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 (145 page)
As if the proliferation of unreason weren’t bad enough, many commentators have been mustering their powers of reason to argue that reason is overrated. During the honeymoon following George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001, editorialists opined that a great president need not be intelligent, because a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to the triangulations and equivocations of overeducated mandarins. After all, they said, it was the Harvard-educated best and the brightest who dragged America into the quagmire of Vietnam. “Critical theorists” and postmodernists on the left, and defenders of religion on the right, agree on one thing: that the two world wars and the Holocaust were the poisoned fruit of the West’s cultivation of science and reason since the Enlightenment.
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Even the scientists are piling on. Human beings are led by their passions, say many psychologists, and deploy their puny powers of reason only to rationalize their gut feelings after the fact. Behavioral economists exult in showing how human behavior departs from the rational-actor theory, and the journalists who publicize their work waste no opportunity to smack the theory around. The implication is that since irrationality is inevitable, we may as well lie back and enjoy it.
In this section, the last before the concluding chapter, I will try to convince you that both the pessimistic assessment of the state of reason in the world, and any sentiment that this would not be such a bad thing, are mistaken. For all their foolishness, modern societies have been getting smarter, and all things being equal, a smarter world is a less violent world.
Before we turn to this evidence, let me sweep away some of the prejudices against reason. Now that the presidency of George W. Bush is over, the theory that we are better off with unintellectual leaders is just embarrassing, and the reasons for the embarrassment may be quantified. Measuring the psychological traits of public figures, to be sure, has a sketchy history, but the psychologist Dean Simonton has developed several historiometric measures that are reliable and valid (in the psychometrician’s technical sense) and politically nonpartisan.
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He analyzed a dataset of 42 presidents from GW to GWB and found that both raw intelligence and openness to new ideas and values are significantly correlated with presidential performance as it has been assessed by nonpartisan historians.
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Though Bush himself is well above the average of the population in intelligence, he is third-lowest among the presidents, and comes in dead last in openness to experience, with a rock-bottom score of 0.0 on the 0–100 scale. Simonton published his work in 2006, while Bush was still in office, but the three historians’ surveys conducted since then bear out the correlation: Bush was ranked 37th, 36th, and 39th among the 42 presidents.
210
208
He analyzed a dataset of 42 presidents from GW to GWB and found that both raw intelligence and openness to new ideas and values are significantly correlated with presidential performance as it has been assessed by nonpartisan historians.
209
Though Bush himself is well above the average of the population in intelligence, he is third-lowest among the presidents, and comes in dead last in openness to experience, with a rock-bottom score of 0.0 on the 0–100 scale. Simonton published his work in 2006, while Bush was still in office, but the three historians’ surveys conducted since then bear out the correlation: Bush was ranked 37th, 36th, and 39th among the 42 presidents.
210
As for Vietnam, the implication that the United States would have avoided the war if only the advisors of Kennedy and Johnson had been less intelligent seems unlikely in light of the fact that after they left the scene, the war was ferociously prosecuted by Richard Nixon, who was neither the best nor the brightest.
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The relationship between presidential intelligence and war may also be quantified. Between 1946 (when the PRIO dataset begins) and 2008, a president’s IQ is negatively correlated with the number of battle deaths in wars involving the United States during his presidency, with a coefficient of -0.45.
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One could say that for every presidential IQ point, 13,440 fewer people die in battle, though it’s more accurate to say that the three smartest postwar presidents, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton, kept the country out of destructive wars.
211
The relationship between presidential intelligence and war may also be quantified. Between 1946 (when the PRIO dataset begins) and 2008, a president’s IQ is negatively correlated with the number of battle deaths in wars involving the United States during his presidency, with a coefficient of -0.45.
212
One could say that for every presidential IQ point, 13,440 fewer people die in battle, though it’s more accurate to say that the three smartest postwar presidents, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton, kept the country out of destructive wars.
The idea that the Holocaust was a product of the Enlightenment is ludicrous, if not obscene. As we saw in chapter 6, what changed in the 20th century was not so much the occurrence of genocide as the recognition that genocide was something bad. The technological and bureaucratic trappings of the Holocaust are a sideshow in the reckoning of its human costs and are unnecessary to the perpetration of mass murder, as the bloody machetes of the Rwandan genocide remind us. Nazi ideology, like the nationalist, romantic militarist, and communist movements of the same era, was a fruit of the 19th-century counter-Enlightenment, not the line of thinking that connects Erasmus, Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Bentham, Jefferson, Madison, and Mill. The scientific pretensions of Nazism were risible pseudoscience, as real science easily showed. In a brilliant recent essay, the philosopher Yaki Menschenfreund reviews the theory that Enlightenment rationality is responsible for the Holocaust:
It is impossible to understand so destructive a policy without recognizing that Nazi ideology was, for the most part, not only irrational—but antirational. It cherished the pagan, pre-Christian past of the German nation, adopted romantic ideas of a return to nature and a more “organic” existence, and nurtured an apocalyptic expectation of an end of days, whence the eternal struggle between the races would be resolved.... The contempt for rationalism and its association with the despised Enlightenment stood at the core of Nazi thought; the movement’s ideologues emphasized the contradiction between
weltanschauung
(“worldview”), the natural and direct experience of the world, and
welt-an-denken
(“thinking about the world”), the “destructive” intellectual activity that breaks reality down through conceptualization, calculation, and theorization. Against the “degenerate” liberal bourgeois’ worship of reason, the Nazis championed the idea of a vital, spontaneous life, unhindered and undimmed by compromises or dilemmas.
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Finally, let’s consider the suggestion that reason is incapable of contending against the brawn of the emotions, a tail that tries to wag the dog. The psychologists David Pizarro and Paul Bloom have argued that this is an over-interpretation of the laboratory phenomena of moral dumbfounding and other visceral reactions to moral dilemmas.
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Even if a decision is guided by intuition, the intuition itself may be a legacy of moral reasoning that had taken place beforehand, whether in private reflection, in dinner table debates, or through the assimilation of norms that were the output of past debates. Case studies reveal that at critical moments in an individual’s life (such as a woman’s decision to have an abortion), or at critical moments in a society’s history (such as the struggles over civil, women’s, and gay rights and the nation’s participation in war), people can be consumed in agonizing reflection and deliberation. We have seen many historic moral changes that originated in painstaking intellectual briefs, which were in turn met with furious rebuttals. Once the debate had been settled, the winning side entrenched itself in people’s sensibilities and erased its own tracks. Today, for example, people might be dumbfounded when asked whether we should burn heretics, keep slaves, whip children, or break criminals on the wheel, yet those very debates took place several centuries ago. We even saw a neuroanatomical basis for the give-andtake between intuition and reasoning in Joshua Greene’s studies of trolley problems in the brain scanner: each of these moral faculties has distinct neurobiological hubs.
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Even if a decision is guided by intuition, the intuition itself may be a legacy of moral reasoning that had taken place beforehand, whether in private reflection, in dinner table debates, or through the assimilation of norms that were the output of past debates. Case studies reveal that at critical moments in an individual’s life (such as a woman’s decision to have an abortion), or at critical moments in a society’s history (such as the struggles over civil, women’s, and gay rights and the nation’s participation in war), people can be consumed in agonizing reflection and deliberation. We have seen many historic moral changes that originated in painstaking intellectual briefs, which were in turn met with furious rebuttals. Once the debate had been settled, the winning side entrenched itself in people’s sensibilities and erased its own tracks. Today, for example, people might be dumbfounded when asked whether we should burn heretics, keep slaves, whip children, or break criminals on the wheel, yet those very debates took place several centuries ago. We even saw a neuroanatomical basis for the give-andtake between intuition and reasoning in Joshua Greene’s studies of trolley problems in the brain scanner: each of these moral faculties has distinct neurobiological hubs.
215
When Hume famously wrote that “reason is, and ought to be, only the slave of the passions,” he was not advising people to shoot from the hip, blow their stack, or fall head over heels for Mr. Wrong.
216
He was basically making the logical point that reason, by itself, is just a means of getting from one true proposition to the next and does not care about the value of those propositions. Nonetheless there are many reasons why reason, working in conjunction with “some particle of the dove, kneaded into our frame,” must “direct the determinations of our mind, and where every thing else is equal, produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind, above what is pernicious and dangerous.” Let’s consider some of the ways the application of reason might be expected to reduce the rate of violence.
216
He was basically making the logical point that reason, by itself, is just a means of getting from one true proposition to the next and does not care about the value of those propositions. Nonetheless there are many reasons why reason, working in conjunction with “some particle of the dove, kneaded into our frame,” must “direct the determinations of our mind, and where every thing else is equal, produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind, above what is pernicious and dangerous.” Let’s consider some of the ways the application of reason might be expected to reduce the rate of violence.
The chronological sequence in which the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason preceded the Humanitarian Revolution reminds us of one big reason, the one captured in Voltaire’s quip that absurdities lead to atrocities. A debunking of hogwash—such as the ideas that gods demand sacrifices, witches cast spells, heretics go to hell, Jews poison wells, animals are insensate, children are possessed, Africans are brutish, and kings rule by divine right—is bound to undermine many rationales for violence.
A second pacifying effect of exercising the faculty of reason is that it goes hand in hand with self-control. Recall that the two traits are statistically correlated in individuals and that their physiological substrates overlap in the brain.
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It is reason—a deduction of the long-term consequences of an action—that gives the self reasons to control the self.
217
It is reason—a deduction of the long-term consequences of an action—that gives the self reasons to control the self.
Self-control, moreover, involves more than just avoiding rash choices that will damage one’s future self. It can also mean suppressing some of our base instincts in the service of motives that we are better able to justify. Sneaky laboratory techniques, such as measurements of how quickly people associate white and black faces with words like
good
and
bad
, and neuroimaging experiments that monitor activity in the amygdala, have shown that many white people have small, visceral negative reactions to African Americans.
218
Yet the sea change in explicit attitudes toward African Americans that we saw in figures 7–6, 7–7, and 7–8, and the obvious comity with which whites and blacks live and work with each other today, show that people can allow their better judgments to overcome these biases.
good
and
bad
, and neuroimaging experiments that monitor activity in the amygdala, have shown that many white people have small, visceral negative reactions to African Americans.
218
Yet the sea change in explicit attitudes toward African Americans that we saw in figures 7–6, 7–7, and 7–8, and the obvious comity with which whites and blacks live and work with each other today, show that people can allow their better judgments to overcome these biases.
Reasoning can also interact with the moral sense. Each of the four relational models from which moral impulses spring comes with a particular style of reasoning. Each of these modes of reasoning may be matched with a mathematical scale, and each is implemented by a distinctive family of cognitive intuitions.
219
Communal Sharing thinks in all-or-none categories (also called a nominal scale): a person is either in the hallowed group or out of it. The cognitive mindset is that of intuitive biology, with its pure essences and potential contaminants. Authority Ranking uses an ordinal scale: the linear ranking of a dominance hierarchy. Its cognitive gadget is an intuitive physics of space, force, and time: higher-ranking people are deemed bigger, stronger, higher, and first in the series. Equality Matching is measured on a scale of intervals, which allows two quantities to be compared to see which is larger but not entered into proportions. It reckons by concrete procedures such as lining things up, counting them off, or comparing them with a balance scale. Only Market Pricing (and the Rational-Legal mindset of which it is part) allows one to reason in terms of
proportionality
. The Rational-Legal model requires the nonintuitive tools of symbolic mathematics, such as fractions, percentages, and exponentiation. And as I have mentioned, it is far from universal, and depends on the cognition-enhancing skills of literacy and numeracy.
219
Communal Sharing thinks in all-or-none categories (also called a nominal scale): a person is either in the hallowed group or out of it. The cognitive mindset is that of intuitive biology, with its pure essences and potential contaminants. Authority Ranking uses an ordinal scale: the linear ranking of a dominance hierarchy. Its cognitive gadget is an intuitive physics of space, force, and time: higher-ranking people are deemed bigger, stronger, higher, and first in the series. Equality Matching is measured on a scale of intervals, which allows two quantities to be compared to see which is larger but not entered into proportions. It reckons by concrete procedures such as lining things up, counting them off, or comparing them with a balance scale. Only Market Pricing (and the Rational-Legal mindset of which it is part) allows one to reason in terms of
proportionality
. The Rational-Legal model requires the nonintuitive tools of symbolic mathematics, such as fractions, percentages, and exponentiation. And as I have mentioned, it is far from universal, and depends on the cognition-enhancing skills of literacy and numeracy.
It’s no coincidence that the word
proportionality
has a moral as well as a mathematical sense. Only preachers and pop singers profess that violence will someday vanish off the face of the earth. A measured degree of violence, even if only held in reserve, will always be necessary in the form of police forces and armies to deter predation or to incapacitate those who cannot be deterred. Yet there is a vast difference between the minimal violence necessary to prevent greater violence and the bolts of fury that an uncalibrated mind is likely to deliver in acts of rough justice. A coarse sense of tit-for-tat payback, especially with the thumb of self-serving biases on the scale, produces many kinds of excess violence, including cruel and unusual punishments, savage beatings of naughty children, destructive retaliatory strikes in war, lethal reprisals for trivial insults, and brutal repression of rebellions by crappy governments in the developing world. By the same token, many moral advances have consisted not of eschewing force across the board but of applying it in carefully measured doses. Some examples include the reform of criminal punishment following Beccaria’s utilitarian arguments, the measured punishments of children by enlightened parents, civil disobedience and passive resistance that stop just short of violence, the calibrated responses to provocations by modern democracies (military exercises, warning shots, surgical strikes on military installations), and the partial amnesties in postconflict conciliation. These reductions in violence required a sense of proportionality, a habit of mind that does not come naturally and must be cultivated by reason.
proportionality
has a moral as well as a mathematical sense. Only preachers and pop singers profess that violence will someday vanish off the face of the earth. A measured degree of violence, even if only held in reserve, will always be necessary in the form of police forces and armies to deter predation or to incapacitate those who cannot be deterred. Yet there is a vast difference between the minimal violence necessary to prevent greater violence and the bolts of fury that an uncalibrated mind is likely to deliver in acts of rough justice. A coarse sense of tit-for-tat payback, especially with the thumb of self-serving biases on the scale, produces many kinds of excess violence, including cruel and unusual punishments, savage beatings of naughty children, destructive retaliatory strikes in war, lethal reprisals for trivial insults, and brutal repression of rebellions by crappy governments in the developing world. By the same token, many moral advances have consisted not of eschewing force across the board but of applying it in carefully measured doses. Some examples include the reform of criminal punishment following Beccaria’s utilitarian arguments, the measured punishments of children by enlightened parents, civil disobedience and passive resistance that stop just short of violence, the calibrated responses to provocations by modern democracies (military exercises, warning shots, surgical strikes on military installations), and the partial amnesties in postconflict conciliation. These reductions in violence required a sense of proportionality, a habit of mind that does not come naturally and must be cultivated by reason.
Reason can also be a force against violence when it abstracts violence itself as a mental category and construes it as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won. The Greeks of Homer conceived of their devastating wars as the handiwork of sadistic puppeteers on high.
220
That, to be sure, required a feat of abstraction: they lifted themselves out of a vantage point from which war is the fault of one’s eternally treacherous enemies. Yet blaming the gods for war does not open up many practical opportunities for mere mortals to reduce it. Moralistic denunciations of war also single it out as an entity, but they provide few guidelines on what to do when an invading army is at one’s doorstep. A real change came in the writings of Grotius, Hobbes, Kant, and other modern thinkers: war was intellectualized as a game-theoretic problem, to be solved by proactive institutional arrangements. Centuries later some of these arrangements, such as Kant’s triad of democratization, trade, and an international community, helped to drive down the rate of war in the Long Peace and the New Peace. And the Cuban Missile Crisis was defused when Kennedy and Khrushchev consciously reframed it as a trap for the two of them to escape without either side losing face.
220
That, to be sure, required a feat of abstraction: they lifted themselves out of a vantage point from which war is the fault of one’s eternally treacherous enemies. Yet blaming the gods for war does not open up many practical opportunities for mere mortals to reduce it. Moralistic denunciations of war also single it out as an entity, but they provide few guidelines on what to do when an invading army is at one’s doorstep. A real change came in the writings of Grotius, Hobbes, Kant, and other modern thinkers: war was intellectualized as a game-theoretic problem, to be solved by proactive institutional arrangements. Centuries later some of these arrangements, such as Kant’s triad of democratization, trade, and an international community, helped to drive down the rate of war in the Long Peace and the New Peace. And the Cuban Missile Crisis was defused when Kennedy and Khrushchev consciously reframed it as a trap for the two of them to escape without either side losing face.
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