesaving information out of a suspect; all other forms of coercive interrogation would be flatly prohibited. The most common response was outrage. By the very act of examining the taboo on torture, Dershowitz had violated the taboo, and he was widely misunderstood as
advocating
torture rather than seeking to
minimize
it.
244
Some of the more measured critics argued that the taboo in fact serves a useful function. Better, they said, to deal with a ticking-bomb scenario, should one ever occur, on an ad hoc basis, and perhaps even put up with some clandestine torture, than to place torture on the table as a live option, from which it could swell from ticking bombs to a wider range of real or imagined threats.
245
242
Unlike ancient, medieval, and early modern times when torture was a form of popular entertainment, today the infliction of torture by governments is almost entirely clandestine, showing that the taboo is widely acknowledged—though like most taboos, it is at times hypocritically flouted. In 2001 the legal scholar Alan Dershowitz addressed this hypocrisy by proposing a legal mechanism designed to eliminate sub rosa torture in democracies.
243
The police in a ticking-bomb scenario would have to get a warrant from a disinterested judge before torturing the lifesaving information out of a suspect; all other forms of coercive interrogation would be flatly prohibited. The most common response was outrage. By the very act of examining the taboo on torture, Dershowitz had violated the taboo, and he was widely misunderstood as
advocating
torture rather than seeking to
minimize
it.
244
Some of the more measured critics argued that the taboo in fact serves a useful function. Better, they said, to deal with a ticking-bomb scenario, should one ever occur, on an ad hoc basis, and perhaps even put up with some clandestine torture, than to place torture on the table as a live option, from which it could swell from ticking bombs to a wider range of real or imagined threats.
245
But perhaps the most powerful inhibition against sadism is more elemental: a visceral revulsion against hurting another person. Most primates find the screams of pain of a fellow animal to be aversive, and they will abstain from food if it is accompanied by the sound and sight of a fellow primate being shocked.
246
The distress is an expression not of the monkey’s moral scruples but of its dread of making a fellow animal mad as hell. (It also may be a response to whatever external threat would have caused a fellow animal to issue an alarm call.)
247
The participants in Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment, who obeyed instructions to deliver shocks to a bogus fellow participant, were visibly distraught as they heard the shrieks of pain they were inflicting.
248
Even in moral philosophers’ hypothetical scenarios like the Trolley Problem, survey-takers recoil from the thought of throwing the fat man in front of the trolley, though they know it would save five innocent lives.
249
246
The distress is an expression not of the monkey’s moral scruples but of its dread of making a fellow animal mad as hell. (It also may be a response to whatever external threat would have caused a fellow animal to issue an alarm call.)
247
The participants in Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment, who obeyed instructions to deliver shocks to a bogus fellow participant, were visibly distraught as they heard the shrieks of pain they were inflicting.
248
Even in moral philosophers’ hypothetical scenarios like the Trolley Problem, survey-takers recoil from the thought of throwing the fat man in front of the trolley, though they know it would save five innocent lives.
249
Testimony on the commission of hands-on violence in the real world is consistent with the results of laboratory studies. As we saw, humans don’t readily consummate mano a mano fisticuffs, and soldiers on the battlefield maybe petrified about pulling the trigger.
250
The historian Christopher Browning’s interviews with Nazi reservists who were ordered to shoot Jews at close range showed that their initial reaction was a physical revulsion to what they were doing.
251
The reservists did not recollect the trauma of their first murders in the morally colored ways we might expect—neither with guilt at what they were doing, nor with retroactive excuses to mitigate their culpability. Instead they recalled how viscerally upset they were made by the screams, the gore, and the raw feeling of killing people at close range. As Baumeister sums up their testimony, “The first day of mass murder did not prompt them to engage in spiritual soul-searching so much as it made them literally want to vomit.”
252
250
The historian Christopher Browning’s interviews with Nazi reservists who were ordered to shoot Jews at close range showed that their initial reaction was a physical revulsion to what they were doing.
251
The reservists did not recollect the trauma of their first murders in the morally colored ways we might expect—neither with guilt at what they were doing, nor with retroactive excuses to mitigate their culpability. Instead they recalled how viscerally upset they were made by the screams, the gore, and the raw feeling of killing people at close range. As Baumeister sums up their testimony, “The first day of mass murder did not prompt them to engage in spiritual soul-searching so much as it made them literally want to vomit.”
252
There are barriers to sadism, then, but there must also be workarounds, or sadism would not exist. The crudest workaround is evident during rampages, when a window of opportunity to rout the enemy opens up and any revulsion against hands-on harm is suspended. The most sophisticated workaround may be the willing suspension of disbelief that allows us to immerse ourselves in fictional worlds. One part of the brain allows us to lose ourselves in the story and perhaps indulge in a touch of virtual sadism. The other reminds us that it’s all make-believe, so our inhibitions don’t spoil the pleasure.
253
253
Psychopathy is a lifelong disabling of the inhibitions against sadism. Psychopaths have a blunted response in their amygdala and orbital cortex to signs of distress, together with a marked lack of sympathy with the interests of other people.
254
All serial killers are psychopaths, and survivors of brutal government interrogation and punishment often report that some of the guards stood out from others in their sadism, presumably the psychopaths.
255
Yet most psychopaths are not serial killers or even sadists, and in some environments, such as public spectacles of cruelty in medieval Europe, nearly everyone indulged in sadism. That means we need to identify the pathway that leads people, some more easily than others, toward the infliction of pain for pleasure.
254
All serial killers are psychopaths, and survivors of brutal government interrogation and punishment often report that some of the guards stood out from others in their sadism, presumably the psychopaths.
255
Yet most psychopaths are not serial killers or even sadists, and in some environments, such as public spectacles of cruelty in medieval Europe, nearly everyone indulged in sadism. That means we need to identify the pathway that leads people, some more easily than others, toward the infliction of pain for pleasure.
Sadism is literally an acquired taste.
256
Government torturers such as police interrogators and prison guards follow a counterintuitive career trajectory. It’s not the rookies who are overly exuberant and the veterans who fine-tune the pain to extract the maximum amount of actionable information. Instead it’s the veterans who torture prisoners beyond any conceivable purpose. They come to enjoy their work. Other forms of sadism also must be cultivated. Most sexual sadists start out wielding the whips and collars as a favor to the more numerous masochists; only gradually do they start to enjoy it. Serial killers too carry out their first murder with trepidation, distaste, and in its wake, disappointment: the experience had not been as arousing as it had been in their imaginations. But as time passes and their appetite is rewhetted, they find the next one easier and more gratifying, and then they escalate the cruelty to feed what turns into an addiction. One can imagine that when tortures and executions are public and common, as in the European Middle Ages, the acclimatization process can inure an entire population.
256
Government torturers such as police interrogators and prison guards follow a counterintuitive career trajectory. It’s not the rookies who are overly exuberant and the veterans who fine-tune the pain to extract the maximum amount of actionable information. Instead it’s the veterans who torture prisoners beyond any conceivable purpose. They come to enjoy their work. Other forms of sadism also must be cultivated. Most sexual sadists start out wielding the whips and collars as a favor to the more numerous masochists; only gradually do they start to enjoy it. Serial killers too carry out their first murder with trepidation, distaste, and in its wake, disappointment: the experience had not been as arousing as it had been in their imaginations. But as time passes and their appetite is rewhetted, they find the next one easier and more gratifying, and then they escalate the cruelty to feed what turns into an addiction. One can imagine that when tortures and executions are public and common, as in the European Middle Ages, the acclimatization process can inure an entire population.
It’s often said that people can become desensitized to violence, but that is not what happens when people acquire a taste for torture. They are not oblivious to the suffering of others in the way that the neighbors of a fish-processing plant stop noticing the noisome smell. Sadists take pleasure in the suffering of victims, or, in the case of serial killers, positively crave it.
257
257
Baumeister explains the acquisition of sadism with the help of a theory of motivation proposed by the psychologist Richard Solomon, based on an analogy with color vision.
258
Emotions come in pairs, Solomon suggested, like complementary colors. The world as seen through rose-tinted goggles eventually returns to neutral, but when the goggles are removed, it looks greenish for a while. That is because our sense of neutral white or gray reflects the present status of a tug-of-war between circuits for the color red (more accurately, longer wavelengths) and circuits for the color green (medium wavelengths). When red-sensitive neurons are overactivated for a protracted period, they habituate and relax their tug, and the rosy tint in our consciousness fades out. Then when the goggles are removed, the red- and green-sensitive neurons are equally stimulated, but the red ones have been desensitized while the green ones are ready and rested. So the green side predominates in the tug-of-war, and greenness is what we experience.
258
Emotions come in pairs, Solomon suggested, like complementary colors. The world as seen through rose-tinted goggles eventually returns to neutral, but when the goggles are removed, it looks greenish for a while. That is because our sense of neutral white or gray reflects the present status of a tug-of-war between circuits for the color red (more accurately, longer wavelengths) and circuits for the color green (medium wavelengths). When red-sensitive neurons are overactivated for a protracted period, they habituate and relax their tug, and the rosy tint in our consciousness fades out. Then when the goggles are removed, the red- and green-sensitive neurons are equally stimulated, but the red ones have been desensitized while the green ones are ready and rested. So the green side predominates in the tug-of-war, and greenness is what we experience.
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