The moral sense offers three ethics that can be assigned to social roles and resources. But most applications of the moral sense are not particularly moral but rather tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical, and it is reason that tells us which of the other applications we should entrench as norms. And the one ethic that we can design to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number, the Rational-Legal mindset, is not part of the natural moral sense at all.
Reason is up to these demands because it is an open-ended combinatorial system, an engine for generating an unlimited number of new ideas. Once it is programmed with a basic self-interest and an ability to communicate with others, its own logic will impel it, in the fullness of time, to respect the interests of ever-increasing numbers of others. It is reason too that can always take note of the shortcomings of previous exercises of reasoning, and update and improve itself in response. And if you detect a flaw in this argument, it is reason that allows you to point it out and defend an alternative.
Adam Smith, friend of Hume and fellow luminary of the Scottish Enlightenment, first made this argument in
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
, using a poignant example that resonates today. Smith asked us to imagine our reaction to reading about a dreadful calamity befalling a large number of strangers, such as a hundred million Chinese perishing in an earthquake. If we’re honest, we will admit that our reaction would run more or less as follows. We would feel bad for a while, pitying the victims and perhaps reflecting on the fragility of life. Perhaps today we would write a check or click on a Web site to aid the survivors. And then we would get back to work, have dinner, and go to bed as if nothing had happened. But if an accident befell us personally, even if it were trivial in comparison, such as losing a little finger, we would be immensely more upset, and would not be able to put the misfortune out of our minds.
This all sounds terribly cynical, but Smith continues. Consider a different scenario. This time you are presented with a choice: you can lose your little finger, or a hundred million Chinese will be killed. Would you sacrifice a hundred million people to save your little finger? Smith predicts, and I agree, that almost no one would select this monstrous option. But why not, Smith asks, given that our empathy for strangers is so much less compelling than our distress at a personal misfortune? He resolves the paradox by comparing our better angels:
It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration. It is from him only that we learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of whatever relates to ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator. It is he who shows us the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice; the propriety of resigning the greatest interests of our own, for the yet greater interests of others, and the deformity of doing the smallest injury to another, in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves.
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10
ON ANGELS’ WINGS
As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.
—Charles Darwin,
The Descent of Man
T
his book grew out of an answer to the question “What are you optimistic about?” and I hope that the numbers I have marshaled have lifted your assessment of the state of the world from the lugubrious conventional wisdom. But having documented dozens of declines and abolitions and zeroes, my mood is one not so much of optimism as of gratitude. Optimism requires a touch of arrogance, because it extrapolates the past to an uncertain future. Though I am confident that human sacrifice, chattel slavery, breaking on the wheel, and wars between democracies will not make a comeback anytime soon, to predict that the current levels of crime, civil war, or terrorism will endure is to sally into territory where angels fear to tread. What we
can
feel sure about is that many kinds of violence have declined up to the present, and we can try to understand why that has happened. As a scientist, I must be skeptical of any mystical force or cosmic destiny that carries us ever upward. Declines of violence are a product of social, cultural, and material conditions. If the conditions persist, violence will remain low or decline even further; if they don’t, it won’t.
In this final chapter I will not try to make predictions; nor will I offer advice to politicians, police chiefs, or peacemakers, which given my qualifications would be a form of malpractice. What I will try to do is identify the broad forces that have pushed violence downward. My quarry will be developments that repeatedly turned up in the historical chapters (2 through 7) and that engage the faculties of mind that were explored in the psychological chapters (8 and 9). That is, I will look for common threads in the Pacification Process, 671 the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Rights Revolutions. Each should represent a way in which predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, or ideology has been overpowered by self-control, empathy, morality, or reason.
We should not expect these forces to fall out of a grand unified theory. The declines we seek to explain unfolded over vastly different scales of time and damage: the taming of chronic raiding and feuding, the reduction of vicious interpersonal violence such as cutting off noses, the elimination of cruel practices like human sacrifice, torture-executions, and flogging, the abolition of institutions such as slavery and debt bondage, the falling out of fashion of blood sports and dueling, the eroding of political murder and despotism, the recent decline of wars, pogroms, and genocides, the reduction of violence against women, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the protection of children and animals. The only thing these superseded practices have in common is that they physically hurt a victim, and so it is only from a generic victim’s perspective—which, as we saw, is also the perspective of the moralist—that we could even dream of a final theory. From the scientist’s perspective, the motives of the perpetrators may be motley, and so will the explanations for the forces that pushed against those motives.
At the same time, all these developments undeniably point in the same direction. It’s a good time in history to be a potential victim. One can imagine a historical narrative in which different practices went in different directions: slavery stayed abolished, for example, but parents decided to bring back savage beatings of their children; or states became increasingly humane to their citizens but more likely to wage war on one another. That hasn’t happened. Most practices have moved in the less violent direction, too many to be a coincidence.
To be sure, some developments went the other way: the destructiveness of European wars through World War II (overshadowing the decrease in their frequency until both fell in tandem), the heyday of genocidal dictators in the middle decades of the 20th century, the rise of crime in the 1960s, and the bulge of civil wars in the developing world following decolonization. Yet every one of these developments has been systematically reversed, and from where we sit on the time line, most trends point peaceward. We may not be entitled to a theory of everything, but we do need a theory that explains why so many somethings point the same way.
IMPORTANT BUT INCONSISTENT
Let me begin by noting a few forces that one might have thought would be important to the processes, peaces, and revolutions of chapters 2–7, but as best I can tell turned out not to be. It’s not that these forces are by any means minor; it’s just that they have not consistently worked to reduce violence.
Weaponry and Disarmament.
Writers who are engrossed by violence and those who are repelled by it have one thing in common: they are fixated on weaponry. Military histories, written by and for guys, obsess over longbows, stirrups, artillery, and tanks. Many movements for nonviolence have been disarmament movements: the demonization of “merchants of war,” the antinuclear demonstrations, the campaigns for gun control. And then there is the contrary though equally weaponcentric prescription according to which the invention of unthinkably destructive weapons (dynamite, poison gas, nuclear bombs) would make war unthinkable.
The technology of weaponry has obviously changed the course of history many times by determining winners and losers, making deterrence credible, and multiplying the destructive power of certain antagonists. No one would argue, for example, that the proliferation of automatic weapons in the developing world has been good for peace. Yet it’s hard to find any correlation over history between the destructive power of weaponry and the human toll of deadly quarrels. Over the millennia weapons, just like every technology, got better and better, yet rates of violence have not gone steadily up but rather have lurched up and down the slope of an inclined sawtooth. The spears and arrows of pre-state peoples notched up higher proportional body counts than has anything since (chapter 2), and the pikemen and cavalry of the Thirty Years’ War did more human damage than the artillery and gas of World War I (chapter 5). Though the 16th and 17th centuries saw a military revolution, it was less an arms race than an
armies
race, in which governments beefed up the size and efficiency of their armed forces. The history of genocide shows that people can be slaughtered as efficiently with primitive weapons as they can with industrial technology (chapters 5 and 6).
Nor did precipitous drops in violence, such as those of the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Great American Crime Decline, originate with the antagonists melting down their weapons. The historical sequence has usually gone the other way, as in the dismantling of armamentaria that was part of the peace dividend after the end of the Cold War. As for the nuclear peace, we have seen that nuclear weapons may have made little difference to the course of world events, given their uselessness in battle and the massive destructive power of conventional forces (chapter 5). And the popular (if bizarre) argument that nuclear weapons would inevitably be used by the great powers to justify the cost of developing them turned out to be flat wrong.
The failure of technological determinism as a theory of the history of violence should not be that surprising. Human behavior is goal-directed, not stimulus-driven, and what matters most to the incidence of violence is whether one person wants another one dead. The cliché of gun control opponents is literally true: guns don’t kill people; people kill people (which is not to endorse the arguments for or against gun control). Anyone who is equipped to hunt, harvest crops, chop firewood, or prepare salad has the means to damage a lot of human flesh. With necessity being the mother of invention, people can upgrade their technology to the extent their enemies force them to. Weaponry, in other words, appears to be largely endogenous to the historical dynamics that result in large declines in violence. When people are rapacious or terrified, they develop the weapons they need; when cooler heads prevail, the weapons rust in peace.
Resources and Power.
When I was a student in the 1970s, I had a professor who shared with anyone who would listen the truth about the Vietnam War: it was really about tungsten. The South China Sea, he discovered, had the world’s largest deposits of the metal used in lightbulb filaments and superhard steel. The debates on communism and nationalism and containment were all a smokescreen for the superpowers’ battle to control the source of this vital resource.
The tungsten theory of the Vietnam War is an example of resource determinism, the idea that people inevitably fight over finite resources like land, water, minerals, and strategic terrain. One version holds that conflict arises from an unequal allocation of resources, and that peace will come when they are distributed more equitably. Another feeds into “realist” theories that see conflict over land and resources as a permanent feature of international relations, and peace as the outcome of a balance of power in which each side is deterred from encroaching on the other’s sphere of influence.
While contests over resources are a vital dynamic in history, they offer little insight into grand trends in violence. The most destructive eruptions of the past half millennium were fueled not by resources but by ideologies, such as religion, revolution, nationalism, fascism, and communism (chapter 5). Though no one can prove that each of these cataclysms wasn’t really about tungsten or some other ulterior resource, any effort to show that they are is bound to look like a nutball conspiracy theory. As for the balance of power, the upending of the pans after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Germanys were unified did not send the world into a mad scramble. Rather, it had no discernible effect on the Long Peace among developed countries, and it presaged a New Peace among developing ones. Nor did either of these pleasant surprises originate in the discovery or redistribution of resources. In fact, resources in the developing world often turn out to be a curse rather than a blessing. Countries rich in oil and minerals, despite having a larger pie to divide among their citizens, are among those with the most violence (chapter 6).