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 (133 page)
The tradeoff between empathy and fairness is not just a laboratory curiosity; it can have tremendous consequences in the real world. Great harm has befallen societies whose political leaders and government employees act out of empathy by warmly doling out perquisites to kin and cronies rather than heartlessly giving them away to perfect strangers. Not only does this nepotism sap the competence of police, government, and business, but it sets up a zero-sum competition for the necessities of life among clans and ethnic groups, which can quickly turn violent. The institutions of modernity depend on carrying out abstract fiduciary duties that cut across bonds of empathy.
The other problem with empathy is that it is too parochial to serve as a force for a universal consideration of people’s interests. Mirror neurons notwithstanding, empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity. Though empathy can be spread outward by taking other people’s perspectives, the increments are small, Batson warns, and they may be ephemeral.
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To hope that the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature.
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To hope that the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature.
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Nor is it necessary. The ideal of the expanding circle does not mean that we must feel the pain of everyone else on earth. No one has the time or energy, and trying to spread our empathy that thinly would be an invitation to emotional burnout and compassion fatigue.
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The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them.
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The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them.
What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of
rights—
a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need.
SELF-CONTROLrights—
a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need.
Ever since Adam and Eve ate the apple, Odysseus had himself tied to the mast, the grasshopper sang while the ant stored food, and Saint Augustine prayed “Lord make me chaste—but not yet,” individuals have struggled with self-control. In modern societies the virtue is all the more vital, because now that we have tamed the blights of nature most of our scourges are self-inflicted. We eat, drink, smoke, and gamble too much, max out our credit cards, fall into dangerous liaisons, and become addicted to heroin, cocaine, and e-mail.
Violence too is largely a problem of self-control. Researchers have piled up a tall stack of risk factors for violence, including selfishness, insults, jealousy, tribalism, frustration, crowding, hot weather, and maleness. Yet almost half of us are male, and all of us have been insulted, jealous, frustrated, or sweaty without coming to blows. The ubiquity of homicidal fantasies shows that we are not immune to the temptations of violence, but have learned to resist them.
Self-control has been credited with one of the greatest reductions of violence in history, the thirtyfold drop in homicide between medieval and modern Europe. Recall that according to Norbert Elias’s theory of the Civilizing Process, the consolidation of states and the growth of commerce did more than just tilt the incentive structure away from plunder. It also inculcated an ethic of self-control that made continence and propriety second nature. People refrained from stabbing each other at the dinner table and amputating each other’s noses at the same time as they refrained from urinating in closets, copulating in public, passing gas at the dinner table, and gnawing on bones and returning them to the serving dish. A culture of honor, in which men were respected for lashing out against insults, became a culture of dignity, in which men were respected for controlling their impulses. Reversals in the decline of violence, such as in the developed world in the 1960s and the developing world following decolonization, were accompanied by reversals in the valuation of self-control, from the discipline of elders to the impetuousness of youth.
Lapses of self-control can also cause violence on larger scales. Many stupid wars and riots began when leaders or communities lashed out against some outrage, but come the next morning had reason to regret the outburst. The burning and looting of African American neighborhoods by their own residents following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, and Israel’s pulverizing of the infrastructure of Lebanon following a raid by Hezbollah in 2006, are just two examples.
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In this section I will examine the science of self-control to see if it supports the theory of the Civilizing Process, in the same way that the preceding section examined the science of empathy to see if it supported the theory of the expanding circle. The theory of the Civilizing Process, like Freud’s theory of the id and the ego from which it was derived, makes a number of strong claims about the human nervous system, which we will examine in turn. Does the brain really contain competing systems for impulse and self-control? Is self-control a single faculty in charge of taming every vice, from overeating to promiscuity to procrastination to petty crime to serious aggression? If so, are there ways for individuals to boost their self-control? And could these adjustments proliferate through a society, changing its character toward greater restraint across the board?
Let’s begin by trying to make sense of the very idea of self-control and the circumstances in which it is and isn’t rational.
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First we must set aside pure selfishness—doing something that helps oneself but hurts others—and focus on self-indulgence—doing something that helps oneself in the short term but hurts oneself in the long term. Examples abound. Food today, fat tomorrow. Nicotine today, cancer tomorrow. Dance today, pay the piper tomorrow. Sex today, pregnancy, disease, or jealousy tomorrow. Lash out today, live with the damage tomorrow.
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First we must set aside pure selfishness—doing something that helps oneself but hurts others—and focus on self-indulgence—doing something that helps oneself in the short term but hurts oneself in the long term. Examples abound. Food today, fat tomorrow. Nicotine today, cancer tomorrow. Dance today, pay the piper tomorrow. Sex today, pregnancy, disease, or jealousy tomorrow. Lash out today, live with the damage tomorrow.
There is nothing
inherently
irrational about preferring pleasure now to pleasure later. After all, the You on Tuesday is no less worthy of a chocolate bar than the You on Wednesday. On the contrary, the You on Tuesday is
more
worthy. If the chocolate bar is big enough, it might tide you over, so eating it on Tuesday means that neither You is hungry, whereas saving it for Wednesday consigns you to hunger on Tuesday. Also, if you abstain from chocolate on Tuesday, you might die before you wake, in which case neither the Tuesday You nor the Wednesday You gets to enjoy it. Finally, if you put the chocolate away, it might spoil or be stolen, again depriving both Yous of the pleasure.
inherently
irrational about preferring pleasure now to pleasure later. After all, the You on Tuesday is no less worthy of a chocolate bar than the You on Wednesday. On the contrary, the You on Tuesday is
more
worthy. If the chocolate bar is big enough, it might tide you over, so eating it on Tuesday means that neither You is hungry, whereas saving it for Wednesday consigns you to hunger on Tuesday. Also, if you abstain from chocolate on Tuesday, you might die before you wake, in which case neither the Tuesday You nor the Wednesday You gets to enjoy it. Finally, if you put the chocolate away, it might spoil or be stolen, again depriving both Yous of the pleasure.
All things being equal, it pays to enjoy things now. That is why, when we lend out money, we insist on interest. A dollar tomorrow really is worth less than a dollar today (even if we assume there is no inflation), and interest is the price we put on the difference. Interest is charged at a fixed rate per unit of time, which means that it compounds, or increases exponentially. That compensates you exactly for the decreasing value of the money coming back to you as time elapses, because the decrease in value is also exponential. Why exponential? With every passing day, there is a fixed chance you will die, or that the borrower will abscond or go bankrupt and you’ll never see the money again. As the probability that this will not have happened dwindles day by day, the compensation you demand multiplies accordingly. Going back to pleasure, a rational agent, when deciding between indulging today and indulging tomorrow, should indulge tomorrow only if the pleasure would be exponentially greater. In other words, a rational agent
ought to
discount the future and enjoy some pleasure today at the expense of less pleasure tomorrow. It makes no sense to scrimp all your life so that you can have one hell of a ninetieth birthday bash.
ought to
discount the future and enjoy some pleasure today at the expense of less pleasure tomorrow. It makes no sense to scrimp all your life so that you can have one hell of a ninetieth birthday bash.
Self-indulgence becomes irrational only when we discount the future too
steepl
y—when we devalue our future selves way below what they should be worth given the chance that those selves will still be around to enjoy what we’ve saved for them. There is an optimum rate of discounting the future—mathematically, an optimum interest rate—which depends on how long you expect to live, how likely you will get back what you saved, how long you can stretch out the value of a resource, and how much you would enjoy it at different points in your life (for example, when you’re vigorous or frail). “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” is a completely rational allocation if we are
sure
we are going to die tomorrow. What is not rational is to eat and drink as if there’s no tomorrow when there really is a tomorrow. To be overly self-indulgent, to lack self-control, is to devalue our future selves too much, or equivalently, to demand too high an interest rate before we deprive our current selves for the benefit of our future selves. No plausible interest rate would make the pleasure in smoking for a twenty-year-old self outweigh the pain of cancer for her fifty-year-old self.
steepl
y—when we devalue our future selves way below what they should be worth given the chance that those selves will still be around to enjoy what we’ve saved for them. There is an optimum rate of discounting the future—mathematically, an optimum interest rate—which depends on how long you expect to live, how likely you will get back what you saved, how long you can stretch out the value of a resource, and how much you would enjoy it at different points in your life (for example, when you’re vigorous or frail). “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” is a completely rational allocation if we are
sure
we are going to die tomorrow. What is not rational is to eat and drink as if there’s no tomorrow when there really is a tomorrow. To be overly self-indulgent, to lack self-control, is to devalue our future selves too much, or equivalently, to demand too high an interest rate before we deprive our current selves for the benefit of our future selves. No plausible interest rate would make the pleasure in smoking for a twenty-year-old self outweigh the pain of cancer for her fifty-year-old self.
Much of what looks like a lack of self-control in the modern world may consist of using a discounting rate that was wired into our nervous systems in the iffy world of our pre-state ancestors, when people died much younger and had no institutions that could parlay savings now into returns years later.
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Economists have noted that when people are left to their own devices, they save far too little for their retirement, as if they expect to die in a few years.
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That is the basis for the “libertarian paternalism” of Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein, and other behavioral economists, in which the government would, with people’s consent, tilt the playing field between their current and future selves.
78
One example is setting an optimal retirement savings plan as the default, which employees would have to opt out of, rather than as a selection they would have to opt into. Another is to shift the burden of sales taxes onto the least healthy foods.
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Economists have noted that when people are left to their own devices, they save far too little for their retirement, as if they expect to die in a few years.
77
That is the basis for the “libertarian paternalism” of Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein, and other behavioral economists, in which the government would, with people’s consent, tilt the playing field between their current and future selves.
78
One example is setting an optimal retirement savings plan as the default, which employees would have to opt out of, rather than as a selection they would have to opt into. Another is to shift the burden of sales taxes onto the least healthy foods.
But weakness of the will is not just a matter of discounting the future too steeply. If we simply devalued our future selves too much, we might make bad choices, but the choices would not change as time passed and the alternatives drew near. If the inner voice shouting “dessert sooner” outvoted the one whispering “fat later,” it would do so whether the dessert was available for consumption in five minutes or in five hours. In reality the preference flips with imminence in time, a phenomenon called
myopic
discounting.
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When we fill in the room service card at night and hang it on the hotel doorknob for the following morning’s breakfast, we are apt to tick off the fruit plate with nonfat yogurt. If instead we make our choices at the buffet table, we might go for the bacon and croissants. Many experiments on many species have shown that when two rewards are far away, organisms will sensibly pick a large reward that comes later over a small reward that comes sooner. If, for example, you had a choice between ten dollars in a week and eleven dollars in a week and a day, you’d pick the second. But when the nearer of the two rewards is imminent, self-control fails, the preference flips, and we go for smaller-sooner over larger-later: ten dollars today over eleven dollars tomorrow. Unlike merely discounting the future, which makes sense if the discount rate is properly set, myopic discounting, with its reversal of preferences, is not in any obvious way rational. Yet all organisms are myopic.
myopic
discounting.
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When we fill in the room service card at night and hang it on the hotel doorknob for the following morning’s breakfast, we are apt to tick off the fruit plate with nonfat yogurt. If instead we make our choices at the buffet table, we might go for the bacon and croissants. Many experiments on many species have shown that when two rewards are far away, organisms will sensibly pick a large reward that comes later over a small reward that comes sooner. If, for example, you had a choice between ten dollars in a week and eleven dollars in a week and a day, you’d pick the second. But when the nearer of the two rewards is imminent, self-control fails, the preference flips, and we go for smaller-sooner over larger-later: ten dollars today over eleven dollars tomorrow. Unlike merely discounting the future, which makes sense if the discount rate is properly set, myopic discounting, with its reversal of preferences, is not in any obvious way rational. Yet all organisms are myopic.
Mathematically minded economists and psychologists explain the myopic preference reversal by saying that organisms engage in
hyperbolic
discounting rather than the more rational exponential discounting.
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When we depreciate our future selves, instead of repeatedly multiplying the subjective value of a reward by a constant fraction with every unit of time we have to wait for it (rendering it half as valuable, then a quarter, then an eighth, then a sixteenth, and so on), we multiply the original subjective value by a smaller and smaller fraction (which renders it half as valuable, then a third, then a quarter, then a fifth, and so on). This insight can also be expressed in a more intuitive, qualitative way. A hyperbola is a mathematical curve with a bit of an elbow, where a steep slope looks like it has been welded onto a shallow one (unlike an exponential curve, which is a smoother ski jump). That jibes with a psychological theory that myopic discounting arises from a handoff between two systems inside the skull, one for rewards that are imminent, another for rewards that are far in the future or entirely hypothetical.
81
As Thomas Schelling put it, “People behave sometimes as if they had two selves, one who wants clean lungs and long life and another who adores tobacco, or one who wants a lean body and another who wants dessert, or one who yearns to improve himself by reading Adam Smith on self-command . . . and another who would rather watch an old movie on television.”
82
Freud’s theory of the id and the ego, and the older idea that our lapses are the handiwork of inner demons (“The devil made me do it!”) are other expressions of the intuition that self-control is a battle of homunculi in the head. The psychologist Walter Mischel, who conducted classic studies of myopic discounting in children (the kids are given the agonizing choice between one marshmallow now and two marshmallows in fifteen minutes), proposed, with the psychologist Janet Metcalfe, that the desire for instant gratification comes from a “hot system” in the brain, whereas the patience to wait comes from a “cool system.”
83
hyperbolic
discounting rather than the more rational exponential discounting.
80
When we depreciate our future selves, instead of repeatedly multiplying the subjective value of a reward by a constant fraction with every unit of time we have to wait for it (rendering it half as valuable, then a quarter, then an eighth, then a sixteenth, and so on), we multiply the original subjective value by a smaller and smaller fraction (which renders it half as valuable, then a third, then a quarter, then a fifth, and so on). This insight can also be expressed in a more intuitive, qualitative way. A hyperbola is a mathematical curve with a bit of an elbow, where a steep slope looks like it has been welded onto a shallow one (unlike an exponential curve, which is a smoother ski jump). That jibes with a psychological theory that myopic discounting arises from a handoff between two systems inside the skull, one for rewards that are imminent, another for rewards that are far in the future or entirely hypothetical.
81
As Thomas Schelling put it, “People behave sometimes as if they had two selves, one who wants clean lungs and long life and another who adores tobacco, or one who wants a lean body and another who wants dessert, or one who yearns to improve himself by reading Adam Smith on self-command . . . and another who would rather watch an old movie on television.”
82
Freud’s theory of the id and the ego, and the older idea that our lapses are the handiwork of inner demons (“The devil made me do it!”) are other expressions of the intuition that self-control is a battle of homunculi in the head. The psychologist Walter Mischel, who conducted classic studies of myopic discounting in children (the kids are given the agonizing choice between one marshmallow now and two marshmallows in fifteen minutes), proposed, with the psychologist Janet Metcalfe, that the desire for instant gratification comes from a “hot system” in the brain, whereas the patience to wait comes from a “cool system.”
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