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 (73 page)
When conquerors find it expedient to suffer the natives to live so that they can provide tribute and taxes, genocide can have a second down-to-earth function. A reputation for a willingness to commit genocide comes in handy for a conqueror because it allows him to present a city with an ultimatum to surrender or else. To make the threat credible, the invader has to be prepared to carry it out. This was the rationale behind the annihilation of the cities of western Asia by Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes.
Once the conquerors have absorbed a city or territory into an empire, they may keep it in line with the threat that they will come down on any revolt like a ton of bricks. In 68 CE the governor of Alexandria called in Roman troops to put down a rebellion by the Jews against Roman rule. According to the historian Flavius Josephus, “Once [the Jews] were forced back, they were unmercifully and completely destroyed. Some were caught in the open field, others forced into their houses, which were plundered and then set on fire. The Romans showed no mercy to the infants, had no regard for the aged, and went on in the slaughter of persons of every age, until all the place was overflowed with blood, and 50,000 Jews lay dead.”
100
Similar tactics have been used in 20th-century counterinsurgency campaigns, such as the ones by the Soviets in Afghanistan and right-wing military governments in Indonesia and Central America.
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Similar tactics have been used in 20th-century counterinsurgency campaigns, such as the ones by the Soviets in Afghanistan and right-wing military governments in Indonesia and Central America.
When a dehumanized people is in a position to defend itself or turn the tables, it can set a Hobbesian trap of group-against-group fear. Either side may see the other as an existential threat that must be preemptively taken out. After the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Serbian nationalists’ genocide of Bosnians and Kosovars was partly fueled by fears that they would be the victims of massacres themselves.
101
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If members of a group have seen their comrades victimized, have narrowly escaped victimization themselves, or paranoically worry they have been targeted for victimization, they may stoke themselves into a moralistic fury and seek vengeance on their perceived assailants. Like all forms of revenge, a retaliatory massacre is pointless once it has to be carried out, but a welladvertised and implacable
drive
to carry it out, regardless of its costs at the time, may have been programmed into people’s brains by evolution, cultural norms, or both as a way to make the deterrent credible.
drive
to carry it out, regardless of its costs at the time, may have been programmed into people’s brains by evolution, cultural norms, or both as a way to make the deterrent credible.
These Hobbesian motives don’t fully explain why predation, preemption, or revenge should be directed against entire
groups
of people rather than the individuals who get in the way or make trouble. The cognitive habit of pigeonholing may be one reason, and another is explained in
The Godfather: Part II
when the young Vito Corleone’s mother begs a Sicilian don to spare the boy’s life:
groups
of people rather than the individuals who get in the way or make trouble. The cognitive habit of pigeonholing may be one reason, and another is explained in
The Godfather: Part II
when the young Vito Corleone’s mother begs a Sicilian don to spare the boy’s life:
Widow:
Don Francesco. You murdered my husband, because he would not bend. And his oldest son Paolo, because he swore revenge. But Vitone is only nine, and dumb-witted. He never speaks.Francesco:
I’m not afraid of his words.
Widow:
He is weak.
Francesco:
He will grow strong.
Widow:
The child cannot harm you.
Francesco:
He will be a man, and then he will come for revenge.
And come for revenge he does. Later in the film the grown Vito returns to Sicily, seeks an audience with the don, whispers his name into the old man’s ear, and cuts him open like a sturgeon.
The solidarity among the members of a family, clan, or tribe—in particular, their resolve to avenge killings—makes them all fair game for someone with a bone to pick with any one of them. Though equal-sized groups in frequent contact tend to constrain their revenge to an-eye-for-an-eye reciprocity, repeated violations may turn episodic anger into chronic hatred. As Aristotle wrote, “The angry man wishes the object of his anger to suffer in return; hatred wishes its object not to exist.”
102
When one side finds itself with an advantage in numbers or tactics, it may seize the opportunity to impose a final solution. Feuding tribes are well aware of genocide’s practical advantages. The anthropologist Rafael Karsten worked with the Jivaro of Amazonian Ecuador (a tribe that contributed one of the long bars to the graph of rates of death in warfare in figure 2–2) and recounts their ways of war:
102
When one side finds itself with an advantage in numbers or tactics, it may seize the opportunity to impose a final solution. Feuding tribes are well aware of genocide’s practical advantages. The anthropologist Rafael Karsten worked with the Jivaro of Amazonian Ecuador (a tribe that contributed one of the long bars to the graph of rates of death in warfare in figure 2–2) and recounts their ways of war:
Whereas the small feuds within the sub-tribes have the character of a private blood-revenge, based on the principle of just retaliation, the wars between the different tribes are in principle wars of extermination. In these there is no question of weighing life against life; the aim is to completely annihilate the enemy tribe.... The victorious party is all the more anxious to leave no single person of the enemy’s people, not even small children, alive, as they fear lest these should later appear as avengers against the victors.
103
Half a world away, the anthropologist Margaret Durham offered a similar vignette from an Albanian tribe that ordinarily abided by norms for measured revenge:
In February 1912 an amazing case of wholesale justice was reported to me. . . . A certain family of the Fandi bairak [subtribe] had long been notorious for evil-doing—robbing, shooting, and being a pest to the tribe. A gathering of all the heads condemned all the males of the family to death. Men were appointed to lay in wait for them on a certain day and pick them off; and on that day the whole seventeen of them were shot. One was but five and another but twelve years old. I protested against thus killing children who must be innocent and was told: “It was bad blood and must not be further propagated.” Such was the belief in heredity that it was proposed to kill an unfortunate woman who was pregnant, lest she should bear a male and so renew the evil.
104
The essentialist notion of “bad blood” is one of several biological metaphors inspired by a fear of the revenge of the cradle. People anticipate that if they leave even a few of a defeated enemy alive, the remnants will multiply and cause trouble down the line. Human cognition often works by analogy, and the concept of an irksome collection of procreating beings repeatedly calls to mind the concept of vermin.
105
Perpetrators of genocide the world over keep rediscovering the same metaphors to the point of cliché. Despised people are rats, snakes, maggots, lice, flies, parasites, cockroaches, or (in parts of the world where they are pests) monkeys, baboons, and dogs.
106
“Kill the nits and you will have no lice,” wrote an English commander in Ireland in 1641, justifying an order to kill thousands of Irish Catholics.
107
“A nit would make a louse,” recalled a Californian settler leader in 1856 before slaying 240 Yuki in revenge for their killing of a horse.
108
“Nits make lice,” said Colonel John Chivington before the Sand Creek Massacre, which killed hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1864.
109
Cankers, cancers, bacilli, and viruses are other insidious biological agents that lend themselves as figures of speech in the poetics of genocide. When it came to the Jews, Hitler mixed his metaphors, but they were always biological: Jews were viruses; Jews were bloodsucking parasites; Jews were a mongrel race; Jews had poisonous blood.
110
105
Perpetrators of genocide the world over keep rediscovering the same metaphors to the point of cliché. Despised people are rats, snakes, maggots, lice, flies, parasites, cockroaches, or (in parts of the world where they are pests) monkeys, baboons, and dogs.
106
“Kill the nits and you will have no lice,” wrote an English commander in Ireland in 1641, justifying an order to kill thousands of Irish Catholics.
107
“A nit would make a louse,” recalled a Californian settler leader in 1856 before slaying 240 Yuki in revenge for their killing of a horse.
108
“Nits make lice,” said Colonel John Chivington before the Sand Creek Massacre, which killed hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1864.
109
Cankers, cancers, bacilli, and viruses are other insidious biological agents that lend themselves as figures of speech in the poetics of genocide. When it came to the Jews, Hitler mixed his metaphors, but they were always biological: Jews were viruses; Jews were bloodsucking parasites; Jews were a mongrel race; Jews had poisonous blood.
110
The human mind has evolved a defense against contamination by biological agents: the emotion of disgust.
111
Ordinarily triggered by bodily secretions, animal parts, parasitic insects and worms, and vectors of disease, disgust impels people to eject the polluting substance and anything that looks like it or has been in contact with it. Disgust is easily moralized, defining a continuum in which one pole is identified with spirituality, purity, chastity, and cleansing and the other with animality, defilement, carnality, and contamination.
112
And so we see disgusting agents as not just physically repellent but also morally contemptible. Many metaphors in the English language for a treacherous person use a disease vector as their vehicle—
a rat, a louse, a worm, a cockroach.
The infamous 1990s term for forced displacement and genocide was
ethnic cleansing
.
111
Ordinarily triggered by bodily secretions, animal parts, parasitic insects and worms, and vectors of disease, disgust impels people to eject the polluting substance and anything that looks like it or has been in contact with it. Disgust is easily moralized, defining a continuum in which one pole is identified with spirituality, purity, chastity, and cleansing and the other with animality, defilement, carnality, and contamination.
112
And so we see disgusting agents as not just physically repellent but also morally contemptible. Many metaphors in the English language for a treacherous person use a disease vector as their vehicle—
a rat, a louse, a worm, a cockroach.
The infamous 1990s term for forced displacement and genocide was
ethnic cleansing
.
Metaphorical thinking goes in both directions. Not only do we apply disgust metaphors to morally devalued peoples, but we tend to morally devalue people who are physically disgusting (a phenomenon we encountered in chapter 4 when considering Lynn Hunt’s theory that a rise in hygiene in Europe caused a decline in cruel punishments). At one pole of the continuum, whiteclad ascetics who undergo rituals of purification are revered as holy men and women. At the other, people living in degradation and filth are reviled as subhuman. The chemist and writer Primo Levi described this spiral during the transport of Jews to the death camps in Germany:
The SS escort did not hide their amusement at the sight of men and women squatting wherever they could, on the platforms and in the middle of the tracks, and the German passengers openly expressed their disgust: people like this deserve their fate, just look how they behave. These are not
Menschen
, human beings, but animals, it’s clear as the light of day.
113
The emotional pathways to genocide—anger, fear, and disgust—can occur in various combinations. In
Worse than War
, a history of 20th-century genocide, the political scientist Daniel Goldhagen points out that not all genocides have the same causes. He classifies them according to whether the victim group is
dehumanized
(a target of moralized disgust),
demonized
(a target of moralized anger), both, or neither.
114
A dehumanized group may be exterminated like vermin, such as the Hereros in the eyes of German colonists, Armenians in the eyes of Turks, black Darfuris in the eyes of Sudanese Muslims, and many indigenous peoples in the eyes of European settlers. A demonized group, in contrast, is thought to be equipped with the standard human reasoning faculties, which makes them all the more culpable for embracing a heresy or rejecting the one true faith. Among these modern heretics were the victims of communist autocracies, and the victims of their opposite number, the right-wing dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, and El Salvador. Then there are the out-and-out demons—groups that manage to be both repulsively subhuman
and
despicably evil. This is how the Nazis saw the Jews, and how Hutus and Tutsis saw each other. Finally, there may be groups that are not reviled as evil or subhuman but are feared as potential predators and eliminated in preemptive attacks, such as in the Balkan anarchy following the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Worse than War
, a history of 20th-century genocide, the political scientist Daniel Goldhagen points out that not all genocides have the same causes. He classifies them according to whether the victim group is
dehumanized
(a target of moralized disgust),
demonized
(a target of moralized anger), both, or neither.
114
A dehumanized group may be exterminated like vermin, such as the Hereros in the eyes of German colonists, Armenians in the eyes of Turks, black Darfuris in the eyes of Sudanese Muslims, and many indigenous peoples in the eyes of European settlers. A demonized group, in contrast, is thought to be equipped with the standard human reasoning faculties, which makes them all the more culpable for embracing a heresy or rejecting the one true faith. Among these modern heretics were the victims of communist autocracies, and the victims of their opposite number, the right-wing dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, and El Salvador. Then there are the out-and-out demons—groups that manage to be both repulsively subhuman
and
despicably evil. This is how the Nazis saw the Jews, and how Hutus and Tutsis saw each other. Finally, there may be groups that are not reviled as evil or subhuman but are feared as potential predators and eliminated in preemptive attacks, such as in the Balkan anarchy following the breakup of Yugoslavia.
So far I have tried to explain genocide in the following way. The mind’s habit of essentialism can lump people into categories; its moral emotions can be applied to them in their entirety. The combination can transform Hobbesian competition among individuals or armies into Hobbesian competition among peoples. But genocide has another fateful component. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, to kill by the millions you need an
ideology
.
115
Utopian creeds that submerge individuals into moralized categories may take root in powerful regimes and engage their full destructive might. For this reason it is ideologies that generate the outliers in the distribution of genocide death tolls. Divisive ideologies include Christianity during the Crusades and the Wars of Religion (and in an offshoot, the Taiping Rebellion in China); revolutionary romanticism during the politicides of the French Revolution; nationalism during the genocides in Ottoman Turkey and the Balkans; Nazism in the Holocaust; and Marxism during the purges, expulsions, and terror-famines in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
ideology
.
115
Utopian creeds that submerge individuals into moralized categories may take root in powerful regimes and engage their full destructive might. For this reason it is ideologies that generate the outliers in the distribution of genocide death tolls. Divisive ideologies include Christianity during the Crusades and the Wars of Religion (and in an offshoot, the Taiping Rebellion in China); revolutionary romanticism during the politicides of the French Revolution; nationalism during the genocides in Ottoman Turkey and the Balkans; Nazism in the Holocaust; and Marxism during the purges, expulsions, and terror-famines in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
Why should utopian ideologies so often lead to genocide? At first glance it seems to make no sense. Even if an actual utopia is unattainable for all kinds of practical reasons, shouldn’t the quest for a perfect world at least leave us with a better one—a world that is 60 percent of the way to perfection, say, or even 15 percent? After all, a man’s reach must exceed his grasp. Shouldn’t we aim high, dream the impossible dream, imagine things that never were and ask “why not”?
Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite. Most of us agree that it is ethically permissible to divert a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would kill only one. But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or—projecting into the indefinite future—infinitely many. How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain.
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