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 (74 page)
Not only that, but consider the people who learn about the promise of a perfect world yet nonetheless oppose it. They are the only things standing in the way of a plan that could lead to infinite goodness. How evil are they? You do the math.
The second genocidal hazard of a utopia is that it has to conform to a tidy blueprint. In a utopia, everything is there for a reason. What about the people? Well, groups of people are diverse. Some of them stubbornly, perhaps essentially, cling to values that are out of place in a perfect world. They may be entrepreneurial in a world that works by communal sharing, or bookish in a world that works by labor, or brash in a world that works by piety, or clannish in a world that works by unity, or urban and commercial in a world that has returned to its roots in nature. If you are designing the perfect society on a clean sheet of paper, why not write these eyesores out of the plans from the start?
In
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur
, the historian Ben Kiernan notes another curious feature of utopian ideologies. Time and again they hark back to a vanished agrarian paradise, which they seek to restore as a healthful substitute for prevailing urban decadence. In chapter 4 we saw that after the Enlightenment had emerged from the intellectual bazaar of cosmopolitan cities, the German counter-Enlightenment romanticized the attachment of a people to their land—the blood and soil of Kiernan’s title. The ungovernable metropolis, with its fluid population and ethnic and occupational enclaves, is an affront to a mindset that envisions a world of harmony, purity, and organic wholeness. Many of the nationalisms of the 19th and early 20th centuries were guided by utopian images of ethnic groups flourishing in their native homelands, often based on myths of ancestral tribes who settled the territory at the dawn of time.
116
This agrarian utopianism lay behind Hitler’s dual obsessions: his loathing of Jewry, which he associated with commerce and cities, and his deranged plan to depopulate Eastern Europe to provide farmland for German city-dwellers to colonize. Mao’s massive agrarian communes and Pol Pot’s expulsion of Cambodian city-dwellers to rural killing fields are other examples.
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur
, the historian Ben Kiernan notes another curious feature of utopian ideologies. Time and again they hark back to a vanished agrarian paradise, which they seek to restore as a healthful substitute for prevailing urban decadence. In chapter 4 we saw that after the Enlightenment had emerged from the intellectual bazaar of cosmopolitan cities, the German counter-Enlightenment romanticized the attachment of a people to their land—the blood and soil of Kiernan’s title. The ungovernable metropolis, with its fluid population and ethnic and occupational enclaves, is an affront to a mindset that envisions a world of harmony, purity, and organic wholeness. Many of the nationalisms of the 19th and early 20th centuries were guided by utopian images of ethnic groups flourishing in their native homelands, often based on myths of ancestral tribes who settled the territory at the dawn of time.
116
This agrarian utopianism lay behind Hitler’s dual obsessions: his loathing of Jewry, which he associated with commerce and cities, and his deranged plan to depopulate Eastern Europe to provide farmland for German city-dwellers to colonize. Mao’s massive agrarian communes and Pol Pot’s expulsion of Cambodian city-dwellers to rural killing fields are other examples.
Commercial activities, which tend to be concentrated in cities, can themselves be triggers of moralistic hatred. As we shall see in chapter 9, people’s intuitive sense of economics is rooted in tit-for-tat exchanges of concrete goods or services of equivalent value—say, three chickens for one knife. It does not easily grasp the abstract mathematical apparatus of a modern economy, such as money, profit, interest, and rent.
117
In intuitive economics, farmers and craftsmen produce palpable items of value. Merchants and other middlemen, who skim off a profit as they pass goods along without causing new stuff to come into being, are seen as parasites, despite the value they create by enabling transactions between producers and consumers who are unacquainted or separated by distance. Moneylenders, who loan out a sum and then demand additional money in return, are held in even greater contempt, despite the service they render by providing people with money at times in their lives when it can be put to the best use. People tend to be oblivious to the intangible contributions of merchants and moneylenders and view them as bloodsuckers. (Once again the metaphor comes from biology.) Antipathy toward individual middlemen can easily transfer to antipathy to ethnic groups. The capital necessary to prosper in middlemen occupations consists mainly of expertise rather than land or factories, so it is easily shared among kin and friends, and it is highly portable. For these reasons it’s common for particular ethnic groups to specialize in the middleman niche and to move to whatever communities currently lack them, where they tend to become prosperous minorities—and targets of envy and resentment.
118
Many victims of discrimination, expulsion, riots, and genocide have been social or ethnic groups that specialize in middlemen niches. They include various bourgeois minorities in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia, the Indians in East Africa and Oceania, the Ibos in Nigeria, the Armenians in Turkey, the Chinese in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam, and the Jews in Europe.
119
117
In intuitive economics, farmers and craftsmen produce palpable items of value. Merchants and other middlemen, who skim off a profit as they pass goods along without causing new stuff to come into being, are seen as parasites, despite the value they create by enabling transactions between producers and consumers who are unacquainted or separated by distance. Moneylenders, who loan out a sum and then demand additional money in return, are held in even greater contempt, despite the service they render by providing people with money at times in their lives when it can be put to the best use. People tend to be oblivious to the intangible contributions of merchants and moneylenders and view them as bloodsuckers. (Once again the metaphor comes from biology.) Antipathy toward individual middlemen can easily transfer to antipathy to ethnic groups. The capital necessary to prosper in middlemen occupations consists mainly of expertise rather than land or factories, so it is easily shared among kin and friends, and it is highly portable. For these reasons it’s common for particular ethnic groups to specialize in the middleman niche and to move to whatever communities currently lack them, where they tend to become prosperous minorities—and targets of envy and resentment.
118
Many victims of discrimination, expulsion, riots, and genocide have been social or ethnic groups that specialize in middlemen niches. They include various bourgeois minorities in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia, the Indians in East Africa and Oceania, the Ibos in Nigeria, the Armenians in Turkey, the Chinese in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam, and the Jews in Europe.
119
Democides are often scripted into the climax of an eschatological narrative, a final spasm of violence that will usher in millennial bliss. The parallels between the utopian ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries and the apocalyptic visions of traditional religions have often been noticed by historians of genocide. Daniel Chirot, writing with the social psychologist Clark McCauley, observes:
Marxist eschatology actually mimicked Christian doctrine. In the beginning, there was a perfect world with no private property, no classes, no exploitation, and no alienation—the Garden of Eden. Then came sin, the discovery of private property, and the creation of exploiters. Humanity was cast from the Garden to suffer inequality and want. Humans then experimented with a series of modes of production, from the slave, to the feudal, to the capitalist mode, always seeking the solution and not finding it. Finally there came a true prophet with a message of salvation, Karl Marx, who preached the truth of Science. He promised redemption but was not heeded, except by his close disciples who carried the truth forward. Eventually, however, the proletariat, the carriers of the true faith, will be converted by the religious elect, the leaders of the party, and join to create a more perfect world. A final, terrible revolution will wipe out capitalism, alienation, exploitation, and inequality. After that, history will end because there will be perfection on earth, and the true believers will have been saved.
120
Drawing on the work of the historians Joachim Fest and George Mosse, they also comment on Nazi eschatology:
It was not an accident that Hitler promised a Thousand Year Reich, a millennium of perfection, similar to the thousand-year reign of goodness promised in Revelation before the return of evil, the great battle between good and evil, and the final triumph of God over Satan. The entire imagery of his Nazi Party and regime was deeply mystical, suffused with religious, often Christian, liturgical symbolism, and it appealed to a higher law, to a mission decreed by fate and entrusted to the prophet Hitler.
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Finally, there are the job requirements. Would you want the stress and responsibility of running a perfect world? Utopian leadership selects for monumental narcissism and ruthlessness.
122
Its leaders are possessed of a certainty about the rectitude of their cause and an impatience for incremental reforms or on-the-fly adjustments guided by feedback from the human consequences of their grand schemes. Mao, who had his image plastered all over China and his little red book of sayings issued to every citizen, was described by his doctor and only confidant Li Zhisui as voracious for flattery, demanding of sexual servicing by concubines, and devoid of warmth and compassion.
123
In 1958 he had a revelation that the country could double its steel production in a year if peasant families contributed to the national output by running backyard smelters. On pain of death for failing to meet the quotas, peasants melted down their woks, knives, shovels, and doorknobs into lumps of useless metal. It was also revealed to him that China could grow large quantities of grain on small plots of land, freeing the rest for grasslands and gardens, if farmers planted the seedlings deep and close together so that class solidarity would make them grow strong and thick.
124
Peasants were herded into communes of 50,000 to implement this vision, and anyone who dragged his feet or pointed out the obvious was executed as a class enemy. Impervious to signals from reality informing him that his Great Leap Forward was a great leap backward, Mao masterminded a famine that killed between 20 million and 30 million people.
122
Its leaders are possessed of a certainty about the rectitude of their cause and an impatience for incremental reforms or on-the-fly adjustments guided by feedback from the human consequences of their grand schemes. Mao, who had his image plastered all over China and his little red book of sayings issued to every citizen, was described by his doctor and only confidant Li Zhisui as voracious for flattery, demanding of sexual servicing by concubines, and devoid of warmth and compassion.
123
In 1958 he had a revelation that the country could double its steel production in a year if peasant families contributed to the national output by running backyard smelters. On pain of death for failing to meet the quotas, peasants melted down their woks, knives, shovels, and doorknobs into lumps of useless metal. It was also revealed to him that China could grow large quantities of grain on small plots of land, freeing the rest for grasslands and gardens, if farmers planted the seedlings deep and close together so that class solidarity would make them grow strong and thick.
124
Peasants were herded into communes of 50,000 to implement this vision, and anyone who dragged his feet or pointed out the obvious was executed as a class enemy. Impervious to signals from reality informing him that his Great Leap Forward was a great leap backward, Mao masterminded a famine that killed between 20 million and 30 million people.
The motives of leaders are critical in understanding genocide, because the psychological ingredients—the mindset of essentialism; the Hobbesian dynamic of greed, fear, and vengeance; the moralization of emotions like disgust; and the appeal of utopian ideologies—do not overcome an entire population at once and incite them to mass killing. Groups that avoid, distrust, or even despise each other can coexist without genocide indefinitely.
125
Think, for example, of African Americans in the segregated American South, Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, and Africans in South Africa under apartheid. Even in Nazi Germany, where anti-Semitism had been entrenched for centuries, there is no indication that anyone but Hitler and a few fanatical henchmen thought it was a good idea for the Jews to be exterminated.
126
When a genocide
is
carried out, only a fraction of the population, usually a police force, military unit, or militia, actually commits the murders.
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Think, for example, of African Americans in the segregated American South, Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, and Africans in South Africa under apartheid. Even in Nazi Germany, where anti-Semitism had been entrenched for centuries, there is no indication that anyone but Hitler and a few fanatical henchmen thought it was a good idea for the Jews to be exterminated.
126
When a genocide
is
carried out, only a fraction of the population, usually a police force, military unit, or militia, actually commits the murders.
127
In the 1st century CE, Tacitus wrote, “A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of a few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.” According to the political scientist Benjamin Valentino in
Final Solutions,
that division of labor applies to the genocides of the 20th century as well.
128
A leader or small clique decides that the time for genocide is right. He gives the go-ahead to a relatively small force of armed men, made up a mixture of true believers, conformists, and thugs (often recruited, as in medieval armies, from the ranks of criminals, drifters, and other unemployable young men). They count on the rest of the population not to get in their way, and thanks to features of social psychology that we will explore in chapter 8, they generally don’t. The psychological contributors to genocide, such as essentialism, moralization, and utopian ideologies, are engaged to different degrees in each of these constituencies. They consume the minds of the leaders and the true believers but have to tip the others only enough to allow the leaders to make their plans a reality. The indispensability of leaders to 20th-century genocide is made plain by the fact that when the leaders died or were removed by force, the killings stopped.
129
Final Solutions,
that division of labor applies to the genocides of the 20th century as well.
128
A leader or small clique decides that the time for genocide is right. He gives the go-ahead to a relatively small force of armed men, made up a mixture of true believers, conformists, and thugs (often recruited, as in medieval armies, from the ranks of criminals, drifters, and other unemployable young men). They count on the rest of the population not to get in their way, and thanks to features of social psychology that we will explore in chapter 8, they generally don’t. The psychological contributors to genocide, such as essentialism, moralization, and utopian ideologies, are engaged to different degrees in each of these constituencies. They consume the minds of the leaders and the true believers but have to tip the others only enough to allow the leaders to make their plans a reality. The indispensability of leaders to 20th-century genocide is made plain by the fact that when the leaders died or were removed by force, the killings stopped.
129
If this analysis is on the right track, genocides can emerge from toxic reactions among human nature (including essentialism, moralization, and intuitive economics), Hobbesian security dilemmas, millennial ideologies, and the opportunities available to leaders. The question now is: how has this interaction changed over the course of history?
It’s not an easy question to answer, because historians have never found genocide particularly interesting. Since antiquity the stacks of libraries have been filled with scholarship on war, but scholarship on genocide is nearly nonexistent, though it killed more people. As Chalk and Jonassohn point out of ancient histories, “We know that empires have disappeared and that cities were destroyed, and we suspect that some wars were genocidal in their results; but we do not know what happened to the bulk of the populations involved in these events. Their fate was simply too unimportant. When they were mentioned at all, they were usually lumped together with the herds of oxen, sheep, and other livestock.”
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As soon as one realizes that the sackings, razings, and massacres of past centuries are what we would call genocide today, it becomes utterly clear that genocide is not a phenomenon of the 20th century. Those familiar with classical history know that the Athenians destroyed Melos during the 5th-century-BCE Peloponnesian War; according to Thucydides, “the Athenians thereupon put to death all who were of military age and made slaves of the women and children.” Another familiar example is the Romans’ destruction of Carthage and its population during the Third Punic War in the 3rd century BCE, a war so total that the Romans, it was said, sowed salt into the ground to make it forever unfarmable. Other historical genocides include the real-life bloodbaths that inspired the ones narrated in the
Iliad,
the
Odyssey,
and the Hebrew Bible; the massacres and sackings during the Crusades; the suppression of the Albigensian heresy; the Mongol invasions; the European witch hunts; and the carnage of the European Wars of Religion.
Iliad,
the
Odyssey,
and the Hebrew Bible; the massacres and sackings during the Crusades; the suppression of the Albigensian heresy; the Mongol invasions; the European witch hunts; and the carnage of the European Wars of Religion.
The authors of recent histories of mass killing are adamant that the idea of an unprecedented “century of genocide” (the 20th) is a myth. On their first page Chalk and Jonassohn write, “Genocide has been practiced in all regions of the world and during all periods in history,” and add that their eleven case studies of pre-20th-century genocides “are not intended to be either exhaustive or representative.”
131
Kiernan agrees: “A major conclusion of this book is that genocide indeed occurred commonly before the twentieth century.” One can see what he means with a glance at the first page of his table of contents:
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Kiernan agrees: “A major conclusion of this book is that genocide indeed occurred commonly before the twentieth century.” One can see what he means with a glance at the first page of his table of contents:
Part One: Early Imperial Expansion1. Classical Genocide and Early Modern Memory2. The Spanish Conquest of the New World 1492–16003. Guns and Genocide in East Asia 1400–16004. Genocidal Massacres in Early Modern Southeast AsiaPart Two. Settler Colonialism5. The English Conquest of Ireland, 1565–16036. Colonial North America, 1600–17767. Genocidal Violence in Nineteenth-Century Australia8. Genocide in the United States9. Settler Genocides in Africa, 1830–1910
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