Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
Tags: #Sociology, #Psychology, #Science, #Amazon.com, #21st Century, #Crime, #Anthropology, #Social History, #Retail, #Criminology
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (148 page)
It isn’t just the chattering classes that have absorbed the shorthand abstractions of the technocracy. The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg has commented on Bruce Springsteen’s lyric in “The River”: “I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company / But lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy.” Only in the last forty years, Nunberg notes, would ordinary people have talked about “the economy” as a natural force with causal powers like the weather.
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Earlier they might have said “on account of times are hard.” Or, he might have added, on account of the Jews, the Negroes, or the rich peasants.
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Earlier they might have said “on account of times are hard.” Or, he might have added, on account of the Jews, the Negroes, or the rich peasants.
We can now put together the two big ideas of this section: the pacifying effects of reason, and the Flynn Effect. We have several grounds for supposing that enhanced powers of reason—specifically, the ability to set aside immediate experience, detach oneself from a parochial vantage point, and frame one’s ideas in abstract, universal terms—would lead to better moral commitments, including an avoidance of violence. And we have just seen that over the course of the 20th century, people’s reasoning abilities—particularly their ability to set aside immediate experience, detach themselves from a parochial vantage point, and think in abstract terms—were steadily enhanced. Can we put these two ideas together to help explain the documented declines of violence in the second half of the 20th century: the Long Peace, New Peace, and Rights Revolutions? Could there be a
moral
Flynn Effect, in which an accelerating escalator of reason carried us away from impulses that lead to violence?
moral
Flynn Effect, in which an accelerating escalator of reason carried us away from impulses that lead to violence?
The idea is not crazy. The cognitive skill that is most enhanced in the Flynn Effect, abstraction from the concrete particulars of immediate experience, is precisely the skill that must be exercised to take the perspectives of others and expand the circle of moral consideration. Flynn himself drew the connection in recounting a conversation he had with his Irish father, who was born in 1884 and was highly intelligent but relatively unschooled.
My father had so much hatred for the English that there was little room left over for prejudice against any other group. But he harbored a bit of racism against blacks, and my brother and I tried to talk him out of it. “What if you woke up one morning and discovered your skin had turned black? Would that make you any less of a human being?” He shot back, “Now that’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said. Who ever heard of a man’s skin turning black overnight?”
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Like the Russian peasant considering the color of bears, Flynn’s father was stuck in a concrete, prescientific mode of thinking. He refused to enter a hypothetical world and explore its consequences, which is one of the ways people can rethink their moral commitments, including their tribalism and racism.
Or consider the high school test question about the water usage in a particular town, which requires, among other things, thinking about proportions. Flynn notes that proportionality questions are surprisingly difficult for many adolescents, and are among the skills that rose as part of the Flynn Effect.
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As we have seen, the mindset of proportionality is essential to calibrating the just use of violence, as in criminal punishment and military action. One has only to replace “manage their water resources” with “manage their crime rate” in the test question to see how an increase in intelligence could translate into more humane policies. A recent study by the psychologist Michael Sargent showed that people with a high “need for cognition”—the trait of enjoying mental challenges—have less punitive attitudes toward criminal justice, even after taking into account their age, sex, race, education, income, and political orientation.
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As we have seen, the mindset of proportionality is essential to calibrating the just use of violence, as in criminal punishment and military action. One has only to replace “manage their water resources” with “manage their crime rate” in the test question to see how an increase in intelligence could translate into more humane policies. A recent study by the psychologist Michael Sargent showed that people with a high “need for cognition”—the trait of enjoying mental challenges—have less punitive attitudes toward criminal justice, even after taking into account their age, sex, race, education, income, and political orientation.
255
Before we test the idea that the Flynn Effect accelerated an escalator of reason and led to greater moral breadth and less violence, we need a sanity check on the Flynn Effect itself. Could the people of today really be that much smarter than the people of yesterday? Flynn himself, in an early paper, noted incredulously that in some countries, if earlier scoring norms were applied today a quarter of the students should now be classified as “gifted,” and the number of certifiable “geniuses” should have increased sixtyfold. “The result,” he said skeptically, “should be a cultural renaissance too great to be overlooked.”
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But of course there
has
been an intellectual renaissance in recent decades, perhaps not in culture but certainly in science and technology. Cosmology, particle physics, geology, genetics, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience have made vertiginous leaps in understanding, while technology has given us secular miracles such as replaceable body parts, routine genome scans, stunning photographs of outer planets and distant galaxies, and tiny gadgets that allow one to chat with billions of people, take photographs, pinpoint one’s location on the globe, listen to vast music collections, read from vast libraries, and access the wonders of the World Wide Web. These miracles have come at such a rapid pace that they have left us blasé about the ideas that made them possible. But no historian who takes in the sweep of human history on the scale of centuries could miss the fact that we are now living in a period of extraordinary brainpower.
256
But of course there
has
been an intellectual renaissance in recent decades, perhaps not in culture but certainly in science and technology. Cosmology, particle physics, geology, genetics, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience have made vertiginous leaps in understanding, while technology has given us secular miracles such as replaceable body parts, routine genome scans, stunning photographs of outer planets and distant galaxies, and tiny gadgets that allow one to chat with billions of people, take photographs, pinpoint one’s location on the globe, listen to vast music collections, read from vast libraries, and access the wonders of the World Wide Web. These miracles have come at such a rapid pace that they have left us blasé about the ideas that made them possible. But no historian who takes in the sweep of human history on the scale of centuries could miss the fact that we are now living in a period of extraordinary brainpower.
We tend to be blasé about moral progress as well, but historians who take the long view have also marveled at the moral advances of the past six decades. As we saw, the Long Peace has had the world’s most distinguished military historians shaking their heads in disbelief. The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there’s nothing wrong with being gay. I don’t find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason.
The other half of the sanity check is to ask whether our recent ancestors can really be considered morally retarded. The answer, I am prepared to argue, is yes. Though they were surely decent people with perfectly functioning brains, the collective moral sophistication of the culture in which they lived was as primitive by modern standards as their mineral spas and patent medicines are by the medical standards of today. Many of their beliefs can be considered not just monstrous but, in a very real sense, stupid. They would not stand up to intellectual scrutiny as being consistent with other values they claimed to hold, and they persisted only because the narrower intellectual spotlight of the day was not routinely shone on them.
Lest you think this judgment a slander on our forebears, consider some of the convictions that were common in the decades before the effects of rising abstract intelligence began to accumulate. A century ago dozens of great writers and artists extolled the beauty and nobility of war, and eagerly looked forward to World War I. One “progressive” president, Theodore Roosevelt, wrote that the decimation of Native Americans was necessary to prevent the continent from becoming a “game preserve for squalid savages,” and that in nine out of ten cases, “the only good Indians are the dead Indians.”
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Another, Woodrow Wilson, was a white supremacist who kept black students out of Princeton when he was president of the university, praised the Ku Klux Klan, cleansed the federal government of black employees, and said of ethnic immigrants, “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”
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A third, Franklin Roosevelt, drove a hundred thousand American citizens into concentration camps because they were of the same race as the Japanese enemy.
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Another, Woodrow Wilson, was a white supremacist who kept black students out of Princeton when he was president of the university, praised the Ku Klux Klan, cleansed the federal government of black employees, and said of ethnic immigrants, “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”
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A third, Franklin Roosevelt, drove a hundred thousand American citizens into concentration camps because they were of the same race as the Japanese enemy.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the young Winston Churchill wrote of taking part in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples” in the British Empire. In one of those jolly little wars, he wrote, “we proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.” Churchill defended these atrocities on the grounds that “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph,” and he said he was “strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.” He blamed the people of India for a famine caused by British mismanagement because they kept “breeding like rabbits,” adding, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
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Today we are stunned by the compartmentalized morality of these men, who in many ways were enlightened and humane when it came to their own race. Yet they never took the mental leap that would have encouraged them to treat the people of other races with the same consideration. I still remember gentle lessons from my mother when my sister and I were children in the early 1960s, lessons that millions of children have received in the decades since: “There are bad Negroes and there are good Negroes, just like there are bad white people and good white people. You can’t tell whether a person is good or bad by looking at the color of his skin.” “Yes, the things those people do look funny to us. But the things we do look funny to them.” Such lessons are not indoctrination but guided reasoning, leading children to conclusions they can accept by their own lights. Surely this reasoning was within the ken of the neural hardware of the great statesmen of a century ago. The difference is that today’s children have been encouraged to take these cognitive leaps, and the resulting understanding has become second nature. Shorthand abstractions like
freedom of speech, tolerance, human rights, civil rights, democracy, peaceful coexistence,
and
nonviolence
(and their antitheses such as
racism
,
genocide
,
totalitarianism,
and
war crimes
) spread outward from their origins in abstract political discourse and became a part of everyone’s mental tool kit. The advances can fairly be called a gain in intelligence, not completely different from the ones that drove scores in abstract reasoning upward.
freedom of speech, tolerance, human rights, civil rights, democracy, peaceful coexistence,
and
nonviolence
(and their antitheses such as
racism
,
genocide
,
totalitarianism,
and
war crimes
) spread outward from their origins in abstract political discourse and became a part of everyone’s mental tool kit. The advances can fairly be called a gain in intelligence, not completely different from the ones that drove scores in abstract reasoning upward.
Moral stupidity was not confined to the policies of leaders; it was written into the law of the land. Within the lifetimes of many readers of this book, the races in much of the country were forcibly segregated, women could not serve on juries in rape trials because they would be embarrassed by the testimony, homosexuality was a felony crime, and men were allowed to rape their wives, confine them to the house, and sometimes kill them and their adulterous lovers. And if you think that today’s congressional proceedings are dumb, consider this 1876 testimony from a lawyer representing the city of San Francisco in hearings on the rights of Chinese immigrants:
In relation to [the Chinese] religion, it is not our religion. That is enough to say about it; because if ours is right theirs must necessarily be wrong. [Question: What is our religion?] Ours is a belief in the existence of a Divine Providence that holds in its hands the destinies of nations. The Divine Wisdom has said that He would divide the country and the world as the heritage of five great families; that to the blacks He would give Africa; to the whites He would give Europe; to the red man He would give America, and Asia He would give to the yellow races. He inspires us with the determination not only to have preserved our own inheritance, but to have stolen from the red man America; and it is settled now that the Saxon, American or European groups of families, the white race, is to have the inheritance of Europe and of America and that the yellow races of China are to be confined to what God Almighty originally gave them; and as they are not a favorite people they are not to be permitted to steal from us what we robbed the American savage of.
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Nor was it just lawmakers who were intellectually challenged when it came to moral reasoning. I mentioned in chapter 6 that in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century, many literary intellectuals (including Yeats, Shaw, Flaubert, Wells, Lawrence, Woolf, Bell, and Eliot) expressed a contempt for the masses that bordered on the genocidal.
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Many others would come to support fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism.
262
John Carey quotes from an essay by Eliot in which the poet comments on the spiritual superiority of the great artist: “It is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.” Carey comments from a later era: “This appalling sentence leaves out of account, we notice, the effect of evil on its victims.”
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261
Many others would come to support fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism.
262
John Carey quotes from an essay by Eliot in which the poet comments on the spiritual superiority of the great artist: “It is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.” Carey comments from a later era: “This appalling sentence leaves out of account, we notice, the effect of evil on its victims.”
263
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