The Better Angels of our Nature: the
decline of violence in history and its causes / Steven Pinker. (Allen Lane, 2011 (ISBN: 978-1-846-14093-8))
A really useful look at the causes of violence, the levels at different times in history and the position now. SP identifies
the following major aspects as Six Trends, Five Inner Demons, Four Better
Angels and Five Historical Forces. [Note: This is a long post as there was so much I wanted to note down and look at again.]
Six Trends:
1.
Transition from the anarchy of the hunting,
gathering and horticultural societies to the first agricultural civilizations
with cities and governments, beginning around five thousand years ago. With that
change came a reduction in the chronic raiding and feuding and a more or less
fivefold decrease in rates of violent death. [Pacification Process]
2.
Spanning more than half a millennium (late
Middle Ages to the 20th century), and best documented in Europe,
this transition saw a tenfold-to-fiftyfold decline in the rates of homicide.
Attributed to consolidation of feudal territories into large kingdoms with
centralized authority and infrastructure of commerce. [Civilizing Process]
3.
Unfolded over centuries, taking off around the
Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment (17th and 18th
centuries) – though with antecedents in classical Greece and the Renaissance.
Saw the first organized movements to abolish socially sanctioned forms of violence
like despotism, slavery, duelling, judicial torture, superstitious killing,
sadistic punishment and cruelty to animals, together with the first stirrings
of systematic pacifism. [Humanitarian Revolution]
4.
Following the end of WW2 there has been an unprecedented
development of the great powers and developed states in general stopping waging
war on one another. [Long Peace]
5.
Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, organized
conflicts of all kinds (civil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic
governments and terrorist attacks) have declined throughout the world. [New
Peace]
6.
The post war era (and the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights) has seen a growing revulsion against aggression on smaller
scales, including violence against ethnic minorities, women, children,
homosexuals and animals. [Rights Revolutions]
Five Inner Demons
Contemporary
scientific understanding of the psychology of violence is that it is the output
of several psychological systems that differ in their environmental triggers,
their internal logic, their neurological basis and their social distribution.
1.
Predatorary or instrumental violence is violence
deployed as a practical means to an end.
2.
Dominance is the urge for authority, prestige,
glory and power, whether it takes the form of macho posturing among individuals
or contests for supremacy among racial, ethnic, religious or national groups.
3.
Revenge fuels the moralistic urge toward
retribution, punishment and justice.
4.
Sadism is the pleasure taken in another’s
suffering.
5.
Ideology is a shared belief system, usually
involving a vision of utopia, which justifies unlimited violence in pursuit of
unlimited good.
Four Better Angels
Humans are
not innately good or evil but come with motives that can orient them away from
violence and toward cooperation and altruism.
1.
Empathy (particularly the sense of sympathetic
concern) prompts us to feel the pain of others and to align their interests
with our own.
2.
Self-control allows us to anticipate the
consequences of acting on our impulses and to inhibit them accordingly.
3.
Moral sense sanctifies a set of norms and taboos
that govern the interaction among people in a culture, sometimes in ways that
decrease violence, though often (when the norms are tribal, authoritarian or
puritanical) in ways that increase it.
4.
Reason allows us to extricate ourselves from our
parochial vantage points, to reflect on the ways in which we live our lives, to
deduce ways in which we could be better off, and to guide the application of
the other better angels of our nature. SP also examines the possibility that in
recent history Homo sapiens has literally evolved to become less violent in the
biologist’s technical sense of a change in our genome.
Five Historical Forces
Exogenous
forces that favour our peaceable motives and that have driven the multiples
declines in violence are identified.
1.
Leviathan: a state and judiciary with a monopoly
on the legitimate use of force can defuse the temptation of exploitative
attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge, and circumvent the self-serving biases
that make all parties believe they are on the side of the angels.
2.
Commerce: a positive-sum game in which everybody
can win; as technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over
longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people
become more valuable alive than dead, and they are less likely to become
targets of demonization and dehumanization.
3.
Feminization: the process in which cultures have
increasingly respected the interests and values of women. Since violence is
largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the
glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of
rootless young men.
4.
Cosmopolitanism: forces such as literacy,
mobility and mass media can prompt people to take the perspective of people
unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them.
5.
Escalator of reason: an intensifying application
of knowledge and rationality to human affairs can force people to recognize the
futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own
interests over others, and to reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather
than a contest to be won.
Pacification Process
All species
want to pass on their genes; this leads to predators and parasites. Victims can
also be members of the same species – infanticide, sibicide, cannibalism, rape
and lethal combat have been documented in many kinds of animals. But animals
are also less inclined to harm close relatives, who share genetic material.
When a tendency to violence emerges, it is always strategic; violence is deployed when expected benefits outweigh
expected costs.
Competition
is built into the evolutionary process. (1) ‘Wives’ are competed over, as in
most species the female makes a greater investment than the male, especially in
mammals. (2) Competition breeds fear – leading to strike first. Deterrence
works if (a) don’t strike first, (b) be strong enough to survive first hit and
(3) retaliate in kind.
Leviathan –
monarchy or other government authority that embodies the will of the people and
has a monopoly on the use of force.
Chimpanzee
aggression is territorial – a group encountering another group at a boundary
leads to a noisy ‘battle’ but not serious fighting. But male groups
encountering a smaller group or individual take advantage of numbers – to mate
with female, to attack female and kill baby, or to kill male. Killings may
occur within a group as well. Humans share a common ancestor with chimps.
Forensic
archaeology shows cannibalism widespread in human prehistory. Humans fight for
gain, safety and credible deterrence.
Percentage
deaths of population from warfare
Prehistoric archaeological sites
|
0% to 60% (average 15%)
|
Hunter-gatherers (contemporary & recent societies)
|
4% to 30% (average 14%)
|
Hunter-horticulturalists & other tribal groups
|
15% to 60% (average
24.5%)
|
States (ancient Mexico to most violent modern periods)
|
1% to 5% (average
3%?)
|
Number of
deaths per 100,000 people (standard measure of homicide rates
Western Europe (2,000 AD)
|
1 per 100,000
|
USA (1970s & 1980s)
|
10 per 100,000
|
Detroit (1970s & 1980s)
|
45 per 100,000
|
Non-state warfare (e.g. tribal)
|
524 per 100,000
|
Wars in 19th century France
|
70 per 100,000
|
WW1
|
144 per 100,000
|
WW2
|
27 per 100,000
|
Russian Revolution
|
135 per 100,000
|
Reduction of homicide rates by government
control is so obvious to anthropologists that it is seldom documented by
numbers. (The various ‘paxes’ – Pax Romanica, Islamica, Mongolica, Hispnaica,
etc. – refer to the reduction in raiding, feuding and warfare in territories
brought under the control of an effective government.) A tragic irony of the
second half of the twentieth century is that when colonies in the developing
world freed themselves from European rule, they often slid back into warfare,
this time intensified by modern weaponry, organized militias and the freedom of
young men to defy tribal leaders.
States
emerged first as stratified theocracies in which elites secured their economic
privileges by enforcing a brutal peace on their underlings.
Civilizing Process
Homicide in
England went from 4 to 100 per 100,000 in the Middle Ages to 0.8 persons per
100,000 in the 1950s. By the 20th century, in every Western European
country the homicide rate was in a narrow band centred on 1 per 100,000.
Certain
patterns remained constant. Men are responsible for around 92% of all killings
(except infanticide) and are most likely to kill in their twenties.
Other
patterns changed. In earlier centuries homicide rates in all social classes were
similar, but as rates fell, they dropped far more among the upper classes than
the lower. Also the rate of men killing unrelated men declined more rapidly
than men killing their own children, parents, spouses and siblings.
The knights
of feudal Europe were warlords. States were ineffectual. Kings were merely the
most prominent lords, with no permanent army and little control over the
country. Private wars and tournaments were common. Religious values were
imparted with threats of eternal torture and depictions of mutilated saints.
Brigands threatened travel and ransoming captives was big business.
Evidence for
change comes from medieval manuals of etiquette which focus on (1) control your
appetites, (2) delay gratification, (3) consider the sensibilities of others,
(4) don’t act like a peasant and (5) distance yourself from your animal nature.
Knives routinely used at meal tables, then usage at meals defined, then forks in
use and table knives had rounded ends. Standards trickled down from the upper
classes to the bourgeoisie and then to the lower classes.
Twofold
outside trigger for change: A. Centralized monarchies gained in strength and
legal systems redefined homicide from a tort (victim’s family could demand
‘blood money’ from killer’s family) to an offense against the state (crown). B.
Money increasingly replaced barter. Roads were built, allowing easier transport
of goods. New technologies needed expert craftsmen. A & B reinforce each
other. [The decrease in violence did not always proceed in step with the rise
of centralised states but many criminologists believe the source of the
pacifying effect of states is due to the trust they command among the
populace.]
Today, statistics
from every Western country show the overwhelming majority of homicides and
other violent crimes are committed by people from the lowest socio-economic
groups. While elites and middle class pursue justice through the legal system,
the lower classes resort to self-help (vigilantism, frontier justice, taking
the law into your own hands). Most homicides are really instances of capital
punishment, with a private citizen as judge, jury and executioner. Lower
status people and the legal system often live in a condition of mutual
hostility.
The
civilizing process also spread outwards from a Western European epicentre.
England was the first to pacify itself, followed by Germany and the Low
Countries. The late 1800s saw a peaceful centre (Britain, France, Germany,
Denmark and the Low Countries) bordered by slightly stroppier Ireland,
Austro-Hungary and Finland, surrounded in turn by still more violent Spain,
Italy, Greece and the Slavic countries. Today a gradient of lawlessness
extending to Eastern Europe and the mountainous Balkans is still visible.
There are
also gradients within countries – the hinterlands and mountains remained
violent long after the urbanized and densely farmed centres calmed down. Most
European countries have kept dependable homicide statistics for a century or
more. On other continents quoted homicide rates are often unreliable and
sometimes incredible; it can be hard to draw a line between casualties in a
civil war and homicides from organized crime. Despite these limitations, the median
national homicide rate is now 6 per 100,000.
The least
violent region is Western and Central Europe and what were parts of the British
Empire (Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, the Maldives and Bermuda). Other
low rate countries adopted European standards – Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong.
China also reports a low rate of 2.2 per 100,000.
The
relationship between crime and democratization is in inverted U. Established
democracies and autocracies are relatively safe places, but emerging
democracies and semi-democracies are often plagued by crime and vulnerable to
civil war. The most crime-prone regions today are Russia, Sub-Saharan Africa
and parts of Latin America. The decivilizing process has also racked many
countries that switched from tribal ways to colonial rule, then went suddenly
to independence.
The USA,
instead of clustering with kindred peoples like Britain, the Netherlands and
Germany, has a homicide rate close to the median rate for the whole world,
along with Albania and Uruguay, and has shown no overall decline in the 20th
century. However, homicide rates vary widely across the USA. A band of northern
states (including new England) have rates (less than 3 per 100,000) comparable
with Europe. Below this is a north-south gradient of increasing rates
(Louisiana has 14.2 per 100,000). Higher rates are seen in areas with high
proportions of African Americans, who tend to be in lower income levels. The
American South still has an obsession with self-help justice and a culture of
‘honour’. One explanation is that the interior south was settled by
Scots-Irish, mostly sheepherders. Herders all over the world cultivate a
hair-trigger for retaliation. Cultural mores can persist long after the
circumstances that gave rise to them have gone. The decline of violence in the
west frontier areas lagged two centuries behind the east.
Cads and
dads: An ecosystem with equal numbers of men and women will favour dads and one
populated mainly by men or where women are plentiful but some men can
monopolise them, will favour cads.
In the 1960s,
European countries and America saw an upturn in violence for three decades.
This is typically explained as a combination of changes in cultural norms,
informalization (in manners, dress and language), a levelling of hierarchies,
an elevation of adolescence over adulthood, the sexual revolution and
experimentation with drugs. [NB: Recent
research indicates the prime factor was lead in petrol. The dates of removal of
lead plus twenty years match the 1990s decline almost exactly. This was not
known to Pinker. Blog author.]
The Humanitarian Revolution
In the modern West and much of the rest of the world, capital and corporal punishments have
been effectively eliminated, government’s power to use violence against their
subjects severely curtailed, slavery abolished and people have lost their
thirst for cruelty. This change began with the Age of Reason (17th
c.) and crested with the Enlightenment at the end of the 1800s.
History shows a longer decline. Human sacrifice was common, but
replaced by a belief in witchcraft and violence against those thought to be
witches, then violence against blasphemers, heretics and apostates. People
become wedded to their beliefs – challenge them and you challenge a person’s
dignity, standing and power.
1095-1208 Crusaders killed an estimated 1 million. In the 13th
century, the Albigensian Crusade killed around 200,000. From the late 15th
to early 18th centuries, the Spanish Inquisition killed an estimated
350,000.
People started to put a higher value on human life, in part due to a
new habit of identifying with the pains and pleasures of other people. This was
helped by growing writing and literacy. By reading, you are observing the world
from someone else’s viewpoint.
At the same time that capital punishment declined, so did the number
of crimes for which it was used. The method of execution changed too, becoming
less violent. European countries, none of which execute people, have the lowest
homicide rates in the world.
Christianity started as a pacifist movement, but things went downhill
when Constantine saw a vision of a flaming cross and the words ‘In this sign I
will conquer’.
Kant identified three conditions for perpetual peace. (1) States
should be democratic – the benefits of war go to the leaders and the costs are
borne by its citizens. (2) The law of nations shall be founded on a League of
Nations. (3) Universal law of hospitality or world citizenship. People from one
country should be free to live in safety in others, as long as they do not
bring an army with them.
Unspoken norms of civilised behaviour, both in everyday interactions
and in the conduct of government, may be a prerequisite to implementing certain
reforms successfully. They may explain why it is hard to impose liberal
democracy on countries in the developing world that have not outgrown their
superstitions, warlords and feuding tribes. People are embedded in a culture
and find meaning in its myths, symbols and epics.
The Long Peace
While the first half of the 20th century saw a cascade of
world wars, civil wars and genocides, the second half saw a historically
unprecedented avoidance of war between the great powers. The components of
long-term trends in wars between states are (1) there are no cycles, (2) a lot
of randomness, (3) an escalation, recently reversed, in the destructiveness of
war and (4) declines in every other dimension of war and thus in interstate war
as a whole.
It is impossible to determine the bloodiest century in history. While
the 20th century had more violent deaths than earlier ones, it also
had more people. The death count of wars in 1800 must be multiplied by 2.5, in
1600 by 4.5, in 1300 by 7 and in 1CE by 15. People think the rate is higher as
it is recent history. Statistical analysis shows the most serious wars and
atrocities are pretty well evenly distributed over the last 2,500 years and
that the size of conflicts taper down towards the present.
A common language does not make two factions less likely to go to war
but a long-standing government inhibits fighting: peoples on one side of a
national border are less likely to have a civil war than people on opposite
sides are to have an interstate war. Countries are more likely to fight their
neighbours but great powers (empires) are more likely to fight everyone.
Certain cultures, especially with a military ideology, are more prone to go to
war. There is no such thing as a ‘typical war’. Wars begin and end randomly.
Short wars are more common than longer ones. Combatants fight longer when a war
is more lethal.
From 1820 to 2000 the most damaging kinds of lethal violence were
murders and world wars. In the world as a whole, homicides outnumber
war-related deaths (even if this includes indirect deaths from hunger and
disease. Luard identified five ages of war: (1) age of dynasties (1400-1559),
(2) age of religions (1559-1648), (3) age of sovereignty (states) (1648-1789),
(4) age of nationalism (1789-1917) and (5) age of ideology (1917 on). There is
no such thing as a ‘nation’ in the sense of an ethnocultural group that
coincides with a patch of real estate.
Since 1945 there have been zero instances of: nuclear weapons used in
conflict; the two Cold War superpowers fighting each other on the battlefield;
any of the great powers fighting each other since 1953; interstate wars fought
in Western Europe since 1945 and Europe as a whole since 1956; interstate wars
between major developed countries (the 44 with the highest per capita income;
developed countries expanding their territory by conquest; and internationally
recognized states going out of existence by conquest.
After 1945, there has been a world-wide steady reduction in the length
of compulsory military service and now in the elimination of conscription
altogether. The United Nations ‘froze’ national borders; existing states and
borders were sacrosanct (even if they made little sense). Since 1951 there have
only been ten invasions that resulted in major change in national boundaries,
all before 1975. The use of poison gas in WW1 was followed by a worldwide
revulsion leading to its outlawing in the Geneva Protocol. The late 1950s and
early 1060s also saw demonstrations in democracies against nuclear weapons and
war itself. Democracy, trade and membership of intergovernmental organisations
all favour peace.
The New Peace
Three kinds of organized violence have increased pessimism: (1) civil
wars that plague the developing world, (2) mass killing of ethnic and political
groups and (3) terrorism. Political scientists have tried to measure these and
surprisingly found that all three kinds are in decline.
The historical record has a Eurocentric bias but other continents
suffered predation, feuding and slave raiding, followed by colonial conquest
but there is little record of numbers or events until 1946. The datasets now
being built up count only direct deaths; a problem with estimating indirect
deaths is that there are too many other external factors – e.g. a drought year
or viral epidemic.
Wars today take place mainly in poor countries, mostly in an arc that
extends from Central & East Africa through the Middle East, across
Southwest Asia and northern India, and down into Southeast Asia. About half the
conflicts take place in the countries with the poorest sixth of the people.
Neither the economic or geographic linkage with war is constant in history: for
half a millennium the wealthy countries of Europe were constantly fighting.
Many governments of newly independent colonies were run by strongmen,
kleptocrats and the occasional psychotic, leaving large parts of their country
in anarchy. Ideologies, whether political or religious, are deadly because they
inflame leaders into trying to outlast their adversaries in destructive wars of
attrition, regardless of the human cost. Anocracies are neither fully
democratic nor fully autocratic – so do not do anything well. Countries with an
abundance of natural resources have slower economic growth, crappier governments
and more violence, while foreign aid often ends up enriching the leaders
rather than building a sustainable infrastructure. International peacekeepers help in stopping violence and on average prevent hostilities restarting.
Genocide has been practised in all regions of the world and in all
periods in history. It is the hardest to comprehend and shocks by the number of
its victims. To make sense of this, we need to begin with the psychology of
categories. People sort others into mental pigeonholes using customs,
appearances and beliefs. To generalize from a category can be helpful – all
raspberries are edible. But when people are categorized, we act as if a
stereotype applies to every man, woman and child. We also assign good traits to
our allies and negative ones to enemies. As people get older, they also tend to
think that members of particular ethnic and religious groups share a biological
heritage which makes them homogenous, unchangeable, predictable and distinct
from other groups. Attacks typically lead to retaliation. However, politicides
and/or ethnocides may be termed genocides. Rates for such attacks have declined
since the 1970s. Predictors of genocide are (1) previous history of genocide,
(2) immediate history of political instability, (3) a ruling elite coming from
an ethnic minority, (4) democracy, (5) openness to trade and (6) an
exclusionary ideology (e.g. Marxism, Islamism (especially a strict application
of Sharia law), militaristic anticommunism, and forms of nationalism that
demonize ethnic or religious rivals.
Terrorism is an unusual form of violence in its ratio of fear to harm
– panic is the whole point. Motivated by a cause they act by surprise and in
secrecy; they seek publicity and attention, which they get through fear. In
most of the developed world, terrorism has failed; most terrorist groups fail
and die out; those that primarily target civilians always failed. Suicide
terrorism accounts for a minority of attacks, but a majority of casualties.
Such terrorists tend to be educated, middle-class, morally engaged and free of
obvious psychopathy; the most effective recruitment is to join a band of
brothers, with commitment to a group intensified by religion.
There are signs that Islamist terrorism is beginning to burn out. The
attacks erase all sympathy for the group, and Muslims are increasingly repulsed
by the savagery. However, terrorism is a tactic, not an ideology or a regime,
so there will always be a risk. Although about a fifth of the world’s
population is Muslim, and about a quarter of the world’s countries have a
Muslim majority, more than half the armed conflicts in 2008 embroiled Muslim
countries or insurgencies. Muslim countries force a greater proportion of their
citizens into armies than non-Muslim countries do. Only about a quarter of
Islamic countries elect their governments and most of them are only dubiously
democratic, with fewer political rights. They were the last to abolish slavery,
still traffic people, and witchcraft is a crime. Violence is sanctioned by
religious superstition and a hyper-developed culture of ‘honour’. The
historical lack of separation between mosque and state has meant lost
opportunities for absorbing and combining new ideas. Islamic conflicts have
continued at the same historic rate while the rest of the world got more
peaceful.
The Rights Revolutions
The post-war revulsion against forms of violence that kill in millions
and thousands (war and genocide) has spread to forms that kill by hundreds,
tens and single digits (e.g. rioting, lynching and hate crimes), extended to
other forms of harm such as rape, assault, battering and intimidation and
spread to vulnerable classes of victims that in earlier eras fell outside the
circle of protection (racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals and
animals).
Hate crimes: Following the 9/11 attacks and the London and Madrid
bombings, there were no anti-Muslim fatalities in the West. Official
discrimination by governments is in decline. In the USA white American’s
attitude to African Americans has changed. By the 1980s few would oppose black
children attending white schools or move away if a black family moved in next
door or believe they are lazier and less intelligent; almost 80% were ok with
racial intermarriage.
While rape is a human universal, so are proscriptions against rape;
however, acknowledgement of the harm of rape from the viewpoint of the victim
has taken time. Women were historically seen as property (chattels) and rape
was seen as an offense against a man – the woman’s father, her husband, or in
the case of a slave, her owner. Moral and legal systems all over the world
codified rape in similar ways. Well into the 1970s, marital rape was not a
crime in any state and the legal system underweighted the interests of women in
other rapes. While not a part of normal male sexuality, it is made possible by
the fact that male desire can be indiscriminate in its choice of partner. Men
underestimate how upsetting sexual aggression is to a female victim.
The treatment of rape in popular culture has changed. A content
analysis of video games dating back to the 1980s revealed a taboo on rape, with
just a handful of exceptions. The facts of rape are elusive, as it is
notoriously underreported by victims and at the same time over-reported
publicly as news in what are later found to be false allegations. The American rape
rate began to fall around 1979, dropped more steeply in the 1990s and has
continued downwards.
The rate of domestic abuse has also fallen. It may be related to the
biological phenomenon of mate-guarding. Practices such as veiling, chaperoning,
chastity belts, claustration, segregation by sex, and female genital cutting
appear to be culturally-sanctioned mate-guarding tactics.
Since definitions of rape and spousal abuse, how data is recorded and
the willingness of victims to report rapes vary around the world, it is
difficult to get good data but it does seem that similar declines have taken
place in other Western democracies but are far worse off in countries outside
Western Europe and the Anglosphere, where laws on violence against women lag
behind. Pinker believes that this violence will decrease over time, with
pressure from the top (the international community) and from below (individual
attitudes).
Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and in every kind of
society. It has been theorized that a women would let a newborn die if its
prospects for survival to adulthood were poor (through deformity, famine, not
sired by husband, older sibling not weaned) and some research appears to bear
this out to a degree. Female infanticide is found in Asia; a preference for
sons arises in societies with distorted property rights, one in which parents,
in effect, own their sons but not their daughters. Inheritance often goes to a
son, parents as they get older may rely on economic support by sons. The
Western rate of infanticide has dropped by more than three orders of magnitude.
Criminalization has played a part, so too has more readily available and
efficient contraception. Additionally, the rate of abortion is falling
world-wide; the exception is in India and Western Europe where rates were
lowest to begin with.
Gay rights. Through history, homosexuals have been subject to violence
from fellow citizens and/or laws against homosexual acts and behaviour. Homosexual
orientation appears to be inborn, and genes may play a part. In traditional and
modern societies, intolerance can erupt in violence. Today homosexuality has
been legalised in almost 120 countries, but is illegal in another 80 and
punishable by death in various countries.
The Humanitarian revolution came out of the ‘republic of letters’.
What went wrong in the Islamic world may have been a rejection of the printing
press and a resistance to books and the ideas they contain. The spread of ideas
can lower violence by debunking ignorance and superstition, increasing the
adoption of the viewpoints of people unlike ourselves, and technological and
moral progress.
Inner Demons
Violence is to some extent innate in humans. The most violent stage in
life is toddlerhood, but they are socialised over the years to restrain
themselves. People may fantasise about killing others and many watch violent
films.
The concept of ‘pure evil’ is a myth. Most of the harm people visit on
one another comes from motives that are found in every normal person. Much of
the decline in violence comes from people acting on these motives less often,
less fully or in fewer circumstances. While there are evil people in the world
(e.g. sadistic psychopaths and narcissistic despots) there are also heroes.
Much of the decline in violence seems to have come from changes in the times.
Despots died and were not replaced; oppressive regimes went out of existence
without fighting to the bitter end.
Scientists’ best guess is that testosterone does not make men
aggressive across the board but prepares them for a challenge of dominance.
Violence is a problem of too much self-esteem rather than too little.
Developed countries with mixtures of ethnic groups have better track
records of ethnic non-violence. Groups may get on each other’s nerves, but they
don’t kill each other. It helps if someone who attacks another group is
punished by his own community – the victimized group see it as a one-on-one
crime not a first strike in a group-on-group war. Things get ugly when
intermingled ethnic groups long for states of their own, keep long memories of
harms committed by neighbours’ ancestors while being unrepentant for harms
committed by their own, and live under poor governments that mythologise one
group’s glorious history while excluding others from the social contract.
Revenge is a futile exercise but the urge for vengeance is a major
cause of violence. It requires the disabling of empathy. Its biological
function is deterrence. The best strategy is co-operate first and until a
partner defects, then defect; if the adversary switches to cooperation, then
co-operate. Revenge cycles occur because people consider the harms they inflict
to be justified and forgettable and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and
grievous. Conciliatory gestures can on occasion avert cycles of revenge. Success
depends not only on symbolic gestures but costly ones for the apologist.
Gestures are more effective in ending civil wars than international ones. A
common denominator for success was a set of conciliation rituals that
implemented a symbolic and incomplete justice rather than perfect justice or
none at all (e.g. the South African restorative justice that involved
uncompromised truth telling and acknowledgement of harm, an explicit rewriting
of people’s social identities and incomplete justice – being able to draw a
line under the past.
Ideologies account for the big body counts in history. Means-ends
reasoning becomes dangerous when the means to a glorious end include harming
human beings. How can we explain extraordinary popular delusions and the
madness of crowds? Groups exhibit certain characteristics. Polarisation – a
group with similar opinions will become more similar to each other and more
extreme as well. Obtuseness – groups are apt to tell their leaders what they
want to hear, to supress dissent, to censor private doubts and filter out
evidence that contradicts an emerging consensus. Animosity between groups –
groups take on an identity of their own in people’s minds and individual’s
desire to be accepted within a group, and to promote its standing in comparison
to other groups, can override better judgement.
People take their cues on how to behave from other people – thus
bystanders to an atrocity often get caught up in the looting, gang rapes and
massacres. Another phenomenon is the spiral of silence, where each member of a
group goes along with certain actions because they think everyone else in the
group wants to do them. This can set off cascades of false compliance and false
enforcement that saturate a whole society. People can also excuse themselves by
explain their actions as provoked, justified, involuntary or inconsequential.
There is no cure for ideology because it emerges from many of the
cognitive processes that make us smart.
One vaccine is an open society in which people and ideas move freely and
no one is punished for airing dissenting views, including those that seem
heretical to political consensus.
Better Angels
Empathy, self-control, morality and taboo, and, most importantly, reason.
Empathy is a circle that may be stretched, but its elasticity is
limited by kinship, friendship, similarity and cuteness (the geometry of the
juvenile face). It reaches breaking point long before it encircles the full set
of people that reason tells us should fall within our moral concern.
Self-control may be strengthened but it can only prevent the harms for
which we ourselves harbour inner temptations. There are moments in life where
we should do one’s thing – reason tells us what those moments are: times when
doing your thing does not impinge on other people’s freedom to do their thing.
The moral sense offers three ethics that can be assigned to social
roles and resources. But most applications of the moral sense are not
particularly moral but rather tribal, authoritarian or puritanical, and it is
reason that tells us which of the other applications we should entrench as
norms.
Morality (philosophy) is distinct from human moral sense (psychology).
People can be mistaken about their moral convictions. Moral sense is a
distinctive mode of thinking about an action, not just the avoidance of the
action. There are important psychological distinctions between actions deemed
immoral (killing is wrong) rather than disagreeable (I hate cauliflower),
unfashionable (bell-bottoms are out) or imprudent (don’t scratch mosquito
bites). Moralized beliefs are actionable – people don’t need to be paid to
refrain from murdering someone. Moralized infractions are punishable. If murder
is wrong, the murderer must be punished. Many moral convictions operate as
norms and taboos rather than as principles. Often people have an instant
intuition that an action is immoral but cannot successfully explain why. Moral
norms, even when unexplainable can be effective brakes on violent behaviour.
Haidt came up with five moral foundations: (1) in-group loyalty, (2)
authority / respect, (3) fairness / reciprocity, (4) harm / care, and (5)
purity / sanctity. No society defines everyday virtue and wrongdoing by the
Golden Rule; instead morality consists in respecting or violating one of the
relational models (ethics or foundations): betraying, exploiting, subverting a
coalition, contaminating oneself or one’s community, defying or insulting a
legitimate authority, harming someone without provocation, taking a benefit
without paying the cost, peculating funds or abusing prerogatives.
Cultures often differ. One society that allows land to be bartered and
sold is shocked that another society does the same with brides. In some
societies a killing is avenged by the victim’s kinsmen, in others a blood payment
is made, and in still others it is punished by the state.
Once a society has a degree of civilization in place, it is reason
that offers the greatest hope for further reducing violence.
On Angels’ Wings
SP feels gratitude at the decline rather than optimism as the
future will always be uncertain but research indicates that violence has
declined up to the present. There is no grand unified theory, but the various
processes and the rights revolutions have all played their part.
Some forces that might be thought to be important in the decline do
not consistently reduce violence. (1) Weaponry – the technology has changed the
course of history many times, makes deterrence credible and multiplies the
destructive power of certain antagonists. While the technology steadily
improved, the rates of violence do not match. (2) Resources and power – the
idea that people fight over finite resources. The most destructive episodes of
violence arose from ideologies. (3) Affluence – tight correlations between
affluence and non-violence are hard to find. Nor does violent crime closely
track economic indicators. However, the likelihood that a country will be torn
by violent civil unrest starts to soar as its annual per capita income falls
below $1,000 (2010). People may be deprived of nutrition and healthcare, and
lack decent schools, police and governments. (4) Religions. Little good has
come from ancient tribal dogmas and religious ideologies have often instigated
violence in the past. At the same time, particular religious movements at
certain times in history have contributed to the decline in violence.
The Pacifist’s Dilemma – this is a variation on the psychological
Prisoner’s Dilemma model. Peace is the best outcome for both sides and war the
worst. If one side attacks and the other does not respond, all the advantage
goes to the attacker. Each side has to be aggressive enough not to be a sitting
duck for its adversary. (1) Leviathan – a state that uses a monopoly on force
to protect its citizens from one another seems to be the most consistent
violence reducer, by imposing a cost on the aggressor that is large enough to
cancel out his gains. (2) Gentle commerce does not eliminate the disaster of
being defeated; it eliminates the adversary’s incentive to attack. (3) Feminization.
Violence is mainly committed by men, especially young men. Historically women
have taken the leadership in pacifist and humanitarian movements out of
proportion to their influence in other political institutions of the time.
Societies in which women get a better deal, both traditional and modern, tend
to have less organized violence. Social and sexual arrangements that favour the
interests of women tend to drain the swamps where violent male-on-male
competition proliferates. Getting married reduces a man’s testosterone and
their likelihood of a life of crime. Unpoliced all-male social milieus are
almost always violent. Female infanticide skews the male-female ratio and leads
to large numbers of unattached men. (5) Living in a more cosmopolitan society
in contact with a diverse sample of other people helps us see other people’s
points of view. (6) Reason – we can now look at situations with an observer’s
viewpoint.
Nostalgia for a peaceable past is a delusion. Native peoples had rates
of death from warfare that were greater than our world wars and past centuries
used torture and extreme physical forms of punishment for what we now view as
petty crime. While human nature can lead us into violence, it also provides
motives to move into peace.
Rank
|
Cause
|
Century
|
Death toll
|
Equivalent
death toll*
|
Adjusted
rank
|
1st
|
World War 2
|
20th
|
55,000,000
|
55,000,000
|
9th
|
2nd
|
Mao Zedong (mostly
govt. caused famine)
|
20th
|
40,000,000
|
40,000,000
|
11th
|
3rd
|
Mongol conquests
|
13th
|
40,000,000
|
278,000,000
|
2nd
|
4th
|
An Lushan revolt
|
8th
|
36,000,000
|
429,000,000
|
1st
|
5th
|
Fall of the Ming Dynasty
|
17th
|
25,000,000
|
112,000,000
|
4th
|
6th
|
Taiping Rebellion
|
19th
|
20,000,000
|
40,000,000
|
10th
|
7th
|
Annihilation of American Indians
|
15th – 19th
|
20,000,000
|
92,000,000
|
7th
|
8th
|
Josef Stalin
|
20th
|
20,000,000
|
20,000,000
|
15th
|
9th
|
Mideast Slave Trade
|
7th – 19th
|
19,000,000
|
132,000,000
|
3rd
|
10th
|
Atlantic Slave Trade
|
15th – 19th
|
18,000,000
|
83,000,000
|
8th
|
11th
|
Timur Lenk (Tamerlane)
|
14th – 15th
|
17,000,000
|
100,000,000
|
6th
|
12th
|
British India (mostly
preventable famine)
|
19th
|
17,000,000
|
35,000,000
|
12th
|
13th
|
World War 1
|
20th
|
15,000,000
|
15,000,000
|
16th
|
14th
|
Russian Civil War
|
20th
|
9,000,000
|
9,000,000
|
20th
|
15th
|
Fall of Rome
|
3rd – 5th
|
8,000,000
|
105,000,000
|
5th
|
16th
|
Congo Free State
|
19th – 20th
|
8,000,000
|
12,000,000
|
18th
|
17th
|
Thirty Years War
|
17th
|
7,000,000
|
32,000,000
|
13th
|
18th
|
Russia’s Time of Troubles
|
16th – 17th
|
5,000,000
|
23,000,000
|
14th
|
19th
|
Napoleonic Wars
|
19th
|
4,000,000
|
11,000,000
|
19th
|
20th
|
Chinese Civil War
|
20th
|
3,000,000
|
3,000,000
|
21st
|
21st
|
French Wars of religion
|
16th
|
3,000,000
|
14,000,000
|
17th
|
*Adjusted death toll gives mid-20th century equivalent.
END
