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 (117 page)
The damage done by the drive for dominance can be multiplied in a second way. This multiplier depends on a feature of the social mind that can be introduced with a benign anecdote. Every December my heart is warmed by a local tradition: the province of Nova Scotia sends a towering spruce to the city of Boston for its Christmas tree in gratitude for the humanitarian aid that Boston organizations extended to Haligonians after the horrendous 1917 explosion of a munitions-laden ship in Halifax harbor. As a Canadian expatriate in New England, I get to feel good twice: once in gratitude for the generous help that had been extended to my fellow Canucks, once in appreciation for the thoughtful gift that is being returned to my Boston brethren. Yet this entire ritual is, when you think about it, rather odd. I was not a party to either act of generosity, and so I neither earned nor should express gratitude. The people who find, fell, and send the tree never met the original victims and helpers; nor did the people who erect and decorate it. For all I know, not a single person touched by the tragedy is alive today. Yet we all feel the emotions that would be appropriate to a transaction of sympathy and gratitude between a pair of individual people. Everyone’s mind contains a representation called “Nova Scotia” and a representation called “Boston” which are granted the full suite of moral emotions and valuations, and individual men and women act out their roles in the social behavior that follows from them.
A part of an individual’s personal identity is melded with the identity of the groups that he or she affiliates with.
128
Each group occupies a slot in their minds that is very much like the slot occupied by an individual person, complete with beliefs, desires, and praiseworthy or blameworthy traits. This social identity appears to be an adaptation to the reality of groups in the welfare of individuals. Our fitness depends not just on our own fortunes but on the fortunes of the bands, villages, and tribes we find ourselves in, which are bound together by real or fictive kinship, networks of reciprocity, and a commitment to public goods, including group defense. Within the group, some people help to police the provision of public goods by punishing any parasite who doesn’t contribute a fair share, and they are rewarded by the group’s esteem. These and other contributions to the group’s welfare are psychologically implemented by a partial loss of boundaries between the group and the self. On behalf of our group, we can feel sympathetic, grateful, angry, guilty, trustful, or mistrustful with regard to some other group, and we spread these emotions over the members of that group regardless of what they have done as individuals to deserve them.
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Each group occupies a slot in their minds that is very much like the slot occupied by an individual person, complete with beliefs, desires, and praiseworthy or blameworthy traits. This social identity appears to be an adaptation to the reality of groups in the welfare of individuals. Our fitness depends not just on our own fortunes but on the fortunes of the bands, villages, and tribes we find ourselves in, which are bound together by real or fictive kinship, networks of reciprocity, and a commitment to public goods, including group defense. Within the group, some people help to police the provision of public goods by punishing any parasite who doesn’t contribute a fair share, and they are rewarded by the group’s esteem. These and other contributions to the group’s welfare are psychologically implemented by a partial loss of boundaries between the group and the self. On behalf of our group, we can feel sympathetic, grateful, angry, guilty, trustful, or mistrustful with regard to some other group, and we spread these emotions over the members of that group regardless of what they have done as individuals to deserve them.
Loyalty to groups in competition, such as sports teams or political parties, encourages us to play out our instinct for dominance vicariously. Jerry Seinfeld once remarked that today’s athletes churn through the rosters of sports teams so rapidly that a fan can no longer support a group of players. He is reduced to rooting for their team logo and uniforms: “You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city.” But stand and cheer we do: the mood of a sports fan rises and falls with the fortunes of his team.
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The loss of boundaries can literally be assayed in the biochemistry lab. Men’s testosterone level rises when their team defeats a rival in a game, just as it rises when they personally defeat a rival in a wrestling match or in singles tennis.
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It also rises or falls when a favored political candidate wins or loses an election.
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The loss of boundaries can literally be assayed in the biochemistry lab. Men’s testosterone level rises when their team defeats a rival in a game, just as it rises when they personally defeat a rival in a wrestling match or in singles tennis.
130
It also rises or falls when a favored political candidate wins or loses an election.
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The dark side of our communal feelings is a desire for our own group to dominate another group, no matter how we feel about its members as individuals. In a set of famous experiments, the psychologist Henri Tajfel told participants that they belonged to one of two groups defined by some trivial difference, such as whether they preferred the paintings of Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky.
132
He then gave them an opportunity to distribute money between a member of their group and a member of the other group; the members were identified only by number, and the participants themselves had nothing to gain or lose from their choice. Not only did they allocate more money to their instant groupmates, but they preferred to penalize a member of the other group (for example, seven cents for a fellow Klee fan, one cent for a Kandinsky fan) than to benefit both individuals at the expense of the experimenter (nineteen cents for a fellow Klee fan, twenty-five cents for a Kandinsky fan). A preference for one’s group emerges early in life and seems to be something that must be unlearned, not learned. Developmental psychologists have shown that preschoolers profess racist attitudes that would appall their liberal parents, and that even babies prefer to interact with people of the same race and accent. 133
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He then gave them an opportunity to distribute money between a member of their group and a member of the other group; the members were identified only by number, and the participants themselves had nothing to gain or lose from their choice. Not only did they allocate more money to their instant groupmates, but they preferred to penalize a member of the other group (for example, seven cents for a fellow Klee fan, one cent for a Kandinsky fan) than to benefit both individuals at the expense of the experimenter (nineteen cents for a fellow Klee fan, twenty-five cents for a Kandinsky fan). A preference for one’s group emerges early in life and seems to be something that must be unlearned, not learned. Developmental psychologists have shown that preschoolers profess racist attitudes that would appall their liberal parents, and that even babies prefer to interact with people of the same race and accent. 133
The psychologists Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto have proposed that people, to varying degrees, harbor a motive they call social dominance, though a more intuitive term is tribalism: the desire that social groups be organized into a hierarchy, generally with one’s own group dominant over the others.
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A social dominance orientation, they show, inclines people to a sweeping array of opinions and values, including patriotism, racism, fate, karma, caste, national destiny, militarism, toughness on crime, and defensiveness of existing arrangements of authority and inequality. An orientation away from social dominance, in contrast, inclines people to humanism, socialism, feminism, universal rights, political progressivism, and the egalitarian and pacifist themes in the Christian Bible.
134
A social dominance orientation, they show, inclines people to a sweeping array of opinions and values, including patriotism, racism, fate, karma, caste, national destiny, militarism, toughness on crime, and defensiveness of existing arrangements of authority and inequality. An orientation away from social dominance, in contrast, inclines people to humanism, socialism, feminism, universal rights, political progressivism, and the egalitarian and pacifist themes in the Christian Bible.
The theory of social dominance implies that race, the focus of so much discussion on prejudice, is psychologically unimportant. As Tajfel’s experiments showed, people can divide the world into in-groups and out-groups based on any ascribed similarity, including tastes in expressionist painters. The psychologists Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides point out that in human evolutionary history members of different races were separated by oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges (which is why racial differences evolved in the first place) and seldom met each other face to face. One’s adversaries were villages, clans, and tribes of the same race. What looms large in people’s minds is not race but
coalition;
it just so happens that nowadays many coalitions (neighborhoods, gangs, countries) coincide with races. Any invidious treatment that people display toward other races can be just as readily elicited by members of other coalitions.
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Experiments by the psychologists G. Richard Tucker, Wallace Lambert, and later Katherine Kinzler have shown that one of the most vivid delineators of prejudice is speech: people distrust people who speak with an unfamiliar accent.
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The effect goes back to the charming story of the origin of the word
shibboleth
in Judges 12:5–6:
coalition;
it just so happens that nowadays many coalitions (neighborhoods, gangs, countries) coincide with races. Any invidious treatment that people display toward other races can be just as readily elicited by members of other coalitions.
135
Experiments by the psychologists G. Richard Tucker, Wallace Lambert, and later Katherine Kinzler have shown that one of the most vivid delineators of prejudice is speech: people distrust people who speak with an unfamiliar accent.
136
The effect goes back to the charming story of the origin of the word
shibboleth
in Judges 12:5–6:
And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of the Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.
The phenomenon of
nationalism
can be understood as an interaction between psychology and history. It is the welding together of three things: the emotional impulse behind tribalism; a cognitive conception of the “group” as a people sharing a language, territory, and ancestry; and the political apparatus of government.
nationalism
can be understood as an interaction between psychology and history. It is the welding together of three things: the emotional impulse behind tribalism; a cognitive conception of the “group” as a people sharing a language, territory, and ancestry; and the political apparatus of government.
Nationalism, Einstein said, is “the measles of the human race.” That isn’t always true—sometimes it’s just a head cold—but nationalism can get virulent when it is comorbid with the group equivalent of narcissism in the psychiatric sense, namely a big but fragile ego with an unearned claim to preeminence. Recall that narcissism can trigger violence when the narcissist is enraged by an insolent signal from reality. Combine narcissism with nationalism, and you get a deadly phenomenon that political scientists call
ressentiment
(French for
resentment
): the conviction that one’s nation or civilization has a historical right to greatness despite its lowly status, which can only be explained by the malevolence of an internal or external foe.
137
ressentiment
(French for
resentment
): the conviction that one’s nation or civilization has a historical right to greatness despite its lowly status, which can only be explained by the malevolence of an internal or external foe.
137
Ressentiment whips up the emotions of thwarted dominance—humiliation, envy, and rage—to which narcissists are prone. Historians such as Liah Greenfield and Daniel Chirot have attributed the major wars and genocides in the early decades of the 20th century to ressentiment in Germany and Russia. Both nations felt they were realizing their rightful claims to preeminence, which perfidious enemies had denied them.
138
It has not escaped the notice of observers of the contemporary scene that Russia and the Islamic world both nurse resentments about their undeserved lack of greatness, and that these emotions are nonnegligible threats to peace.
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It has not escaped the notice of observers of the contemporary scene that Russia and the Islamic world both nurse resentments about their undeserved lack of greatness, and that these emotions are nonnegligible threats to peace.
139
Heading in the other direction are European countries like Holland, Sweden, and Denmark that stopped playing the preeminence game in the 18th century and pegged their self-esteem to more tangible if less heart-pounding achievements like making money and giving their citizens a pleasant lifestyle.
140
Together with countries that never cared about being magnificent in the first place, like Canada, Singapore, and New Zealand, their national pride, though considerable, is commensurate with their achievements, and in the arena of interstate relations they don’t make trouble.
140
Together with countries that never cared about being magnificent in the first place, like Canada, Singapore, and New Zealand, their national pride, though considerable, is commensurate with their achievements, and in the arena of interstate relations they don’t make trouble.
Group-level ambition also determines the fate of ethnic neighbors. Experts on ethnicity dismiss the conventional wisdom that ancient hatreds inevitably keep neighboring peoples at each other’s throats.
141
After all, there are some six thousand languages spoken on the planet, at least six hundred of which have substantial numbers of speakers.
142
By any reckoning, the number of deadly ethnic conflicts that actually break out is a tiny fraction of the number that could break out. In 1996 James Fearon and David Laitin carried out one such reckoning. They focused on two parts of the world that each housed a combustible mixture of ethnic groups: the republics of the recently dissolved Soviet Union in the early 1990s, which had 45 of them, and newly decolonized Africa from 1960 to 1979, which had at least 160, probably many more. Fearon and Laitin counted the number of civil wars and incidents of intercommunal violence (such as deadly riots) as a proportion of the number of pairs of neighboring ethnic groups. They found that in the former Soviet Union, violence broke out in about 4.4 percent of the opportunities, and in Africa it broke out in fewer than 1 percent. Developed countries with mixtures of ethnic groups, such as New Zealand, Malaysia, Canada, Belgium, and recently the United States, have even better track records of ethnic nonviolence.
143
The groups may get on each other’s nerves, but they don’t kill each other. Nor should this be surprising. Even if ethnic groups are like people and constantly jockey for status, remember that most of the time people don’t come to blows either.
141
After all, there are some six thousand languages spoken on the planet, at least six hundred of which have substantial numbers of speakers.
142
By any reckoning, the number of deadly ethnic conflicts that actually break out is a tiny fraction of the number that could break out. In 1996 James Fearon and David Laitin carried out one such reckoning. They focused on two parts of the world that each housed a combustible mixture of ethnic groups: the republics of the recently dissolved Soviet Union in the early 1990s, which had 45 of them, and newly decolonized Africa from 1960 to 1979, which had at least 160, probably many more. Fearon and Laitin counted the number of civil wars and incidents of intercommunal violence (such as deadly riots) as a proportion of the number of pairs of neighboring ethnic groups. They found that in the former Soviet Union, violence broke out in about 4.4 percent of the opportunities, and in Africa it broke out in fewer than 1 percent. Developed countries with mixtures of ethnic groups, such as New Zealand, Malaysia, Canada, Belgium, and recently the United States, have even better track records of ethnic nonviolence.
143
The groups may get on each other’s nerves, but they don’t kill each other. Nor should this be surprising. Even if ethnic groups are like people and constantly jockey for status, remember that most of the time people don’t come to blows either.
Several things determine whether ethnic groups can coexist without bloodshed. As Fearon and Laitin point out, one important emollient is the way a group treats a loose cannon who attacks a member of the other group.
144
If the malefactor is reeled in and punished by his own community, the victimized group can classify the incident as a one-on-one crime rather than as the first strike in a group-against-group war. (Recall that one reason international peacekeepers are effective is that they can chasten spoilers on one side to the satisfaction of the other.) The political scientist Stephen van Evera suggests that an even bigger factor is ideology. Things get ugly when intermingled ethnic groups long for states of their own, hope to unite with their diasporas in other countries, keep long memories of harms committed by their neighbors’ ancestors while being unrepentant for harms committed by their own, and live under crappy governments that mythologize one group’s glorious history while excluding others from the social contract.
144
If the malefactor is reeled in and punished by his own community, the victimized group can classify the incident as a one-on-one crime rather than as the first strike in a group-against-group war. (Recall that one reason international peacekeepers are effective is that they can chasten spoilers on one side to the satisfaction of the other.) The political scientist Stephen van Evera suggests that an even bigger factor is ideology. Things get ugly when intermingled ethnic groups long for states of their own, hope to unite with their diasporas in other countries, keep long memories of harms committed by their neighbors’ ancestors while being unrepentant for harms committed by their own, and live under crappy governments that mythologize one group’s glorious history while excluding others from the social contract.
Many peaceable countries today are in the process of redefining the nationstate by purging it of tribalist psychology. The government no longer defines itself as a crystallization of the yearning of the soul of a particular ethnic group, but as a compact that embraces all the people and groups that happen to find themselves on a contiguous plot of land. The machinery of government is often rubegoldbergian, with complex arrangements of devolution and special status and power-sharing and affirmative action, and the contraption is held together by a few national symbols such as a rugby team.
145
People root for clothing instead of blood and soil. It is a messiness appropriate to the messiness of people’s divided selves, with coexisting identities as individuals and as members of overlapping groups.
146
145
People root for clothing instead of blood and soil. It is a messiness appropriate to the messiness of people’s divided selves, with coexisting identities as individuals and as members of overlapping groups.
146
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