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 (123 page)
In other words, peel off the bumper sticker that says “If you want peace, work for justice.” Replace it with the one recommended by Joshua Goldstein: “If you want peace, work for peace.”
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Finally, the belligerents have to signal their commitment to a new relationship with a burst of verbal and nonverbal gestures. As Long and Brecke observe, “Legislatures passed solemn resolutions, peace accords were signed and embraces exchanged by heads of formerly rival groups, statues and monuments to the tragedy were erected, textbooks were rewritten, and a thousand other actions, large and small, were undertaken to underscore the notion that the past was different and the future more hopeful.”
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The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians stands in many people’s minds today as the nastiest ongoing cycle of deadly revenge. Not even Pollyanna would claim to have the key to solving it. But the applied psychology of reconciliation bears out the vision of the Israeli novelist Amos Oz on what a solution will have to look like:
SADISMTragedies can be resolved in one of two ways: there is the Shakespearean resolution and there is the Chekhovian one. At the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, the stage is strewn with dead bodies and maybe there’s some justice hovering high above. A Chekhov tragedy, on the other hand, ends with everybody disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, disappointed, absolutely shattered, but still alive. And I want a Chekhovian resolution, not a Shakespearean one, for the Israeli/Palestinian tragedy.
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It’s hard to single out the most heinous form of human depravity—there are so many to choose from—but if genocide is the worst by quantity, sadism might be the worst by quality. The deliberate infliction of pain for no purpose but to enjoy a person’s suffering is not just morally monstrous but intellectually baffling, because in exchange for the agony of the victim the torturer receives no apparent personal or evolutionary benefit. And unlike many other sins, pure sadism is not a guilty pleasure that most people indulge in their fantasy lives; few of us daydream about watching cats burn to death. Yet torture is a recurring disfigurement in human history and current events, appearing in at least five circumstances.
Sadism can grow out of instrumental violence. The threat of torture can terrify political opponents, and it must at least occasionally be used to make the threat real. Torture may also be used to extract information from a criminal suspect or political enemy. Many police and national security forces engage in mild torture under euphemisms like “the third degree,” “moderate physical pressure,” and “enhanced interrogation,” and these tactics may sometimes be effective.
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And as moral philosophers since Jeremy Bentham have pointed out, in theory torture can even be justifiable, most famously in the ticking-bomb scenario in which a criminal knows the location of an explosive that will kill and maim many innocent people and only torture would force him to disclose its location.
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And as moral philosophers since Jeremy Bentham have pointed out, in theory torture can even be justifiable, most famously in the ticking-bomb scenario in which a criminal knows the location of an explosive that will kill and maim many innocent people and only torture would force him to disclose its location.
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Yet among the many arguments against the use of torture is that it seldom stays instrumental for long. Torturers get carried away. They inflict so much suffering on their victims that the victims will say anything to make it stop, or become so delirious with agony as to be incapable of responding.
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Often the victims die, which makes the extraction of information moot. And in cases like the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, the use of torture, far from serving a useful purpose, was a strategic catastrophe for the country that allowed it to happen, inflaming enemies and alienating friends.
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Often the victims die, which makes the extraction of information moot. And in cases like the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, the use of torture, far from serving a useful purpose, was a strategic catastrophe for the country that allowed it to happen, inflaming enemies and alienating friends.
A second occasion for torture is in criminal and religious punishment. Here again there is a granule of instrumental motivation, namely to deter wrongdoers with the prospect of pain that would cancel out their gain. Yet as Beccaria and other Enlightenment reformers pointed out, any calculus of deterrence can achieve the same goals with punishments that are less severe but more reliable. And surely the death penalty, if it is applied at all, is a sufficient disincentive to capital crimes without needing the then-customary practice of preceding it with prolonged gruesome torture. In practice, corporal punishment and excruciating capital punishment escalate into orgies of cruelty for its own sake.
Entertainment itself can be a motive for torture, as at the Roman Colosseum and in blood sports like bearbaiting and cat-burning. Tuchman notes that towns in medieval France would sometimes purchase a condemned criminal from another town so they could entertain their citizens with a public execution.
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Hideous tortures and mutilations can accompany a rampage by soldiers, rioters, or militiamen, especially when they have been released from apprehension and fear, the phenomenon that Randall Collins calls forward panic. These are the atrocities that accompany pogroms, genocides, police brutality, and military routs, including those in tribal warfare.
Finally there are serial killers, the sickos who stalk, kidnap, torture, mutilate, and kill their victims for sexual gratification. Serial killers like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer are not the same as garden-variety mass murderers.
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Mass murderers include men who run amok, like the enraged postal workers who avenge a humiliation and prove their potency by taking as many people as they can with them in a final suicidal outburst. They also include spree killers, like the Washington, D.C., sniper John Muhammad, who stretch out their vengeance and dominance over several weeks. With serial killers, in contrast, the motive is sadism. They are aroused by the prospect of tormenting, disfiguring, dismembering, eviscerating, and slowly draining the life out of victims with their bare hands. Even the most jaded consumer of human atrocities will find something to shock them in Harold Schechter’s authoritative compendium
The Serial Killer Files
.
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Mass murderers include men who run amok, like the enraged postal workers who avenge a humiliation and prove their potency by taking as many people as they can with them in a final suicidal outburst. They also include spree killers, like the Washington, D.C., sniper John Muhammad, who stretch out their vengeance and dominance over several weeks. With serial killers, in contrast, the motive is sadism. They are aroused by the prospect of tormenting, disfiguring, dismembering, eviscerating, and slowly draining the life out of victims with their bare hands. Even the most jaded consumer of human atrocities will find something to shock them in Harold Schechter’s authoritative compendium
The Serial Killer Files
.
For all its notoriety in rock songs, made-for-TV movies, and Hollywood blockbusters, serial killing is a rare phenomenon. The criminologists James Alan Fox and Jack Levin note that “there may actually be more scholars studying serial murder than there are offenders committing it.”
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And even that small number (like every other tabulation of violence we have examined in this book) has been in decline. In the 1980s, when serial killers were a pop sensation, there were 200 known perpetrators in all, and they killed around 70 victims a year. In the 1990s, there were 141, and in the 2000s, only 61.
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Those figures may be underestimates (because many serial killers prey on runaways, prostitutes, the homeless, and others whose disappearance may not have been reported as murders), but by any reckoning, no more than two or three dozen serial killers can be at large in the United States at any time, and they are collectively responsible for a tiny fraction of the 17,000 homicides that take place every year.
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And even that small number (like every other tabulation of violence we have examined in this book) has been in decline. In the 1980s, when serial killers were a pop sensation, there were 200 known perpetrators in all, and they killed around 70 victims a year. In the 1990s, there were 141, and in the 2000s, only 61.
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Those figures may be underestimates (because many serial killers prey on runaways, prostitutes, the homeless, and others whose disappearance may not have been reported as murders), but by any reckoning, no more than two or three dozen serial killers can be at large in the United States at any time, and they are collectively responsible for a tiny fraction of the 17,000 homicides that take place every year.
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Serial killing is nothing new. Schechter shows that contrary to a common view that serial killers are the product of our sick society, they have splattered the pages of history for millennia. Caligula, Nero, Bluebeard (probably based on the 15th-century knight Gilles de Rais), Vlad the Impaler, and Jack the Ripper are celebrity examples, and scholars have speculated that legends of werewolves, robber bridegrooms, and demon barbers may have been based on widely retold tales of actual serial killers. All that is new in sadistic killing is the name for the motive, which comes to us courtesy of the most famous serial torturer of all, Donatien Alphonse François, also known as the Marquis de Sade. In earlier centuries serial killers were called murder fiends, bloodthirsty monsters, devils in human shape, or the morally insane.
Though the florid sadism of serial killers is historically rare, the sadism of inquisitors, rampagers, public execution spectators, blood sport fans, and Colosseum audiences is not. And even serial killers don’t end up with their avocation because of any gene, brain lesion, or childhood experience we can identify.
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(They do tend to be victims of childhood sexual and physical abuse, but so are millions of people who don’t grow up to be serial killers.) So it’s conceivable that the pathway to serial killing can shed light on the pathway that leads ordinary people into sadism as well. How can we make sense of this most senseless variety of violence?
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(They do tend to be victims of childhood sexual and physical abuse, but so are millions of people who don’t grow up to be serial killers.) So it’s conceivable that the pathway to serial killing can shed light on the pathway that leads ordinary people into sadism as well. How can we make sense of this most senseless variety of violence?
The development of sadism requires two things: motives to enjoy the suffering of others, and a removal of the restraints that ordinarily inhibit people from acting on them.
Though it’s painful to admit, human nature comes equipped with at least four motives to take satisfaction in the pain of others. One is a morbid fascination with the vulnerability of living things, a phenomenon perhaps best captured by the word
macabre
. This is what leads boys to pull the legs off grasshoppers and to fry ants with a magnifying glass. It leads adults to rubberneck at the scene of automobile accidents—a vice that can tie up traffic for miles—and to fork over their disposable income to read and watch gory entertainment. The ultimate motive may be mastery over the living world, including our own safety. The implicit lesson of macabre voyeurism may be “But for the swerve of a steering wheel or an unlocked front door, that could have happened to me.”
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macabre
. This is what leads boys to pull the legs off grasshoppers and to fry ants with a magnifying glass. It leads adults to rubberneck at the scene of automobile accidents—a vice that can tie up traffic for miles—and to fork over their disposable income to read and watch gory entertainment. The ultimate motive may be mastery over the living world, including our own safety. The implicit lesson of macabre voyeurism may be “But for the swerve of a steering wheel or an unlocked front door, that could have happened to me.”
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Another appeal of feeling someone’s pain is dominance. It can be enjoyable to see how the mighty have fallen, especially if they have been among your tormenters. And when one is looking downward instead of upward, it’s reassuring to know that you can exercise the power to dominate others should the need arise. The ultimate form of power over someone is the power to cause them pain at will.
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Nowadays neuroscientists will slide people into a magnet to look at just about any human experience. Though no one, to my knowledge, has studied sadism in the scanner, a recent experiment looked at the diluted version, schadenfreude.
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Male Japanese students lay in an MRI machine and were asked to put themselves in the shoes of a schlemiel who longs for a job in a multinational information technology company but earns mediocre grades, flubs his job interview, warms the bench in his baseball club, ends up with a low-paying job in a retail store, lives in a tiny apartment, and has no girlfriend. At his college reunion he meets a classmate who works for a multinational corporation, lives in a luxury condo, owns a fancy car, dines at French restaurants, collects watches, jet-sets to weekend vacation spots, and “has many opportunities to meet girls after work.” The participant also imagines meeting two other classmates, one successful, one unsuccessful, whom the Japanese researchers assumed—correctly, as it turned out—would arouse no envy in the participant because they were women. The participant, still imagining himself the loser, then reads about a string of misfortunes that befall his envied but increasingly Job-like classmate: the classmate is falsely accused of cheating on an exam, he becomes the victim of ugly rumors, his girlfriend has an affair, his company gets into financial trouble, his bonus is small, his car breaks down, his watches are stolen, his apartment building is sprayed with graffiti, he gets food poisoning at the French restaurant, and his vacation is canceled because of a typhoon. The researchers could literally read the gloating off the participants’ brains. As the participants read of the misfortunes of their virtual better (though not of the nonthreatening women), their striatum, the part of the Seeking circuit that underlies wanting and liking, lit up like a Tokyo boulevard. The results were the same when women contemplated the downfall of an enviable female rival.
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Male Japanese students lay in an MRI machine and were asked to put themselves in the shoes of a schlemiel who longs for a job in a multinational information technology company but earns mediocre grades, flubs his job interview, warms the bench in his baseball club, ends up with a low-paying job in a retail store, lives in a tiny apartment, and has no girlfriend. At his college reunion he meets a classmate who works for a multinational corporation, lives in a luxury condo, owns a fancy car, dines at French restaurants, collects watches, jet-sets to weekend vacation spots, and “has many opportunities to meet girls after work.” The participant also imagines meeting two other classmates, one successful, one unsuccessful, whom the Japanese researchers assumed—correctly, as it turned out—would arouse no envy in the participant because they were women. The participant, still imagining himself the loser, then reads about a string of misfortunes that befall his envied but increasingly Job-like classmate: the classmate is falsely accused of cheating on an exam, he becomes the victim of ugly rumors, his girlfriend has an affair, his company gets into financial trouble, his bonus is small, his car breaks down, his watches are stolen, his apartment building is sprayed with graffiti, he gets food poisoning at the French restaurant, and his vacation is canceled because of a typhoon. The researchers could literally read the gloating off the participants’ brains. As the participants read of the misfortunes of their virtual better (though not of the nonthreatening women), their striatum, the part of the Seeking circuit that underlies wanting and liking, lit up like a Tokyo boulevard. The results were the same when women contemplated the downfall of an enviable female rival.
A third occasion for sadism is revenge, or the sanitized third-party version we call justice. The whole point of moralistic punishment is that the wrongdoer suffers for his sins, and we have already seen that revenge can be sweet. Revenge literally turns off the empathic response in the brain (at least among men), and it is consummated only when the avenger knows that the target knows that his suffering is payback for his misdeeds.
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What better way for the avenger to be certain in that knowledge than to inflict the suffering himself?
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What better way for the avenger to be certain in that knowledge than to inflict the suffering himself?
Finally, there is sexual sadism. Sadism itself is not a common perversion—among people who indulge in S&M, far more of them are into the M than the S—but milder forms of domination and degradation are not uncommon in pornography, and they may be a by-product of the fact that males are the more ardent and females the more discriminating gender.
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The circuits for sexuality and aggression are intertwined in the limbic system, and both respond to testosterone.
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The circuits for sexuality and aggression are intertwined in the limbic system, and both respond to testosterone.
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