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 (137 page)
Baumeister and other psychologists tested the exercise metaphor by having participants undertake regimens of self-control for several weeks or months before taking part in one of their ego depletion studies.
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In various studies the regimens required them to keep track of every piece of food they ate; enroll in programs of physical exercise, money management, or study skills; use their nonpreferred hand for everyday tasks like brushing their teeth and using a computer mouse; and one that really gave the students’ self-control a workout: avoid curse words, speak in complete sentences, and not begin sentences with
I
. After several weeks of this cross-training, the students indeed turned out to be more resistant to ego depletion tasks in the lab, and they also showed greater self-control in their lives. They smoked fewer cigarettes, drank less alcohol, ate less junk food, spent less money, watched less television, studied more, and washed the dishes more often rather than leaving them in the sink. Score another point for Elias’s conjecture that self-control in life’s little routines can become second nature and be generalized to the rest of one’s comportment.
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In various studies the regimens required them to keep track of every piece of food they ate; enroll in programs of physical exercise, money management, or study skills; use their nonpreferred hand for everyday tasks like brushing their teeth and using a computer mouse; and one that really gave the students’ self-control a workout: avoid curse words, speak in complete sentences, and not begin sentences with
I
. After several weeks of this cross-training, the students indeed turned out to be more resistant to ego depletion tasks in the lab, and they also showed greater self-control in their lives. They smoked fewer cigarettes, drank less alcohol, ate less junk food, spent less money, watched less television, studied more, and washed the dishes more often rather than leaving them in the sink. Score another point for Elias’s conjecture that self-control in life’s little routines can become second nature and be generalized to the rest of one’s comportment.
In addition to being modulated by Ulyssean constraints, cognitive reframing, an adjustable internal discount rate, improvements in nutrition, and the equivalent of muscle gain with exercise, self-control might be at the mercy of whims in fashion.
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In some eras, self-control defines the paragon of a decent person: a grown-up, a person of dignity, a lady or a gentleman, a mensch. In others it is jeered at as uptight, prudish, stuffy, straitlaced, puritanical. Certainly the crime-prone 1960s were the recent era that most glorified the relaxation of self-control: Do your own thing, Let it all hang out, If it feels good do it, Take a walk on the wild side. The premium on self-indulgence is on full display in concert films from the decade, which show rock musicians working so hard to outdo each other in impulsiveness that it looks as if they put a lot of planning and effort into their spontaneity.
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In some eras, self-control defines the paragon of a decent person: a grown-up, a person of dignity, a lady or a gentleman, a mensch. In others it is jeered at as uptight, prudish, stuffy, straitlaced, puritanical. Certainly the crime-prone 1960s were the recent era that most glorified the relaxation of self-control: Do your own thing, Let it all hang out, If it feels good do it, Take a walk on the wild side. The premium on self-indulgence is on full display in concert films from the decade, which show rock musicians working so hard to outdo each other in impulsiveness that it looks as if they put a lot of planning and effort into their spontaneity.
Could these six pathways to self-control proliferate among the members of a society and come to define its global character? That would be the final domino in the chain of explanation that makes up the theory of the Civilizing Process. The exogenous first domino is a change in law enforcement and opportunities for economic cooperation that objectively tilt the payoffs so that a deferral of gratification, in particular, an avoidance of impulsive violence, pays off in the long run. The knock-on effect is a strengthening of people’s self-control muscles that allow them (among other things) to inhibit their violent impulses, above and beyond what is strictly necessary to avoid being caught and punished. The process could even feed on itself in a positive feedback loop, “positive” in both the engineering and the human-values sense. In a society in which other people control their aggression, a person has less of a need to cultivate a hair trigger for retaliation, which in turn takes a bit of pressure off everyone else, and so on.
One way to bridge the gap between psychology and history is to look for changes in a society-wide index of self-control. As we have seen, an interest rate is just such an index, because it reveals how much compensation people demand for deferring consumption from the present to the future. To be sure, an interest rate is partly determined by objective factors like inflation, expected income growth, and the risk that the investment will never be returned. But it partly reflects the purely psychological preference for instant over delayed gratification. According to one economist, a six-year-old who prefers to eat one marshmallow now rather than two marshmallows a few minutes from now is in effect demanding an interest rate of 3 percent a day, or 150 percent a month.
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Gregory Clark, the economic historian we met in chapter 4, has estimated the interest rates that Englishmen demanded (in the form of rents on land and houses) from 1170 to 2000, the millennium over which the Civilizing Process took place. Before 1800, he argues, there was no inflation to speak of, incomes were flat, and the risk that an owner would lose his property was low and constant. If so, the effective interest rate was an estimate of the degree to which people favored their present selves over their future selves.
FIGURE 9–1.
Implicit interest rates in England, 1170–2000
Implicit interest rates in England, 1170–2000
Source:
Graph from Clark, 2007a, p. 33.
Graph from Clark, 2007a, p. 33.
Figure 9–1 shows that during the centuries in which homicide plummeted in England, the effective interest rate also plummeted, from more than 10 percent to around 2 percent. Other European societies showed a similar transition. The correlation does not, of course, prove causation, but it is consistent with Elias’s claim that the decline of violence from medieval to modern Europe was part of a broader trend toward self-control and an orientation to the future.
What about more direct measures of a society’s aggregate self-control? An annual interest rate is still quite distant from the momentary exercises of forbearance that suppress violent impulses in everyday life. Though there are dangers in essentializing a society by assigning it character traits that really should apply to individuals (remember the so-called fierce people), there may be a grain of truth in the impression that some cultures are marked by more self-control in everyday life than others. Friedrich Nietzsche distinguished between Apollonian and Dionysian cultures, named after the Greek gods of light and wine, and the distinction was used by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict in her classic 1934 ethnography collection
Patterns of Culture
. Apollonian cultures are said to be thinking, self-controlled, rational, logical, and ordered; Dionysian cultures are said to be feeling, passionate, instinctual, irrational, and chaotic. Few anthropologists invoke the dichotomy today, but a quantitative analysis of the world’s cultures by the sociologist Geert Hofstede has rediscovered the distinction in the pattern of survey responses among the middle-class citizens of more than a hundred countries.
Patterns of Culture
. Apollonian cultures are said to be thinking, self-controlled, rational, logical, and ordered; Dionysian cultures are said to be feeling, passionate, instinctual, irrational, and chaotic. Few anthropologists invoke the dichotomy today, but a quantitative analysis of the world’s cultures by the sociologist Geert Hofstede has rediscovered the distinction in the pattern of survey responses among the middle-class citizens of more than a hundred countries.
According to Hofstede’s data, countries differ along six dimensions.
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One of them is Long-Term versus Short-Term Orientation: “Long-term oriented societies foster pragmatic virtues oriented towards future rewards, in particular saving, persistence, and adapting to changing circumstances. Short-term oriented societies foster virtues related to the past and present such as national pride, respect for tradition, preservation of ‘face,’ and fulfilling social obligations.” Another dimension is Indulgence versus Restraint: “Indulgence stands for a society that allows relatively free gratification of basic and natural human drives related to enjoying life and having fun. Restraint stands for a society that suppresses gratification of needs and regulates it by means of strict social norms.” Both, of course, are conceptually related to the faculty of self-control, and not surprisingly, they are correlated with each other (with a coefficient of 0.45 across 110 countries). Elias would have predicted that both of these national traits should correlate with the countries’ homicide rates, and the prediction turns out to be true. The citizens of countries with more of a long-term orientation commit fewer homicides, as do the citizens of countries that emphasize restraint over indulgence.
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One of them is Long-Term versus Short-Term Orientation: “Long-term oriented societies foster pragmatic virtues oriented towards future rewards, in particular saving, persistence, and adapting to changing circumstances. Short-term oriented societies foster virtues related to the past and present such as national pride, respect for tradition, preservation of ‘face,’ and fulfilling social obligations.” Another dimension is Indulgence versus Restraint: “Indulgence stands for a society that allows relatively free gratification of basic and natural human drives related to enjoying life and having fun. Restraint stands for a society that suppresses gratification of needs and regulates it by means of strict social norms.” Both, of course, are conceptually related to the faculty of self-control, and not surprisingly, they are correlated with each other (with a coefficient of 0.45 across 110 countries). Elias would have predicted that both of these national traits should correlate with the countries’ homicide rates, and the prediction turns out to be true. The citizens of countries with more of a long-term orientation commit fewer homicides, as do the citizens of countries that emphasize restraint over indulgence.
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So the theory of the Civilizing Process, like the theory of the expanding circle, has found support in experiments and datasets that are far from its field of origin. Psychology, neuroscience, and economics have confirmed Elias’s speculation that humans are equipped with a faculty of self-control that regulates both violent and nonviolent impulses, that can be strengthened and generalized over the lifetime of an individual, and that can vary in strength across societies and historical periods.
So far I have not mentioned yet another explanation for the long-term growth of self-control: that it is a process of evolution in the biologist’s sense. Before turning to the last two of our better angels, morality and reason, I need to spend a few pages on this vexed question.
RECENT BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION?Many people casually use the word
evolution
to refer both to cultural change (that is, history) and to biological change (that is, a shift in the frequencies of genes across generations). Cultural and biological evolution can certainly interact. For instance, when tribes in Europe and Africa adopted the practice of keeping livestock for milk, they evolved genetic changes that allowed them to digest lactose in adulthood.
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But the two processes are different. They can always be distinguished, in theory, by experiments in which babies from one society are given up for adoption and brought up in another. If biological evolution has taken place in response to the distinctive culture of either society, then the adopted children should differ, on average, from their native peers.
evolution
to refer both to cultural change (that is, history) and to biological change (that is, a shift in the frequencies of genes across generations). Cultural and biological evolution can certainly interact. For instance, when tribes in Europe and Africa adopted the practice of keeping livestock for milk, they evolved genetic changes that allowed them to digest lactose in adulthood.
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But the two processes are different. They can always be distinguished, in theory, by experiments in which babies from one society are given up for adoption and brought up in another. If biological evolution has taken place in response to the distinctive culture of either society, then the adopted children should differ, on average, from their native peers.
A frequently asked question about declines in violence is whether they can be attributed to recent biological evolution. In a society that has undergone a Pacification or Civilizing Process, has the genetic makeup of the people changed in response, helping the process along and leaving them permanently less disposed to violence? Any such change would not, of course, be a Lamarckian absorption of the cultural trend into the genome, but a Darwinian response to the altered contingencies of survival and reproduction. The individuals who happen to be genetically suited to the changed culture would outreproduce their neighbors and contribute a larger share of genes to the next generation, gradually shifting the population’s genetic makeup.
One can imagine, for example, that in a society that was undergoing a Pacification or Civilizing Process, a tendency toward impulsive violence would begin to pay off less than it did in the days of Hobbesian anarchy, because a hair trigger for retaliation would now be harmful rather than helpful. The psychopaths and hotheads would be weeded out by the Leviathan and sent to the dungeons or gallows, while the empathizers and cooler heads would bring up their children in peace. Genes that fortified empathy and self-control would proliferate, while genes that gave free rein to predation, dominance, and revenge would ebb.
Even a cultural change as simple as a shift from polygyny to monogamy could, in theory, alter the selective landscape. Napoleon Chagnon documented that among the Yanomamö, the men who had killed another man had more wives and more children than the men who had never killed; similar patterns have been found in other tribes, such as the Jivaro (Shuar) of Ecuador.
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This arithmetic, if it persisted over many generations, would favor a genetic tendency to be willing and able to kill. A society that has shifted to monogamy, in contrast, removes this reproductive jackpot, and conceivably could relax the selection for bellicosity.
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This arithmetic, if it persisted over many generations, would favor a genetic tendency to be willing and able to kill. A society that has shifted to monogamy, in contrast, removes this reproductive jackpot, and conceivably could relax the selection for bellicosity.
Throughout this book I have assumed that human nature, in the sense of the cognitive and emotional inventory of our species, has been constant over the ten-thousand-year window in which declines of violence are visible, and that all differences in behavior among societies have strictly environmental causes. That is a standard assumption in evolutionary psychology, based on the fact that the few centuries and millennia in which societies have separated and changed are a small fraction of the period in which our species has been in existence.
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Since most adaptive evolutionary change is gradual, the bulk of our biological adaptation must be to the foraging lifestyle that prevailed during those tens of millennia, rather than to the specifics of societies that have departed from that lifestyle and diverged from each other only recently. The assumption is supported by evidence for the psychic unity of humankind—that people in every society have all the basic human faculties such as language, causal reasoning, intuitive psychology, sexual jealousy, fear, anger, love, and disgust, and that the recent mixing of human populations has revealed no qualitative innate differences among them.
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Since most adaptive evolutionary change is gradual, the bulk of our biological adaptation must be to the foraging lifestyle that prevailed during those tens of millennia, rather than to the specifics of societies that have departed from that lifestyle and diverged from each other only recently. The assumption is supported by evidence for the psychic unity of humankind—that people in every society have all the basic human faculties such as language, causal reasoning, intuitive psychology, sexual jealousy, fear, anger, love, and disgust, and that the recent mixing of human populations has revealed no qualitative innate differences among them.
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