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 (80 page)
The small-scale bands in which humans spent much of their evolutionary history were held together by kinship, and people tended to be related to their neighbors. Among the Yanomamö, for example, two individuals picked at random from a village are related almost as closely as first cousins, and people who consider each other relatives are related, on average, even more closely.
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The genetic overlap tilts the evolutionary payoff toward taking greater risks to life and limb if the risky act might benefit one’s fellow warriors. One of the reasons that chimpanzees, unlike other primates, engage in cooperative raiding is that the females, rather than the males, disperse from the troop at sexual maturity, so the males in a troop tend to be related.
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The genetic overlap tilts the evolutionary payoff toward taking greater risks to life and limb if the risky act might benefit one’s fellow warriors. One of the reasons that chimpanzees, unlike other primates, engage in cooperative raiding is that the females, rather than the males, disperse from the troop at sexual maturity, so the males in a troop tend to be related.
210
As with all aspects of our psychology that have been illuminated by evolutionary theory, what matters is not
actual
genetic relatedness (it’s not as if hunter-gatherers, to say nothing of chimpanzees, send off cheek swabs to a genotyping service) but the
perception
of relatedness, as long as the perception was correlated with the reality over long enough spans of time.
211
Among the contributors to the perception of kinship are the experience of having grown up together, having seen one’s mother care for the other person, commensal meals, myths of common ancestry, essentialist intuitions of common flesh and blood, the sharing of rituals and ordeals, physical resemblance (often enhanced by hairdressing, tattoos, scarification, and mutilation), and metaphors such as
fraternity, brotherhood, family, fatherland, motherland,
and
blood.
212
Military leaders use every trick in the book to make their soldiers feel like genetic relatives and take on the biologically predictable risks. Shakespeare made this clear in the most famous motivational speech in the literary history of war, when Henry V addresses his men on St. Crispin’s Day:
actual
genetic relatedness (it’s not as if hunter-gatherers, to say nothing of chimpanzees, send off cheek swabs to a genotyping service) but the
perception
of relatedness, as long as the perception was correlated with the reality over long enough spans of time.
211
Among the contributors to the perception of kinship are the experience of having grown up together, having seen one’s mother care for the other person, commensal meals, myths of common ancestry, essentialist intuitions of common flesh and blood, the sharing of rituals and ordeals, physical resemblance (often enhanced by hairdressing, tattoos, scarification, and mutilation), and metaphors such as
fraternity, brotherhood, family, fatherland, motherland,
and
blood.
212
Military leaders use every trick in the book to make their soldiers feel like genetic relatives and take on the biologically predictable risks. Shakespeare made this clear in the most famous motivational speech in the literary history of war, when Henry V addresses his men on St. Crispin’s Day:
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother.
Modern militaries too take pains to group soldiers into bands of brothers—the fire teams, squads, and platoons of half a dozen to several dozen soldiers that serve as a crucible for the primary emotion that moves men to fight in armies, brotherly love. Studies of military psychology have discovered that soldiers fight above all out of loyalty to their platoonmates.
213
The writer William Manchester reminisced about his experience as a Marine in World War II:
213
The writer William Manchester reminisced about his experience as a Marine in World War II:
Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down, and I couldn’t do it to them.... I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have saved them. Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.
214
Two decades later, another Marine-turned-author, William Broyles, offered a similar reflection on his experience in Vietnam:
The enduring emotion of war, when everything else has faded, is comradeship. A comrade in war is a man you can trust with anything, because you trust him with your life.... Despite its extreme right-wing image, war is the only utopian experience most of us ever have. Individual possessions and advantage count for nothing: the group is everything. What you have is shared with your friends. It isn’t a particularly selective process, but a love that needs no reasons, that transcends race and personality and education—all those things that would make a difference in peace.
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Though in extremis a man may lay down his life to save a platoon of virtual brothers, it’s rarer for him to calmly make plans to commit suicide at some future date on their behalf. The conduct of war would be very different if he did. To avoid panic and rout (at least in the absence of file closers), battle plans are generally engineered so that an individual soldier does not know that he has been singled out for certain death. At a bomber base during World War II, for example, strategists calculated that pilots would have a higher probability of survival if a few of them who drew the short straws in a lottery would fly off to certain death on one-way sorties rather than all of them taking their chances in the fuel-laden planes needed for round trips. But they opted for the higher risk of an unpredictable death over the lower risk of a death that would be preceded by a lengthy period of doom.
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How do the engineers of suicide terrorism overcome this obstacle?
216
How do the engineers of suicide terrorism overcome this obstacle?
Certainly an ideology of an afterlife helps, as in the posthumous Playboy Mansion promised to the 9/11 hijackers. (Japanese kamikaze pilots had to make do with the less vivid image of being absorbed into a great realm of the spirit.) But modern suicide terrorism was perfected by the Tamil Tigers, and though the members grew up in Hinduism with its promise of reincarnation, the group’s ideology was secular: the usual goulash of nationalism, romantic militarism, Marxism-Leninism, and anti-imperialism that animated 20th-century third-world liberation movements. And in accounts by would-be suicide terrorists of what prompted them to enlist, anticipation of an afterlife, with or without the virgins, seldom figures prominently. So while expectation of a pleasant afterlife may tip the perceived cost-benefit ratio (making it harder to imagine an atheist suicide bomber), it cannot be the only psychological driver.
Using interviews with failed and prospective suicide terrorists, the anthropologist Scott Atran has refuted many common misconceptions about them. Far from being ignorant, impoverished, nihilistic, or mentally ill, suicide terrorists tend to be educated, middle class, morally engaged, and free of obvious psychopathology. Atran concluded that many of the motives may be found in nepotistic altruism.
217
217
The case of the Tamil Tigers is relatively easy. They use the terrorist equivalent of file closers, selecting operatives for suicide missions and threatening to kill their families if they withdraw.
218
Only slightly less subtle are the methods of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, who hold out a carrot rather than a stick to the terrorist’s family in the form of generous monthly stipends, lump-sum payments, and massive prestige in the community.
219
Though in general one should not expect extreme behavior to deliver a payoff in biological fitness, the anthropologists Aaron Blackwell and Lawrence Sugiyama have shown that it may do so in the case of Palestinian suicide terrorism. In the West Bank and Gaza many men have trouble finding wives because their families cannot afford a bride-price, they are restricted to marrying parallel cousins, and many women are taken out of the marriage pool by polygynous marriage or by marriage up to more prosperous Arabs in Israel. Blackwell and Sugiyama note that 99 percent of Palestinian suicide terrorists are male, that 86 percent are unmarried, and that 81 percent have at least six siblings, a larger family size than the Palestinian average. When they plugged these and other numbers into a simple demographic model, they found that when a terrorist blows himself up, the financial payoff can buy enough brides for his brothers to make his sacrifice reproductively worthwhile.
218
Only slightly less subtle are the methods of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, who hold out a carrot rather than a stick to the terrorist’s family in the form of generous monthly stipends, lump-sum payments, and massive prestige in the community.
219
Though in general one should not expect extreme behavior to deliver a payoff in biological fitness, the anthropologists Aaron Blackwell and Lawrence Sugiyama have shown that it may do so in the case of Palestinian suicide terrorism. In the West Bank and Gaza many men have trouble finding wives because their families cannot afford a bride-price, they are restricted to marrying parallel cousins, and many women are taken out of the marriage pool by polygynous marriage or by marriage up to more prosperous Arabs in Israel. Blackwell and Sugiyama note that 99 percent of Palestinian suicide terrorists are male, that 86 percent are unmarried, and that 81 percent have at least six siblings, a larger family size than the Palestinian average. When they plugged these and other numbers into a simple demographic model, they found that when a terrorist blows himself up, the financial payoff can buy enough brides for his brothers to make his sacrifice reproductively worthwhile.
Atran has found that suicide terrorists can also be recruited without these direct incentives. Probably the most effective call to martyrdom is the opportunity to join a happy band of brothers. Terrorist cells often begin as gangs of underemployed single young men who come together in cafés, dorms, soccer clubs, barbershops, or Internet chat rooms and suddenly find meaning in their lives by a commitment to the new platoon. Young men in all societies do foolish things to prove their courage and commitment, especially in groups, where individuals may do something they know is foolish because they think that everyone else in the group thinks it is cool.
220
(We will return to this phenomenon in chapter 8.) Commitment to the group is intensified by religion, not just the literal promise of paradise but the feeling of spiritual awe that comes from submerging oneself in a crusade, a calling, a vision quest, or a jihad. Religion may also turn a commitment to the cause into a sacred value—a good that may not be traded off against anything else, including life itself.
221
The commitment can be stoked by the thirst for revenge, which in the case of militant Islamism takes the form of vengeance for the harm and humiliation suffered by any Muslim anywhere on the planet at any time in history, or for symbolic affronts such as the presence of infidel soldiers on sacred Muslim soil. Atran summed up his research in testimony to a U.S. Senate subcommittee:
220
(We will return to this phenomenon in chapter 8.) Commitment to the group is intensified by religion, not just the literal promise of paradise but the feeling of spiritual awe that comes from submerging oneself in a crusade, a calling, a vision quest, or a jihad. Religion may also turn a commitment to the cause into a sacred value—a good that may not be traded off against anything else, including life itself.
221
The commitment can be stoked by the thirst for revenge, which in the case of militant Islamism takes the form of vengeance for the harm and humiliation suffered by any Muslim anywhere on the planet at any time in history, or for symbolic affronts such as the presence of infidel soldiers on sacred Muslim soil. Atran summed up his research in testimony to a U.S. Senate subcommittee:
When you look at young people like the ones who grew up to blow up trains in Madrid in 2004, carried out the slaughter on the London underground in 2005, hoped to blast airliners out of the sky en route to the United States in 2006 and 2009, and journeyed far to die killing infidels in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia; when you look at whom they idolize, how they organize, what bonds them and what drives them; then you see that what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Koran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that they will never live to enjoy.... Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer: . . . fraternal, fastbreaking, thrilling, glorious, and cool. Anyone is welcome to try his hand at slicing off the head of Goliath with a paper cutter.
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The local imams are of marginal importance in this radicalization, since young men who want to raise hell rarely look to community elders for guidance. And Al Qaeda has become more a global brand inspiring a diffuse social network than a centralized recruiting organization.
The up-close look at suicide terrorists at first seems pretty depressing, because it suggests we are fighting a multiheaded hydra that cannot be decapitated by killing its leadership or invading its home base. Remember, though, that all terrorist organizations follow an arc toward failure. Are there any signs that Islamist terrorism is beginning to burn out?
The answer is a clear yes. In Israel, sustained attacks on civilians have accomplished what they accomplish everywhere else in the world: erase all sympathy for the group, together with any willingness to compromise with it.
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After the Second Intifada began, shortly after Yasir Arafat’s rejection of the Camp David accords in 2000, the Palestinians’ economic and political prospects steadily deteriorated. In the long run, Cronin adds, suicide terrorism is a supremely idiotic tactic because it makes the target nation unwilling to tolerate members of the minority community in their midst, never knowing which among them may be a walking bomb. Though Israel has faced international condemnation for building a security barrier, other countries faced with suicide terrorism, Cronin notes, have taken similar measures.
224
The Palestinian leadership on the West Bank has, more recently, disavowed violence and turned its energies toward competent governance, while Palestinian activist groups have turned to boycotts, civil disobedience, peaceful protests, and other forms of nonviolent resistance.
225
They have even enlisted Rajmohan Gandhi (grandson of Mohandas) and Martin Luther King III for symbolic support. It’s too soon to know whether this is a turning point in Palestinian tactics, but a retreat from terrorism would not be historically unprecedented.
223
After the Second Intifada began, shortly after Yasir Arafat’s rejection of the Camp David accords in 2000, the Palestinians’ economic and political prospects steadily deteriorated. In the long run, Cronin adds, suicide terrorism is a supremely idiotic tactic because it makes the target nation unwilling to tolerate members of the minority community in their midst, never knowing which among them may be a walking bomb. Though Israel has faced international condemnation for building a security barrier, other countries faced with suicide terrorism, Cronin notes, have taken similar measures.
224
The Palestinian leadership on the West Bank has, more recently, disavowed violence and turned its energies toward competent governance, while Palestinian activist groups have turned to boycotts, civil disobedience, peaceful protests, and other forms of nonviolent resistance.
225
They have even enlisted Rajmohan Gandhi (grandson of Mohandas) and Martin Luther King III for symbolic support. It’s too soon to know whether this is a turning point in Palestinian tactics, but a retreat from terrorism would not be historically unprecedented.
The bigger story, though, is the fate of Al Qaeda. Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer who has been keeping tabs on the movement, counted ten serious plots on Western targets in 2004 (many inspired by the invasion of Iraq) but just three in 2008.
226
Not only has Al Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan been routed and its leadership decimated (including bin Laden himself in 2011), but in the world of Muslim opinion its favorables have long been sinking, and its negatives have been rising.
227
In the past six years Muslims have become repulsed by what they increasingly see as nihilistic savagery, consistent with Cronin’s remark that decency, not just violence, has an international language. The movement’s strategic goals—a pan-Islamic caliphate, the replacement of repressive and theocratic regimes by even more repressive and theocratic regimes, the genocidal killing of infidels—begin to lose their appeal once people start thinking about what they really mean. And Al Qaeda has succumbed to the fatal temptation of all terrorist groups: to stay in the limelight by mounting ever bloodier attacks on ever more sympathetic victims, which in Al Qaeda’s case includes tens of thousands of fellow Muslims. Attacks in the mid-2000s on a Bali nightclub, a Jordanian wedding party, an Egyptian resort, the London underground, and cafés in Istanbul and Casablanca massacred Muslims and non-Muslims alike for no discernible purpose. The franchise of the movement known as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) proved to be even more depraved, bombing mosques, marketplaces, hospitals, volleyball games, and funerals, and brutalizing resisters with amputations and beheadings.
226
Not only has Al Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan been routed and its leadership decimated (including bin Laden himself in 2011), but in the world of Muslim opinion its favorables have long been sinking, and its negatives have been rising.
227
In the past six years Muslims have become repulsed by what they increasingly see as nihilistic savagery, consistent with Cronin’s remark that decency, not just violence, has an international language. The movement’s strategic goals—a pan-Islamic caliphate, the replacement of repressive and theocratic regimes by even more repressive and theocratic regimes, the genocidal killing of infidels—begin to lose their appeal once people start thinking about what they really mean. And Al Qaeda has succumbed to the fatal temptation of all terrorist groups: to stay in the limelight by mounting ever bloodier attacks on ever more sympathetic victims, which in Al Qaeda’s case includes tens of thousands of fellow Muslims. Attacks in the mid-2000s on a Bali nightclub, a Jordanian wedding party, an Egyptian resort, the London underground, and cafés in Istanbul and Casablanca massacred Muslims and non-Muslims alike for no discernible purpose. The franchise of the movement known as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) proved to be even more depraved, bombing mosques, marketplaces, hospitals, volleyball games, and funerals, and brutalizing resisters with amputations and beheadings.
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