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 (143 page)
BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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According to the 18th-century writer Mary Wortley Montagu, “Satire should, like a polished razor keen / Wound with a touch that’s scarcely felt or seen.” But satire is seldom polished that keenly, and the butts of a joke may be all too aware of the subversive power of humor. They may react with a rage that is stoked by the intentional insult to a sacred value, the deflation of their dignity, and a realization that laughter indicates common knowledge of both. The lethal riots in 2005 provoked by the editorial cartoons in the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
(for example, one showing Muhammad in heaven greeting newly arrived suicide bombers with “Stop, we have run out of virgins!”) show that when it comes to the deliberate undermining of a sacred relational model, humor is no laughing matter.
Jyllands-Posten
(for example, one showing Muhammad in heaven greeting newly arrived suicide bombers with “Stop, we have run out of virgins!”) show that when it comes to the deliberate undermining of a sacred relational model, humor is no laughing matter.
How do the relational models that make up the moral sense license the various kinds of violence that people feel are morally legitimate? And what degree of freedom allows societies to throttle down moralistic violence or, better still, shift it into reverse? All the relational models invite moralistic punishment of the people who violate their rules of engagement. But each model licenses a distinctive kind of violence as well.
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Human beings, Fiske notes, need not relate to one another using any of the models at all, a state he calls a null or asocial relationship. People who don’t fall under a relational model are
dehumanized:
they are seen as lacking the essential features of human nature and are treated, in effect, like inanimate objects which may be ignored, exploited, or preyed upon at will.
192
An asocial relationship thus sets the stage for the predatory violence of conquest, rape, assassination, infanticide, strategic bombing, colonial expulsions, and other crimes of convenience.
dehumanized:
they are seen as lacking the essential features of human nature and are treated, in effect, like inanimate objects which may be ignored, exploited, or preyed upon at will.
192
An asocial relationship thus sets the stage for the predatory violence of conquest, rape, assassination, infanticide, strategic bombing, colonial expulsions, and other crimes of convenience.
Placing other people under the aegis of a relational model imposes at least some obligation to take their interests into account. Communal Sharing has sympathy and warmth built into it—but only for members of the in-group. Fiske’s collaborator Nick Haslam has argued that Communal Sharing can lead to a second kind of dehumanization: not the
mechanistic
dehumanization of an asocial relationship, but an
animalistic
dehumanization that denies to outsiders the traits that are commonly perceived as uniquely human, such as reason, individuality, self-control, morality, and culture.
193
Rather than being treated with callousness or indifference, such outsiders are treated with disgust or contempt. Communal Sharing may encourage this dehumanization because the excluded people are seen as lacking the pure and sacred essence that unites the members of the tribe, and thereby they threaten to pollute it with their animal contaminants. So Communal Sharing, for all its cuddly connotations, supports the mindset behind genocidal ideologies based on tribe, race, ethnicity, and religion.
mechanistic
dehumanization of an asocial relationship, but an
animalistic
dehumanization that denies to outsiders the traits that are commonly perceived as uniquely human, such as reason, individuality, self-control, morality, and culture.
193
Rather than being treated with callousness or indifference, such outsiders are treated with disgust or contempt. Communal Sharing may encourage this dehumanization because the excluded people are seen as lacking the pure and sacred essence that unites the members of the tribe, and thereby they threaten to pollute it with their animal contaminants. So Communal Sharing, for all its cuddly connotations, supports the mindset behind genocidal ideologies based on tribe, race, ethnicity, and religion.
Authority Ranking also has two sides. It brings a paternalistic responsibility to protect and support one’s underlings, and thus may be the psychological basis of the Pacification Process in which overlords protect their subject peoples from internecine violence. In a similar way, it furnishes the moral rationalizations employed by slaveholders, colonial overlords, and benevolent despots. But Authority Ranking also justifies violent punishment for insolence, insubordination, disobedience, treason, blasphemy, heresy, and lèse-majesté. When welded to Communal Sharing, it justifies group-over-group violence, including imperial and jingoistic conquest and the subjugation of subordinate castes, colonies, and slaves.
More benevolent is the obligation of reciprocal exchange in Equality Matching, which gives each party a stake in the continued existence and well-being of the other. Equality Matching also encourages a modicum of perspective-taking, which, as we have seen, can turn into genuine sympathy. The pacifying effect of commerce between individuals and nations may depend on a mindset in which exchange partners, even if they are not genuinely loved, are at least valued. On the other hand, Equality Matching supplies the rationale for tit-for-tat retaliation: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, blood for blood. As we saw in chapter 8, even people in modern societies are apt to conceive of criminal punishment as just deserts rather than as general or specific deterrence.
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194
Rational-Legal reasoning, the add-on to the moral repertoire in literate and numerate societies, does not come with its own intuitions or emotions, and by itself neither encourages nor discourages violence. Unless all people are explicitly enfranchised and granted ownership of their own bodies and property, the amoral pursuit of profit in a market economy can exploit them in slave markets, human trafficking, and the opening of foreign markets with gunboats. And the deployment of quantitative tools can be used to maximize kill ratios in the waging of high-tech war. Yet Rational-Legal reasoning, as we shall see, can also be put in the service of a utilitarian morality that calculates the greatest good for the greatest number, and that titrates the amount of legitimate police and military force to the minimum necessary to reduce the aggregate amount of violence.
195
195
What, then, are the historical changes in moral psychology that encouraged reductions in violence such as the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, and the Rights Revolutions?
The direction of the change in prevailing models is clear enough. “Over the last three centuries throughout the world,” Fiske and Tetlock observe, “there has been a rapidly accelerating tendency of social systems as a whole to move from Communal Sharing to Authority Ranking to Equality Matching to Market Pricing.”
196
And if we use the polling data from chapter 7 as an indication that social liberals are at the leading edge of changes in attitudes that eventually drag along social conservatives as well, then Haidt’s data on the moral concerns of liberals and conservatives tell the same story. In judging the importance of moral concerns, recall, social liberals place little weight on In-group Loyalty and Purity/Sanctity (which Fiske lumps under Communal Sharing), and they place little weight on Authority/Respect. Instead they invest all their moral concern in Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity. Social conservatives spread their moral portfolio over all five.
197
The trend toward social liberalism, then, is a trend away from communal and authoritarian values and toward values based on equality, fairness, autonomy, and legally enforced rights. Though both liberals and conservatives may deny that any such a trend has taken place, consider the fact that no mainstream conservative politician today would invoke tradition, authority, cohesion, or religion to justify racial segregation, keeping women out of the workforce, or criminalizing homosexuality, arguments they made just a few decades ago.
198
196
And if we use the polling data from chapter 7 as an indication that social liberals are at the leading edge of changes in attitudes that eventually drag along social conservatives as well, then Haidt’s data on the moral concerns of liberals and conservatives tell the same story. In judging the importance of moral concerns, recall, social liberals place little weight on In-group Loyalty and Purity/Sanctity (which Fiske lumps under Communal Sharing), and they place little weight on Authority/Respect. Instead they invest all their moral concern in Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity. Social conservatives spread their moral portfolio over all five.
197
The trend toward social liberalism, then, is a trend away from communal and authoritarian values and toward values based on equality, fairness, autonomy, and legally enforced rights. Though both liberals and conservatives may deny that any such a trend has taken place, consider the fact that no mainstream conservative politician today would invoke tradition, authority, cohesion, or religion to justify racial segregation, keeping women out of the workforce, or criminalizing homosexuality, arguments they made just a few decades ago.
198
Why might a disinvestment of moral resources from community, sanctity, and authority militate against violence? One reason is that communality can legitimize tribalism and jingoism, and authority can legitimize government repression. But a more general reason is that a retrenchment of the moral sense to smaller territories leaves fewer transgressions for which people may legitimately be punished. There is a bedrock of morality based on autonomy and fairness on which everyone, traditional and modern, liberal and conservative, agrees. No one objects to the use of government violence to put assailants, rapists, and murderers behind bars. But defenders of traditional morality wish to heap many nonviolent infractions on top of this consensual layer, such as homosexuality, licentiousness, blasphemy, heresy, indecency, and desecration of sacred symbols. For their moral disapproval to have teeth, traditionalists must get the Leviathan to punish those offenders as well. Expunging these offenses from the law books gives the authorities fewer grounds for clubbing, cuffing, paddling, jailing, or executing people.
The momentum of social norms in the direction of Market Pricing gives many people the willies, but it would, for better or worse, extrapolate the trend toward nonviolence. Radical libertarians, who love the Market Pricing model, would decriminalize prostitution, drug possession, and gambling, and thereby empty the world’s prisons of millions of people currently kept there by force (to say nothing of sending pimps and drug lords the way of Prohibition gangsters). The progression toward personal freedom raises the question of whether it is morally
desirable
to trade a measure of socially sanctioned violence for a measure of behavior that many people deem intrinsically wrong, such as blasphemy, homosexuality, drug use, and prostitution. But that’s just the point: right or wrong, retracting the moral sense from its traditional spheres of community, authority, and purity entails a reduction of violence. And that retraction is precisely the agenda of classical liberalism: a freedom of individuals from tribal and authoritarian force, and a tolerance of personal choices as long as they do not infringe on the autonomy and well-being of others.
desirable
to trade a measure of socially sanctioned violence for a measure of behavior that many people deem intrinsically wrong, such as blasphemy, homosexuality, drug use, and prostitution. But that’s just the point: right or wrong, retracting the moral sense from its traditional spheres of community, authority, and purity entails a reduction of violence. And that retraction is precisely the agenda of classical liberalism: a freedom of individuals from tribal and authoritarian force, and a tolerance of personal choices as long as they do not infringe on the autonomy and well-being of others.
The historical direction of morality in modern societies is not just away from Communality and Authority but toward Rational-Legal organization, and that too is a pacifying development. Fiske notes that utilitarian morality, with its goal of securing the greatest good for the greatest number, is a paradigm case of the Market Pricing model (itself a special case of the Rational-Legal mindset).
199
Recall that it was the utilitarianism of Cesare Beccaria that led to a reengineering of criminal punishment away from a raw hunger for retribution and toward a calibrated policy of deterrence. Jeremy Bentham used utilitarian reasoning to undermine the rationalizations for punishing homosexuals and mistreating animals, and John Stuart Mill used it to make an early case for feminism. The national reconciliation movements of the 1990s, in which Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and other peacemakers abjured in-kind retributive justice for a cocktail of truth-telling, amnesty, and measured punishment of the most atrocious perpetrators, was another accomplishment of violence reduction via calculated proportionality. So is the policy of responding to international provocations with economic sanctions and tactics of containment rather than retaliatory strikes.
199
Recall that it was the utilitarianism of Cesare Beccaria that led to a reengineering of criminal punishment away from a raw hunger for retribution and toward a calibrated policy of deterrence. Jeremy Bentham used utilitarian reasoning to undermine the rationalizations for punishing homosexuals and mistreating animals, and John Stuart Mill used it to make an early case for feminism. The national reconciliation movements of the 1990s, in which Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and other peacemakers abjured in-kind retributive justice for a cocktail of truth-telling, amnesty, and measured punishment of the most atrocious perpetrators, was another accomplishment of violence reduction via calculated proportionality. So is the policy of responding to international provocations with economic sanctions and tactics of containment rather than retaliatory strikes.
If the recent theories of moral psychology are on the right track, then intuitions of community, authority, sacredness, and taboo are part of human nature and will probably always be with us, even if we try to sequester their influence. That is not necessarily a cause for alarm. Relational models can be combined and embedded, and Rational-Legal reasoning that seeks to minimize overall violence can strategically deploy the other mental models in benign ways.
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200
If a version of Communal Sharing is assigned to the resource of human life, and applied to a community consisting of the entire species rather than a family, tribe, or nation, it can serve as an emotional undergirding of the abstract principle of human rights. We are all one big family, and no one within it may usurp the life or freedom of anyone else. Authority Ranking may authorize the state’s monopoly on the use of violence in order to prevent greater violence. And the authority of the state over its citizens can be embedded in other authority rankings in the form of democratic checks and balances, as when the president can veto the bills of Congress while at the same time Congress can impeach and remove the president. Sacred values, and the taboos that protect them, can be attached to resources that we decide are genuinely precious, such as identifiable lives, national borders, and the nonuse of chemical and nuclear weapons.
BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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