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 (13 page)
Though we bristle when we read of European colonists calling native people savages, and justly fault them for their hypocrisy and racism, it’s not as if they were making the atrocities up. Many eyewitnesses have brought back tales of horrific violence in tribal warfare. Helena Valero, a woman who had been abducted by the Yanomamö in the Venezuelan rain forest in the 1930s, recounted one of their raids:
Meanwhile from all sides the women continued to arrive with their children, whom the other Karawetari had captured.... Then the men began to kill the children; little ones, bigger ones, they killed many of them. They tried to run away, but they caught them, and threw them on the ground, and stuck them with bows, which went through their bodies and rooted them to the ground. Taking the smallest by the feet, they beat them against the trees and rocks. . . . All the women wept.
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In the early 19th century an English convict named William Buckley escaped from a penal colony in Australia and for three decades lived happily with the Wathaurung aborigines. He provided firsthand accounts of their way of life, including their ways of war:
On approaching the enemy’s quarters, they laid themselves down in ambush until all was quiet, and finding most of them asleep, laying about in groups, our party rushed upon them, killing three on the spot and wounding several others. The enemy fled precipitately, leaving their war implements in the hands of their assailants and their wounded to be beaten to death by boomerangs, three loud shouts closing the victors’ triumph. The bodies of the dead they mutilated in a shocking manner, cutting the arms and legs off, with flints, and shells, and tomahawks.When the women saw them returning, they also raised great shouts, dancing about in savage ecstasy. The bodies were thrown upon the ground, and beaten about with sticks—in fact, they all seemed to be perfectly mad with excitement.
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It was not just Europeans gone native who recounted such episodes but the natives themselves. Robert Nasruk Cleveland, an Iñupiaq Inuit, provided this reminiscence in 1965:
The next morning the raiders attacked the camp and killed all the women and children remaining there.... After shoving sheefish into the vaginas of all the Indian women they had killed, the Noatakers took Kititigaagvaat and her baby, and retreated toward the upper Noatak River.... Finally, when they had almost reached home, the Noatakers gang-raped Kititigaagvaat and left her with her baby to die. . . .Some weeks later, the Kobuk caribou hunters returned home to find the rotting remains of their wives and children and vowed revenge. A year or two after that, they headed north to the upper Noatak to seek it. They soon located a large body of Nuataagmiut and secretly followed them. One morning the men in the Nuataagmiut camp spotted a large band of caribou and went off in pursuit. While they were gone, the Kobuk raiders killed every woman in the camp. Then they cut off their vulvas, strung them on a line, and headed quickly toward home.
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Cannibalism has long been treated as the quintessence of primitive savagery, and in reaction many anthropologists used to dismiss reports of cannibalism as blood libels by neighboring tribes. But forensic archaeology has recently shown that cannibalism was widespread in human prehistory. The evidence includes human bones that bear human teethmarks or that had been cracked and cooked like those of animals and thrown out in the kitchen trash.
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Some of the butchered bones date back 800,000 years, to the time when
Homo heidelbergensis
, a common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals, first appears on the evolutionary stage. Traces of human blood proteins have also been found in cooking pots and in ancient human excrement. Cannibalism may have been so common in prehistory as to have affected our evolution: our genomes contain genes that appear to be defenses against the prion diseases transmitted by cannibalism.
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All this is consistent with eyewitness accounts, such as this transcription by a missionary of a Maori warrior taunting the preserved head of an enemy chief:
Homo heidelbergensis
, a common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals, first appears on the evolutionary stage. Traces of human blood proteins have also been found in cooking pots and in ancient human excrement. Cannibalism may have been so common in prehistory as to have affected our evolution: our genomes contain genes that appear to be defenses against the prion diseases transmitted by cannibalism.
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All this is consistent with eyewitness accounts, such as this transcription by a missionary of a Maori warrior taunting the preserved head of an enemy chief:
You wanted to run away, did you? But my war club overtook you. And after you were cooked, you made food for my mouth. And where is your father? He is cooked. And where is your brother? He is eaten. And where is your wife? There she sits, a wife for me. And where are your children? There they are, with loads on their backs, carrying food, as my slaves.
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Many scholars have found the image of harmless foragers to be plausible because they had trouble imagining the means and motives that could drive them to war. Recall, for example, Eckhardt’s claim that hunter-gatherers had “little to fight about.” But organisms that have evolved by natural selection always have something to fight about (which doesn’t, of course, mean that they will always fight). Hobbes noted that humans in particular have three reasons for quarrel: gain, safety, and credible deterrence. People in nonstate societies fight about all three.
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Foraging peoples can invade to gain territory, such as hunting grounds, watering holes, the banks or mouths of rivers, and sources of valued minerals like flint, obsidian, salt, or ochre. They may raid livestock or caches of stored food. And very often they fight over women. Men may raid a neighboring village for the express purpose of kidnapping women, whom they gang-rape and distribute as wives. They may raid for some other reason and take the women as a bonus. Or they may raid to claim women who had been promised to them in marriage but were not delivered at the agreed-upon time. And sometimes young men attack for trophies, coups, and other signs of aggressive prowess, especially in societies where they are a prerequisite to attaining adult status.
People in nonstate societies also invade for safety. The security dilemma or Hobbesian trap is very much on their minds, and they may form an alliance with nearby villages if they fear they are too small, or launch a preemptive strike if they fear that an enemy alliance is getting too big. One Yanomamö man in Amazonia told an anthropologist, “We are tired of fighting. We don’t want to kill anymore. But the others are treacherous and cannot be trusted.”
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But in most surveys the most commonly cited motive for warfare is vengeance, which serves as a crude deterrent to potential enemies by raising the anticipated long-term costs of an attack. In the
Iliad,
Achilles describes a feature of human psychology that can be found in cultures throughout the world: revenge “far sweeter than flowing honey wells up like smoke in the breasts of man.” Foraging and tribal people avenge theft, adultery, vandalism, poaching, abduction of women, soured deals, alleged sorcery, and previous acts of violence. One cross-cultural survey found that in 95 percent of societies, people explicitly endorse the idea of taking a life for a life.
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Tribal people not only feel the smoke welling up in their breasts but know that their enemies feel it too. That is why they sometimes massacre every last member of a village they raid: they anticipate that any survivors would seek revenge for their slain kinsmen.
RATES OF VIOLENCE IN STATE AND NONSTATE SOCIETIESIliad,
Achilles describes a feature of human psychology that can be found in cultures throughout the world: revenge “far sweeter than flowing honey wells up like smoke in the breasts of man.” Foraging and tribal people avenge theft, adultery, vandalism, poaching, abduction of women, soured deals, alleged sorcery, and previous acts of violence. One cross-cultural survey found that in 95 percent of societies, people explicitly endorse the idea of taking a life for a life.
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Tribal people not only feel the smoke welling up in their breasts but know that their enemies feel it too. That is why they sometimes massacre every last member of a village they raid: they anticipate that any survivors would seek revenge for their slain kinsmen.
Though descriptions of violence in nonstate societies demolish the stereotype that foraging peoples are inherently peaceful, they don’t tell us whether the level of violence is higher or lower than in so-called civilized societies. The annals of modern states have no shortage of gruesome massacres and atrocities, not least against native peoples of every continent, and their wars have death tolls that reach eight digits. Only by looking at numbers can we get a sense as to whether civilization has increased violence or decreased it.
In absolute numbers, of course, civilized societies are matchless in the destruction they have wreaked. But should we look at absolute numbers, or at
relative
numbers, calculated as a proportion of the populations? The choice confronts us with the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of one hundred to be killed or 1 percent of a population of one billion. In one frame of mind, one could say that a person who is tortured or killed suffers to the same degree regardless of how many other people meet such a fate, so it is the sum of these sufferings that should engage our sympathy and our analytic attention. But in another frame of mind, one could reason that part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. So the number of people in a given time and place who enjoy full lives has to be counted as a moral good, against which we calibrate the moral bad of the number who are victims of violence. Another way of expressing this frame of mind is to ask, “If
I
were one of the people who were alive in a particular era, what would be the chances that I would be a victim of violence?” The reasoning in this second frame of mind, whether it appeals to the proportion of a population or the risk to an individual, ends in the conclusion that in comparing the harmfulness of violence across societies, we should focus on the rate, rather than the number, of violent acts.
relative
numbers, calculated as a proportion of the populations? The choice confronts us with the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of one hundred to be killed or 1 percent of a population of one billion. In one frame of mind, one could say that a person who is tortured or killed suffers to the same degree regardless of how many other people meet such a fate, so it is the sum of these sufferings that should engage our sympathy and our analytic attention. But in another frame of mind, one could reason that part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. So the number of people in a given time and place who enjoy full lives has to be counted as a moral good, against which we calibrate the moral bad of the number who are victims of violence. Another way of expressing this frame of mind is to ask, “If
I
were one of the people who were alive in a particular era, what would be the chances that I would be a victim of violence?” The reasoning in this second frame of mind, whether it appeals to the proportion of a population or the risk to an individual, ends in the conclusion that in comparing the harmfulness of violence across societies, we should focus on the rate, rather than the number, of violent acts.
What happens, then, when we use the emergence of states as the dividing line and put hunter-gatherers, hunter-horticulturalists, and other tribal peoples (from any era) on one side, and settled states (also from any era) on the other? Several scholars have recently scoured the anthropological and historical literature for every good body count from nonstate societies that they could find. Two kinds of estimates are available. One comes from ethnographers who record demographic data, including deaths, in the people they study over long stretches of time.
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The other comes from forensic archaeologists, who sift through burial sites or museum collections with an eye for signs of foul play.
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The other comes from forensic archaeologists, who sift through burial sites or museum collections with an eye for signs of foul play.
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How can one establish the cause of death when the victim perished hundreds or thousands of years ago? Some prehistoric skeletons are accompanied by the stone-age equivalent of a smoking gun: a spearhead or arrowhead embedded in a bone, like the ones found in Kennewick Man and Ötzi. But circumstantial evidence can be almost as damning. Archaeologists can check prehistoric skeletons for the kinds of damage known to be left by assaults in humans today. The stigmata include bashed-in skulls, cut marks from stone tools on skulls or limbs, and parry fractures on ulnar bones (the injury that a person gets when he defends himself against an assailant by holding up his arm). Injuries sustained by a skeleton when it was inside a living body can be distinguished in several ways from the damage it sustained when it was exposed to the world. Living bones fracture like glass, with sharp, angled edges, whereas dead bones fracture like chalk, at clean right angles. And if a bone has a different pattern of weathering on its fractured surface than on its intact surface, it was probably broken after the surrounding flesh had rotted away. Other incriminating signs from nearby surroundings include fortifications, shields, shock weapons such as tomahawks (which are useless in hunting), and depictions of human combat on the walls of caves (some of them more than six thousand years old). Even with all this evidence, archaeological death counts are usually underestimates, because some causes of death—a poisoned arrow, a septic wound, or a ruptured organ or artery—leave no trace on the victim’s bones.
Once researchers have tallied a raw count of violent deaths, they can convert it to a rate in either of two ways. The first is to calculate the percentage of all deaths that are caused by violence. This rate is an answer to the question, “What are the chances that a person died at the hands of another person rather than passing away of natural causes?” The graph in figure 2–2 presents this statistic for three samples of nonstate people—skeletons from prehistoric sites, hunter-gatherers, and hunter-horticulturalists—and for a variety of state societies. Let’s walk through it.
The topmost cluster shows the rate of violent death for skeletons dug out of archaeological sites.
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They are the remains of hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturalists from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas and date from 14,000 BCE to 1770 CE, in every case well before the emergence of state societies or the first sustained contact with them. The death rates range from 0 to 60 percent, with an average of 15 percent.
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They are the remains of hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturalists from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas and date from 14,000 BCE to 1770 CE, in every case well before the emergence of state societies or the first sustained contact with them. The death rates range from 0 to 60 percent, with an average of 15 percent.
FIGURE 2–2.
Percentage of deaths in warfare in nonstate and state societies
Sources:
Prehistoric archaeological sites: Bowles, 2009; Keeley, 1996. Hunter-gatherers: Bowles, 2009. Hunter-horticulturalists and other tribal groups: Gat, 2006; Keeley, 1996. Ancient Mexico: Keeley, 1996. World, 20th-century wars & genocides (includes man-made famines): White, 2011. Europe, 1900–60: Keeley, 1996, from Wright, 1942, 1942/1964, 1942/ 1965; see note 52. Europe, 17th-century: Keeley, 1996. Europe and United States, 20th century: Keeley, 1996, from Harris, 1975. World, 20th-century battle deaths: Lacina & Gleditsch, 2005; Sarkees, 2000; see note 54. United States, 2005 war deaths: see text and note 57. World, 2005 battle deaths: see text and note 58.
Percentage of deaths in warfare in nonstate and state societies
Sources:
Prehistoric archaeological sites: Bowles, 2009; Keeley, 1996. Hunter-gatherers: Bowles, 2009. Hunter-horticulturalists and other tribal groups: Gat, 2006; Keeley, 1996. Ancient Mexico: Keeley, 1996. World, 20th-century wars & genocides (includes man-made famines): White, 2011. Europe, 1900–60: Keeley, 1996, from Wright, 1942, 1942/1964, 1942/ 1965; see note 52. Europe, 17th-century: Keeley, 1996. Europe and United States, 20th century: Keeley, 1996, from Harris, 1975. World, 20th-century battle deaths: Lacina & Gleditsch, 2005; Sarkees, 2000; see note 54. United States, 2005 war deaths: see text and note 57. World, 2005 battle deaths: see text and note 58.
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