The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (146 page)
Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
Tags: #Sociology, #Psychology, #Science, #Social History, #21st Century, #Crime, #Anthropology, #Amazon.com, #Retail, #Criminology
None of these rationales for rationality speaks to Hume’s point that rationality is merely a means to an end, and that the end depends on the thinker’s passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony, if the reasoner wants peace and harmony. But it can also lay out a road map to war and strife, if the reasoner delights in war and strife. Do we have any reason to expect that rationality should orient a reasoner to
wanting
less violence?
wanting
less violence?
On the grounds of austere logic, the answer is no. But it doesn’t take much to switch it to yes. All you need are two conditions. The first is that the reasoners care about their own well-being: that they prefer to live rather than die, keep their body parts intact rather than have them maimed, and spend their days in comfort rather than in pain. Mere logic does not force them to have those prejudices. Yet any product of natural selection—indeed, any agent that manages to endure the ravages of entropy long enough to be reasoning in the first place—will in all likelihood have them.
The second condition is that the reasoners be part of a community of other agents who can impinge on their well-being and who can exchange messages and comprehend each other’s reasoning. That assumption too is not logically necessary. One could imagine a Robinson Crusoe who reasons in solitude, or a Galactic Overlord who is untouchable by his subjects. But natural selection could not have manufactured a solitary reasoner, because evolution works on populations, and
Homo sapiens
in particular is not just a rational animal but a social and language-using one. As for the Overlord, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. Even he, in principle, must worry about the possibility of a fall from power that would require him to deal with his erstwhile underlings.
Homo sapiens
in particular is not just a rational animal but a social and language-using one. As for the Overlord, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. Even he, in principle, must worry about the possibility of a fall from power that would require him to deal with his erstwhile underlings.
As we saw at the end of chapter 4, the assumptions of self-interest and sociality combine with reason to lay out a morality in which nonviolence is a goal. Violence is a Prisoner’s Dilemma in which either side can profit by preying on the other, but both are better off if neither one tries, since mutual predation leaves each side bruised and bloodied if not dead. In the game theorist’s definition of the dilemma, the two sides are not allowed to talk, and even if they were, they would have no grounds for trusting each other. But in real life people can confer, and they can bind their promises with emotional, social, or legal guarantors. And as soon as one side tries to prevail on the other not to injure him, he has no choice but to commit himself not to injure the other side either. As soon as he says, “It’s bad for you to hurt me,” he’s committed to “It’s bad for me to hurt you,” since logic cannot tell the difference between “me” and “you.” (After all, their meaning switches with every turn in the conversation.) As the philosopher William Godwin put it, “What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’ that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?”
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Nor can reason distinguish between Mike and Dave, or Lisa and Amy, or any other set of individuals, because as far as logic is concerned, they’re just a bunch of
x
’s and
y
’s. So as soon as you try to persuade someone to avoid harming you by appealing to
reasons
why he shouldn’t, you’re sucked into a commitment to the avoidance of harm as a general goal. And to the extent that you pride yourself on the quality of your reason, work to apply it far and wide, and use it to persuade others, you will be forced to deploy that reason in pursuit of universal interests, including an avoidance of violence.
222
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Nor can reason distinguish between Mike and Dave, or Lisa and Amy, or any other set of individuals, because as far as logic is concerned, they’re just a bunch of
x
’s and
y
’s. So as soon as you try to persuade someone to avoid harming you by appealing to
reasons
why he shouldn’t, you’re sucked into a commitment to the avoidance of harm as a general goal. And to the extent that you pride yourself on the quality of your reason, work to apply it far and wide, and use it to persuade others, you will be forced to deploy that reason in pursuit of universal interests, including an avoidance of violence.
222
Humans, of course, were not created in a state of Original Reason. We descended from apes, spent hundreds of millennia in small bands, and evolved our cognitive processes in the service of hunting, gathering, and socializing. Only gradually, with the appearance of literacy, cities, and long-distance travel and communication, could our ancestors cultivate the faculty of reason and apply it to a broader range of concerns, a process that is still ongoing. One would expect that as collective rationality is honed over the ages, it will progressively whittle away at the shortsighted and hot-blooded impulses toward violence, and force us to treat a greater number of rational agents as we would have them treat us.
Our cognitive faculties need not have evolved to go in this direction. But once you have an open-ended reasoning system, even if it evolved for mundane problems like preparing food and securing alliances, you can’t keep it from entertaining propositions that are consequences of other propositions. When you acquired your mother tongue and came to understand
This is the cat that killed the rat
, nothing could prevent you from understanding
This is the rat that ate the malt.
When you learned how to add 37 + 24, nothing could prevent you from deriving the sum of 32 + 47. Cognitive scientists call this feat systematicity and attribute it to the combinatorial power of the neural systems that underlie language and reasoning.
223
So if the members of species have the power to reason with one another, and enough opportunities to exercise that power, sooner or later they will stumble upon the mutual benefits of nonviolence and other forms of reciprocal consideration, and apply them more and more broadly.
This is the cat that killed the rat
, nothing could prevent you from understanding
This is the rat that ate the malt.
When you learned how to add 37 + 24, nothing could prevent you from deriving the sum of 32 + 47. Cognitive scientists call this feat systematicity and attribute it to the combinatorial power of the neural systems that underlie language and reasoning.
223
So if the members of species have the power to reason with one another, and enough opportunities to exercise that power, sooner or later they will stumble upon the mutual benefits of nonviolence and other forms of reciprocal consideration, and apply them more and more broadly.
This is the theory of the expanding circle as Peter Singer originally formulated it.
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Though I have co-opted his metaphor as a name for the historical process in which increased opportunities for perspective-taking led to sympathy for more diverse groups of people, Singer himself did not have the emotions in mind so much as the intellect. He is a philosopher’s philosopher, and argued that over the aeons people had the power to literally
think their way
into greater respect for the interests of others. And that respect cannot be confined to the interests of the people with whom we rub shoulders in a small social circle. Just as you can’t favor yourself over someone else when holding up ideals on how to behave, you can’t favor members of your group over the members of another group. For Singer, it is hardheaded reason more than softhearted empathy that expands the ethical circle ever outward:
224
Though I have co-opted his metaphor as a name for the historical process in which increased opportunities for perspective-taking led to sympathy for more diverse groups of people, Singer himself did not have the emotions in mind so much as the intellect. He is a philosopher’s philosopher, and argued that over the aeons people had the power to literally
think their way
into greater respect for the interests of others. And that respect cannot be confined to the interests of the people with whom we rub shoulders in a small social circle. Just as you can’t favor yourself over someone else when holding up ideals on how to behave, you can’t favor members of your group over the members of another group. For Singer, it is hardheaded reason more than softhearted empathy that expands the ethical circle ever outward:
Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end....If we do not understand what an escalator is, we might get on it intending to go a few meters, only to find that once we are on, it is difficult to avoid going all the way to the end. Similarly, once reasoning has got started it is hard to tell where it will stop. The idea of a disinterested defense of one’s conduct emerges because of the social nature of human beings and the requirements of group living, but in the thought of reasoning beings, it takes on a logic of its own which leads to its extension beyond the bounds of the group.
225
In the historical sequence that Singer adduces, the moral circle of the early Greeks was confined to the city-state, as in this unintentionally comical epitaph from the mid-5th century CE:
This memorial is set over the body of a very good man. Pythion, from Megara, slew seven men and broke off seven spear points in their bodies.... This man, who saved three Athenian regiments . . . having brought sorrow to no one among all men who dwell on earth, went down to the underworld felicitated in the eyes of all.
226
Plato widened the circle a bit by arguing that Greeks should spare other Greeks from devastation and enslavement, visiting these fates only on non-Greeks. In modern times Europeans expanded the no-taking-slaves rule to other Europeans, but Africans were fair game. Today, of course, slavery is illegal for everyone.
The only problem with Singer’s metaphor is that the history of moral concern looks less like an escalator than an elevator that gets stuck on a floor for a seeming eternity, then lurches up to the next floor, gets stuck there for a while, and so on. Singer’s history finds just four circle sizes in almost two and a half millennia, which works out to one ascent every 625 years. That feels a bit jerky for an escalator. Singer acknowledges the bumpiness of moral progress and attributes it to the rarity of great thinkers:
Insofar as the timing and success of the emergence of a questioning spirit is concerned, history is a chronicle of accidents. Nevertheless, if reasoning flourishes within the confines of customary morality, progress in the long run is not accidental. From time to time, outstanding thinkers will emerge who are troubled by the boundaries that custom places on their reasoning, for it is in the nature of reasoning that it dislikes notices saying “off limits.” Reasoning is inherently expansionist. It seeks universal application. Unless crushed by countervailing forces, each new application will become part of the territory of reasoning bequeathed to future generations.
227
But it remains puzzling that these outstanding thinkers have appeared so rarely on the world’s stage, and that the expansion of reason should have dawdled so. Why did human rationality need thousands of years to arrive at the conclusion that something might be a wee bit wrong with slavery? Or with beating children, raping unattached women, exterminating native peoples, imprisoning homosexuals, or waging wars to assuage the injured vanity of kings? It shouldn’t take an Einstein to figure it out.
One possibility is that the theory of an escalator of reason is historically incorrect, and that humanity was led up the incline of moral progress by the heart rather than the head. A different possibility is that Singer is right, at least in part, but the escalator is powered not just by the sporadic appearance of outstanding thinkers but by a rise in the quality of
everyone
’s thinking. Perhaps we’re getting better because we’re getting smarter.
everyone
’s thinking. Perhaps we’re getting better because we’re getting smarter.
Believe it or not, we
are
getting smarter. In the early 1980s the philosopher James Flynn had a Eureka! moment when he noticed that the companies that sell IQ tests periodically renorm the scores.
228
The average IQ has to be 100 by definition, but the percentage of questions answered correctly is an arbitrary number that depends on how hard the questions are. The testmongers have to map the percentage-correct scale onto the IQ scale by a formula, but the formula kept getting out of whack. The average scores on the tests had been creeping up for decades, so to keep the average at 100, every once in a while they jiggered the formula so the test-takers would need a larger number of correct answers to earn a given IQ. Otherwise there would be IQ inflation.
are
getting smarter. In the early 1980s the philosopher James Flynn had a Eureka! moment when he noticed that the companies that sell IQ tests periodically renorm the scores.
228
The average IQ has to be 100 by definition, but the percentage of questions answered correctly is an arbitrary number that depends on how hard the questions are. The testmongers have to map the percentage-correct scale onto the IQ scale by a formula, but the formula kept getting out of whack. The average scores on the tests had been creeping up for decades, so to keep the average at 100, every once in a while they jiggered the formula so the test-takers would need a larger number of correct answers to earn a given IQ. Otherwise there would be IQ inflation.
This inflation, Flynn realized, is not a kind that one should try to whip, but is telling us something important about recent history and the human mind. Later generations, given the same set of questions as earlier ones, got more of them correct. Later generations must be getting better at whatever skills IQ tests measure. Since IQ tests have been administered in massive numbers all over the world for much of the 20th century, in some countries, down to the last schoolchild and draftee, one can plot a country’s change in measured intelligence over time. Flynn scoured the world for datasets in which the same IQ test was given over many years, or the scoring norms were available to keep the numbers commensurate. The result was the same in every sample: IQ scores increased over time.
229
In 1994 Richard Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray christened the phenomenon the Flynn Effect, and the name has stuck.
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In 1994 Richard Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray christened the phenomenon the Flynn Effect, and the name has stuck.
230
The Flynn Effect has been found in thirty countries, including some in the developing world, and it has been going on ever since IQ tests were first given en masse around the time of World War I.
231
An even older dataset from Britain suggests that the Flynn Effect may even have begun with the cohort of Britons who were born in 1877 (though of course they were tested as adults).
232
The gains are not small: an average of three IQ points (a fifth of a standard deviation) per decade.
231
An even older dataset from Britain suggests that the Flynn Effect may even have begun with the cohort of Britons who were born in 1877 (though of course they were tested as adults).
232
The gains are not small: an average of three IQ points (a fifth of a standard deviation) per decade.
The implications are stunning. An average teenager today, if he or she could time-travel back to 1950, would have had an IQ of 118. If the teenager went back to 1910, he or she would have had an IQ of 130, besting 98 percent of his or her contemporaries. Yes, you read that right: if we take the Flynn Effect at face value, a typical person today is smarter than 98 percent of the people in the good old days of 1910. To state it in an even more jarring way, a typical person of 1910, if time-transported forward to the present, would have a mean IQ of 70, which is at the border of mental retardation. With the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test that is sometimes considered the purest measure of general intelligence, the rise is even steeper. An ordinary person of 1910 would have an IQ of 50 today, which is smack in the middle of mentally retarded territory, between “moderate” and “mild” retardation.
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