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 (62 page)
It’s not immediately obvious why, out of all the weapons of war, poison gas was singled out as uniquely abominable—as so uncivilized that even the Nazis kept it off the battlefield. (They clearly had no compunction about using it elsewhere.) It’s highly unpleasant to be gassed, but then it’s just as unpleasant to be perforated or shredded by pieces of metal. As far as numbers are concerned, gas is far less lethal than bullets and bombs. In World War I fewer than 1 percent of the men who were injured by poison gas died from their injuries, and these fatalities added up to less than 1 percent of the war’s death toll.
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Though chemical warfare is militarily messy—no battlefield commander wants to be at the mercy of which way the wind is blowing—Germany could have used it to devastate the British forces at Dunkirk, and American forces would have found it handy in rooting out the Japanese soldiers hiding in caves in the Pacific Rim. And even if chemical weapons are difficult to deploy, that would hardly make them unique, since most new weapon technologies are ineffective when they are introduced. The first gunpowder weapons, for example, were slow to load, difficult to aim, and apt to blow up in the soldier’s face. Nor were chemical weapons the first to be condemned for barbarism: in the era of longbows and pikes, gunpowder weapons were denounced as immoral, unmanly, and cowardly. Why did the taboo against chemical weapons take?
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Though chemical warfare is militarily messy—no battlefield commander wants to be at the mercy of which way the wind is blowing—Germany could have used it to devastate the British forces at Dunkirk, and American forces would have found it handy in rooting out the Japanese soldiers hiding in caves in the Pacific Rim. And even if chemical weapons are difficult to deploy, that would hardly make them unique, since most new weapon technologies are ineffective when they are introduced. The first gunpowder weapons, for example, were slow to load, difficult to aim, and apt to blow up in the soldier’s face. Nor were chemical weapons the first to be condemned for barbarism: in the era of longbows and pikes, gunpowder weapons were denounced as immoral, unmanly, and cowardly. Why did the taboo against chemical weapons take?
One possibility is that the human mind finds something distinctively repugnant about poison. Whatever suspension of the normal rules of decency allows warriors to do their thing, it seems to license only the sudden and directed application of force against an adversary who has the potential to do the same. Even pacifists may enjoy war movies or video games in which people get shot, stabbed, or blown up, but no one seems to get pleasure from watching a greenish cloud descend on a battlefield and slowly turn men into corpses. The poisoner has long been reviled as a uniquely foul and perfidious killer. Poison is the method of the sorcerer rather than the warrior; of the woman (with her terrifying control of kitchen and medicine chest) rather than the man. In
Venomous Woman
, the literary scholar Margaret Hallissy explains the archetype:
Venomous Woman
, the literary scholar Margaret Hallissy explains the archetype:
Poison can never be used as an honorable weapon in a fair duel between worthy opponents, as the sword or gun, male weapons, can. A man who uses such a secret weapon is beneath contempt. Publicly acknowledged rivalry is a kind of bonding in which each worthy opponent gives the other the opportunity to demonstrate prowess.... The dueler is open, honest, and strong; the poisoner fraudulent, scheming, and weak. A man with a gun or a sword is a threat, but he declares himself to be so, and his intended victim can arm himself.... The poisoner uses superior secret knowledge to compensate for physical inferiority. A weak woman planning a poison is as deadly as a man with a gun, but because she plots in secret, the victim is more disarmed.
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Whatever abhorrence of poisoning we might have inherited from our evolutionary or cultural past, it needed a boost from historical contingency to become entrenched as a taboo on the conduct of war. Price conjectures that the critical nonevent was that in World War I, poison gas was never deliberately used against civilians. At least in that application, no taboo-shattering precedent had been set, and the widespread horror in the 1930s about the prospect that gas-dispensing airplanes could annihilate entire cities rallied people into categorically opposing all uses of the weapons.
The analogies between the chemical weapons taboo and the nuclear weapons taboo are clear enough. Today the two are lumped together as “weapons of mass destruction,” though nuclear weapons are incomparably more destructive, because each taboo can draw strength from the other by association. The dread of both kinds of weapons is multiplied by the prospect of slow death by sickening and the absence of a boundary between battlefield and civilian life.
The world’s experience with chemical weapons offers some morals that are mildly hopeful, at least by the terrifying standards of the nuclear age. Not every lethal technology becomes a permanent part of the military tool kit; some genies can be put back in their bottles; and moral sentiments can sometimes become entrenched as international norms and affect the conduct of war. Those norms, moreover, can be robust enough to withstand an isolated exception, which does not necessarily set off an uncontrollable escalation. That in particular is a hopeful discovery, though it might be good for the world if not too many people were aware of it.
If the world did away with chemical weapons, could it do the same with nuclear weapons? Recently a group of American icons proposed just that in an idealistic manifesto entitled “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” The icons were not Peter, Paul, and Mary but George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn.
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Shultz was secretary of state in the Reagan administration. Perry was secretary of defense under Clinton. Kissinger was national security advisor and secretary of state under Nixon and Ford. Nunn was a chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and has long been considered the American lawmaker most knowledgeable about national defense. None could be accused of starry-eyed pacifism.
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Shultz was secretary of state in the Reagan administration. Perry was secretary of defense under Clinton. Kissinger was national security advisor and secretary of state under Nixon and Ford. Nunn was a chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and has long been considered the American lawmaker most knowledgeable about national defense. None could be accused of starry-eyed pacifism.
Supporting them is a dream team of war-hardened statesmen from Democratic and Republican administrations going back to that of John F. Kennedy. They include five former secretaries of state, five former national security advisors, and four former secretaries of defense. In all, three-quarters of the living alumni of those positions signed on to the call for a phased, verified, binding elimination of all nuclear weapons, now sometimes called Global Zero.
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Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev have endorsed it in speeches (one of the reasons Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009), and several policy think tanks have begun to work out how it might be implemented. The leading road map calls for four phases of negotiation, reduction, and verification, with the last warhead dismantled in 2030.
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Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev have endorsed it in speeches (one of the reasons Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009), and several policy think tanks have begun to work out how it might be implemented. The leading road map calls for four phases of negotiation, reduction, and verification, with the last warhead dismantled in 2030.
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As one might guess from the résumés of its supporters, Global Zero has some hardheaded realpolitik behind it. Since the end of the Cold War, the nuclear arsenal of the great powers has become an absurdity. It is no longer needed to deter an existential threat from an enemy superpower, and given the nuclear taboo, it serves no other military purpose. The threat of a retaliatory strike cannot deter stateless terrorists, because their bomb would not come with a return address, and if they were religious fanatics there would be nothing on earth that they valued enough to threaten. As praiseworthy as the various nuclear arms reduction agreements have been, they make little difference to global security as long as thousands of weapons remain in existence and the technology to make new ones is not forgotten.
The psychology behind Global Zero is to extend the taboo on
using
nuclear weapons to a taboo on
possessing
them. Taboos depend on a mutual understanding that there are bright lines delineating all-or-none categories, and the line distinguishing zero from more-than-zero is the brightest of all. No country could justify acquiring a nuclear weapon to protect itself against a nuclear-armed neighbor if it had no nuclear-armed neighbors. Nor could it claim that the nuclear legacy nations were hypocritically reserving the right to keep their own weapons. A developing nation could no longer try to look like a grown-up by acquiring a nuclear arsenal if the grown-ups had eschewed the weapons as old-fashioned and repulsive. And any rogue state or terrorist group that flirted with acquiring a nuclear weapon would become a pariah in the eyes of the world—a depraved criminal rather than a redoubtable challenger.
using
nuclear weapons to a taboo on
possessing
them. Taboos depend on a mutual understanding that there are bright lines delineating all-or-none categories, and the line distinguishing zero from more-than-zero is the brightest of all. No country could justify acquiring a nuclear weapon to protect itself against a nuclear-armed neighbor if it had no nuclear-armed neighbors. Nor could it claim that the nuclear legacy nations were hypocritically reserving the right to keep their own weapons. A developing nation could no longer try to look like a grown-up by acquiring a nuclear arsenal if the grown-ups had eschewed the weapons as old-fashioned and repulsive. And any rogue state or terrorist group that flirted with acquiring a nuclear weapon would become a pariah in the eyes of the world—a depraved criminal rather than a redoubtable challenger.
The problem, of course, is how to get there from here. The process of dismantling the weapons would open windows of vulnerability during which one of the remaining nuclear powers could fall under the sway of an expansionist zealot. Nations would be tempted to cheat by retaining a few nukes on the side just in case their adversaries did so. A rogue state might support nuclear terrorists once it was sure that it would never be a target of retaliation. And in a world that lacked nuclear weapons but retained the knowledge of how to build them—and that genie certainly can’t be put back in the bottle—a crisis could set off a scramble to rearm, in which the first past the post might be tempted to strike preemptively before its adversary got the upper hand. Some experts on nuclear strategy, including Schelling, John Deutch, and Harold Brown, are skeptical that a nuclear-free world is attainable or even desirable, though others are working out timetables and safeguards designed to answer their objections.
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With all these uncertainties, no one should predict that nuclear weapons will go the way of poison gas anytime soon. But it is a sign of the momentum behind the Long Peace that abolition can even be discussed as a foreseeable prospect. If it happens, it would represent the ultimate decline in violence. A nuclear-free world! What realist would have dreamed it?
IS THE LONG PEACE A DEMOCRATIC PEACE?If the Long Peace is not the sturdy child of terror and the twin brother of annihilation, then whose child is it? Can we identify an exogenous variable—some development that is not part of the peace itself—that blossomed in the postwar years and that we have reason to believe is a generic force against war? Is there a causal story with more explanatory muscle than “Developed countries stopped warring because they got less warlike”?
In chapter 4 we met a two-hundred-year-old theory that offers some predictions. In his essay “Perpetual Peace,” Immanuel Kant reasoned that three conditions should reduce the incentives of national leaders to wage war without their having to become any kinder or gentler.
The first is democracy. Democratic government is designed to resolve conflicts among citizens by consensual rule of law, and so democracies should externalize this ethic in dealing with other states. Also, every democracy knows the way every other democracy works, since they’re all constructed on the same rational foundations rather than growing out of a cult of personality, a messianic creed, or a chauvinistic mission. The resulting trust among democracies should nip in the bud the Hobbesian cycle in which the fear of a preemptive attack on each side tempts both into launching a preemptive attack. Finally, since democratic leaders are accountable to their people, they should be less likely to initiate stupid wars that enhance their glory at the expense of their citizenries’ blood and treasure.
The Democratic Peace, as the theory is now called, has two things going for it as an explanation for the Long Peace. The first is that the trend lines are in the right direction. In most of Europe, democracy has surprisingly shallow roots. The eastern half was dominated by communist dictatorships until 1989, and Spain, Portugal, and Greece were fascist dictatorships until the 1970s. Germany started one world war as a militaristic monarchy, joined by monarchical Austria-Hungary, and another as a Nazi dictatorship, joined by Fascist Italy. Even France needed five tries to get democracy right, interleaved with monarchies, empires, and Vichy regimes. Not so long ago many experts thought that democracy was doomed. In 1975 Daniel Patrick Moynihan lamented that “liberal democracy on the American model increasingly tends to the condition of monarchy in the 19th century: a holdover form of government, one which persists in isolated or peculiar places here and there, and may even serve well enough for special circumstances, but which has simply no relevance to the future. It was where the world was, not where it is going.”
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Social scientists should never predict the future; it’s hard enough to predict the past. Figure 5–23 shows the worldwide fortunes of democracies, autocracies, and anocracies (countries that are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic) in the decades since World War II. The year in which Moynihan announced the death of democracy was a turning point in the relative fortunes of the different forms of governance, and democracy turned out to be exactly where the world was going, particularly the developed world. Southern Europe became fully democratic in the 1970s, and Eastern Europe by the early 1990s. Currently the only European country classified as an autocracy is Belarus, and all but Russia are full-fledged democracies. Democracies also predominate in the Americas and in major developed countries of the Pacific, such as South Korea and Taiwan.
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Quite apart from any contribution that democracy might make to international peace, it is a form of government that inflicts the minimum of violence on its own citizens, so the rise of democracy itself must be counted as another milestone in the historical decline of violence.
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Quite apart from any contribution that democracy might make to international peace, it is a form of government that inflicts the minimum of violence on its own citizens, so the rise of democracy itself must be counted as another milestone in the historical decline of violence.
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