Today: Violence. Are humans inherently violent? Is war inevitable? Or is violence learned behavior? This chapter, of course, anticipates Pinker’s later book, THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, which documents how violence has *declined* throughout human history, though that’s a different topic.
Earlier posts about this book: post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4, post 5, post 6.
–Ch17, Violence
So is war eternal and inevitable? Churchill quote. The archaeological record supports the idea. Even cannibalism. And so on. Cruelty. Christians and their crosses. Efforts to reduce violence have led to legislation, as if violence has nothing to do with human nature but is taught by culture, or endemic to certain environments. The Seville Statement again. Claims that we ‘know’ what causes violence. Violence is a learned behavior, many claim. Learned from TV shows and video games. Or from childhood abuse. Another theory is about the American conception of maleness. And the frontier culture.
But the idea that violence is learned behavior is not based on research. We don’t understand wild swings in crime rates. No one considers the role of heredity, or biological differences between men and women.
America is not actually the most violent society in the world. Some countries have masculine cultural norms without being violent. And media violence is all about fighting bad guys. Conservative belief that violence in the media causes violent crime is mere faith. Examples of what the evidence actually indicates. Other factors, like guns, are difficult to prove. Similarly discrimination and poverty. On the science side violence is considered a public health problem. But violence is not a disease in the medical sense.
Environment theories rely on the Blank Slate and the Noble Savage, and avoid any claim about our psychological makeup. So focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment. But this is wishful thinking. It’s not true. But it doesn’t have to be a disease to be worth combating. Yet there have been objections to conference and initiatives trying to discuss it, leading to charges of racism.
So: violence is not a sickness or poisoning, but it part of our design. Two fears to allay: it’s not about certain bad genes of violent individuals, though certain groups are more likely to be violent. Trends in violence occur despite genes. And, it’s not that violent people are violent all the time. Violence is just a contingent strategy, among many.
So what is the evidence that human have evolved mechanisms for discretionary violence? Physiology; boys in all cultures play in ways that are practice for fighting; babies are especially aggressive. Stories about murders and crimes are popular. And sports, stylized combat. The question of what goes ‘wrong’ when people are violent is badly posed. Some people are lauded for being violent; it depends on their role, whose side they’re on.
The first step in understanding violence is to examine why it can pay off in personal or evolutionary terms. Why is violence avoided? Hobbes worked this out, though his argument is misunderstood. His analysis has been rediscovered by evolutionary biology, game theory, and social psychology. Hobbes said there are three causes of quarrel: competition; diffidence; glory. Dawkins explains the first in terms of obstacles in the environment. Parental investment explains why men are violent and compete for women. Our moral circle of sympathy extends only so far. So one way of reducing violence: encourage people to put all of humanity inside their circle. Page 320b:
The observation that people may be morally indifferent to other people who are outside a mental circle immediately suggests an opening for the effort to reduce violence: understand the psychology of the circle well enough to encourage people to put all of humanity inside it. In earlier chapters we saw how the moral circle has been growing for millennia, pushed outward by the expanding networks of reciprocity that make other human beings more valuable alive than dead. As Robert Wright put it, “Among the many reasons I don’t think we should bomb the Japanese is that they built my minivan.” Other technologies have contributed to a cosmopolitan view that makes it easy to imagine trading places with other people. These include literacy, travel, a knowledge of history, and realistic art that helps people project themselves into the daily lives of people who in other times might have been their mortal enemies.
Also this:
We have also seen how the circle can shrink. Recall that Jonathan Glover showed that atrocities are often accompanied by tactics of dehumanization such as the use of pejorative names, degrading conditions, humiliating dress, and “cold jokes” that make light of suffering. These tactics can flip a mental switch and reclassify an individual from “person” to “nonperson,” making it as easy for someone to torture or kill him as it is for us to boil a lobster alive. (Those who poke fun at politically correct names for ethnic minorities, including me, should keep in mind that they originally had a humane rationale.”
[[ Of course conservatives deride “politically correct” terms as “woke” because they *do* believe certain other groups are nonpersons. Like immigrants. ]]
Then about diffidence, in the sense of distrust. And thus the need to defend oneself. Which might require initial offense. The Hobbesian trap. Between individuals, or groups. And our skill at making tools makes us good at killing one another. Examples from history of Hobbesian traps: street gangs, World War I, etc. The nuclear strategy. Self-deception and bluffing can lead to disaster.
Thus the alternative defense of retaliation: eye for an eye, blood feuds, MAD [Mutually Assured Destruction].
Third, glory, or ‘honor.’ As true now as ever. Murders over trivial disputes; wars lasting years for ‘honor.’ These make a kind of sense given the logic of deterrence. Especially when there’s no police around. Combative masculinity is not peculiarly American. Herders are especially prone. Many examples, including the American South, settled by herdsmen from Europe. A culture still in place. (Further examples from previous book.) Inner-city young African-American men, having somehow inherited this culture 329t.
Hobbes’ analysis showed that violence is not primitive or irrational, but a near-inevitable outcome of self-interested, rational social organisms. But he had an idea for preventing it. A governing body that penalizes aggressors. An authority that alone is authorized to use force. It seems to be the most effective violence-reduction technique ever invented. [That is: the government. What Hobbes called the Leviathan.] A trend going back to the Middle Ages and the reduction of violence since then. When law enforcement vanishes, violence breaks out; examples. Author recalls police strike in Montreal in 1969. [[ Pinker doesn’t say this, but this system of government policing is an example of how people continually squabble over details of a system that, in its entirely, is a huge success. There will *always* be things to bicker about, no matter how perfect (or “godly”) society becomes. ]] Page 332.2: “one of our species’ greatest inventions, democratic government and the rule of law.” Still, Hobbes neglected the problem of policing the police. This became an obsession of the founders who framed the American Constitution. [[ With its checks and balances that MAGA conservatives are eager to undo. ]] Meanwhile some 170 million people were killed by their own governments in the 20th century.
Such leviathans leave much to be desired; since they are armed, they can be a danger themselves. [[ This is the problem with overfunding the police, where, in recent decades, US municipal police departments have bought surplus military hardware. Thus “defund” the police, as some say, doesn’t mean eliminating the police. ]] We can’t seem able to eliminate cultures of honor in the first place. In the 1960s some wanted peace, but it takes both sides. Still, the overall trend as been a decline in violence over time. Why? Perhaps cosmopolitan ideas of expanding the moral circle. Examples, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Scenarios of game theory show how these things work. Prisoner’s Dilemma. One way out is to change the rules (tit for tat). A broader strategy is to “stand back and go up a further level’ p335. Yet diplomats can “continue to demonize their opponents…”:
…peacemakers must understand the emotional faculties of adversaries and not just neutralize the current rational incentives. The best-laid plans of peacemakers are often derailed by the adversaries’ ethnocentrism, sense of humor, moralization, and self-deception. These mindsets evolved to deal with hostilities of the ancestral past, and we must bring them into the open if we are to work around them in the present.
That is, in my terms: transition from the tribal mindset to a cosmopolitan one.
An emphasis on the open-endedness of human rationality resonates with the find from cognitive science that the mind is a combinatorial, recursive system. Not only do we have thoughts, but we have thoughts about our thoughts…
That is, we have the ability to think around our worst, tribal instincts, if we want to.
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Next chapter: gender.
