The politics of economic inequality ultimately hinge on a tradeoff between economic freedom and economic equality. Though scientists cannot dictate how these desiderata should be weighted, they can help assess the morally relevant costs and thereby enable us to make a more informed decision. Once again the psychology of status and dominance has a role to play in this assessment. In absolute terms, today’s poor are materially better off than the aristocracy of just a century ago. They live longer, are better fed, and enjoy formerly unimaginable luxuries such as central heating, refrigerators, telephones, and round-the-clock entertainment from television and radio. Conservatives say this makes it hard to argue that the station of lower-income people is an ethical outrage that ought to be redressed at any cost.
But if people’s sense of well-being comes from an assessment of their social status, and social status is relative, then extreme inequality can make people on the lower rungs feel defeated even if they are better off than most of humanity. It is not just a matter of hurt feelings: people with lower status are less healthy and die younger, and communities with greater inequality have poorer health and shorter life expectancies.59 The medical researcher Richard Wilkinson, who documented these patterns, argues that low status triggers an ancient stress reaction that sacrifices tissue repair and immune function for an immediate fight-or-flight response. Wilkinson, together with Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, have pointed to another measurable cost of economic inequality. Crime rates are much higher in regions with greater disparities of wealth (even after controlling for absolute levels of wealth), partly because chronic low status leads men to become obsessed with rank and to kill one another over trivial insults.60 Wilkinson argues that reducing economic inequality would make millions of lives happier, safer, and longer.
This well-populated gallery of left-wing innatists should not come as a surprise, even after centuries in which human nature was a preserve of the right. Mindful both of science and of history, the Darwinian left has abandoned the Utopian Vision that brought so many unintended disasters. Whether this non-Utopian left is really all that different from the contemporary secular right, and whether its particular policies are worth their costs, is not for me to argue here. The point is that traditional political alignments ought to change as we learn more about human beings. The ideologies of the left and the right took shape before Darwin, before Mendel, before anyone knew what a gene or a neuron or a hormone was. Every student of political science is taught that political ideologies are based on theories of human nature. Why must they be based on theories that are three hundred years out of date?
Chapter 17
Violence
The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending.1
WINSTON CHURCHILL’S SUMMARY of our species could be dismissed as the pessimism of a man who fought history’s most awful war and was present at the birth of a cold war that could have destroyed humanity altogether. In fact it has sadly stood the test of time. Though the cold war is a memory, and hot wars between major nations are rare, we still do not have peace in the world. Even before the infamous year of 2001, with its horrific terrorist attacks on the United States and subsequent war in Afghanistan, the World Conflict List catalogued sixty-eight areas of systematic violence, from Albania and Algeria through Zambia and Zimbabwe.2
Churchill’s speculation about prehistory has also been borne out. Modern foragers, who offer a glimpse of life in prehistoric societies, were once thought to engage only in ceremonial battles that were called to a halt as soon as the first man fell. Now they are known to kill one another at rates that dwarf the casualties from our world wars.3 The archaeological record is no happier. Buried in the ground and hidden in caves lie silent witnesses to a bloody prehistory stretching back hundreds of thousands of years. They include skeletons with scalping marks, ax-shaped dents, and arrowheads embedded in them; weapons like tomahawks and maces that are useless for hunting but specialized for homicide; fortification defenses such as palisades of sharpened sticks; and paintings from several continents showing men firing arrows, spears, or boomerangs at one another and being felled by these weapons.4 For decades, “anthropologists of peace” denied that any human group had ever practiced cannibalism, but evidence to the contrary has been piling up and now includes a smoking gun. In an 850-year-old site in the American Southwest, archaeologists have found human bones that were hacked up like the bones of animals used for food. They also found traces of human myoglobin (a muscle protein) on pot shards, and—damningly—in a lump of fossilized human excrement.5 Members of Homo antecessor, relatives of the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans, bashed and butchered one another too, suggesting that violence and cannibalism go back at least 800,000 years.6
War is only one of the ways in which people kill other people. In much of the world, war shades into smaller-scale violence such as ethnic strife, turf battles, blood feuds, and individual homicides. Here too, despite undeniable improvements, we do not have anything like peace. Though Western societies have seen murder rates fall between tenfold and a hundredfold in the past millennium, the United States lost a million people to homicide in the twentieth century, and an American man has about a one-half percent lifetime chance of being murdered.7
History indicts our species not just with the number of killings but with the manner. Hundreds of millions of Christians decorate their homes and adorn their bodies with a facsimile of a device that inflicted an unimaginably agonizing death on people who were a nuisance to Roman politicians. It is just one example of the endless variations of torture that the human mind has devised over the millennia, many of them common enough to have become words in our lexicon: to crucify, to draw and quarter, to flay, to press, to stone; the garrote, the rack, the stake, the thumbscrew. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, learning of the atrocities committed by the Turks in Bulgaria, said, “No animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.” The annual reports of Amnesty International show that artistic cruelty is by no means a thing of the past.
THE REDUCTION OF violence on scales large and small is one of our greatest moral concerns. We ought to use every intellectual tool available to understand what it is about the human mind and human social arrangements that leads people to hurt and kill so much. But as with the other moral concerns examined in this part of the book, the effort to figure out what is going on has been hijacked by an effort to legislate the correct answer. In the case of violence, the correct answer is that violence has nothing to do with human nature but is a pathology inflicted by malign elements outside us. Violence is a behavior taught by the culture, or an infectious disease endemic to certain environments.
This hypothesis has become the central dogma of a secular faith, repeatedly avowed in public proclamations like a daily prayer or pledge of allegiance. Recall Ashley Montagu’s UNESCO resolution that biology supports an ethic of “universal brotherhood” and the anthropologists who believed that “nonviolence and peace were likely the norm throughout most of human prehistory.” In the 1980s, many social science organizations endorsed the Seville Statement, which declared that it is “scientifically incorrect” to say that humans have a “violent brain” or have undergone selection for violence.8 “War is not an instinct but an invention,” wrote Ortega y Gasset, paralleling his claim that man has no nature but only history.9 A recent United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women announced that “violence is part of an historical process, and is not natural or born of biological determinism.” A 1999 ad by the National Funding Collaborative on Violence Prevention declared that “violence is learned behavior.”10
Another sign of this faith-based approach to violence is the averred certainty that particular environmental explanations are correct. We know the causes of violence, it is repeatedly said, and we also know how to eliminate it. Only a failure o
f commitment has prevented us from doing so. Remember Lyndon Johnson saying that “all of us know” that the conditions that breed violence are ignorance, discrimination, poverty, and disease. A 1997 article on violence in a popular science magazine quoted a clinical geneticist who echoed LBJ:
We know what causes violence in our society: poverty, discrimination, the failure of our educational system. It’s not the genes that cause violence in our society. It’s our social system.11
The authors of the article, the historians Betty and Daniel Kevles, agreed:
We need better education, nutrition, and intervention in dysfunctional homes and in the lives of abused children, perhaps to the point of removing them from the control of their incompetent parents. But such responses would be expensive and socially controversial.12
The creed that violence is learned behavior often points to particular elements of American culture as the cause. A member of a toy-monitoring group recently told a reporter, “Violence is a learned behavior. Every toy is educational. The question is, what do you want your children to learn?”13 Media violence is another usual suspect. As two public health experts recently wrote:
The reality is that children learn to value and use violence to solve their problems and deal with strong feelings. They learn it from role models in their families and communities. They learn it from the heroes we put in front of them on television, the movies, and video games.14
Childhood abuse, recently implicated in Richard Rhodes’s Why They Kill, is a third putative cause. “The tragedy is that people who have been victimized often become victimizers themselves,” said the president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. “It’s a cycle we could break, but it involves some expense. As a society, we haven’t put our resources there.”15 Note in these statements the mouthing of the creed (“Violence is a learned behavior”), the certainty that it is true (“The reality is”), and the accusation that we suffer from a lack of commitment (“We haven’t put our resources there”) rather than an ignorance of how to solve the problem.
Many explanations blame “culture,” conceived as a superorganism that teaches, issues commands, and doles out rewards and punishments. A Boston Globe columnist must have been oblivious to the circularity of his reasoning when he wrote:
So why is America more violent than other industrialized Western democracies? It’s our cultural predisposition to violence. We pummel each other, maul each other, stab each other and shoot each other because it’s our cultural imperative to do so.16
When culture is seen as an entity with beliefs and desires, the beliefs and desires of actual people are unimportant. After Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, the journalist Alfie Kohn ridiculed Americans who “yammer about individual responsibility” and attributed the bombing to American individualism: “We have a cultural addiction to competition in this country. We’re taught in classrooms and playing fields that other people are obstacles to our own success.”17 A related explanation for the bombing put the blame on American symbols, such as the arrow-clutching eagle on the national seal, and state mottoes, including “Live Free or Die” (New Hampshire) and “With the sword, we seek peace, but under liberty” (Massachusetts).18
A popular recent theory attributes American violence to a toxic and peculiarly American conception of maleness inculcated in childhood. The social psychologist Alice Eagly explained sprees of random shootings by saying, “This sort of behavior has been part of the male role as it has been construed in US culture, from the frontier tradition on.”19 According to the theory, popularized in bestsellers like Dan Kindlon’s Raising Cain and William Pollack’s Real Boys, we are going through a “national crisis of boyhood in America,” caused by the fact that boys are forced to separate from their mothers and stifle their emotions. “What’s the matter with men?” asked an article in the Boston Globe Magazine. “ Violent behavior, emotional distance, and higher rates of drug addiction can’t be explained by hormones,” it answers. “The problem, experts say, is cultural beliefs about masculinity—everything packed into the phrase ‘a real man.’ “20
THE STATEMENT THAT “violence is learned behavior” is a mantra repeated by right-thinking people to show that they believe that violence should be reduced. It is not based on any sound research. The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that “we know the conditions that breed violence,” we barely have a clue. Wild swings in crime rates—up in the 1960s and late 1980s, down in the late 1990s—continue to defy any simple explanation. And the usual suspects for understanding violence are completely unproven and sometimes patently false. This is most blatant in the case of factors like “nutrition” and “disease” that are glibly thrown into lists of the social ills that allegedly bring on violence. There is no evidence, to put it mildly, that violence is caused by a vitamin deficiency or a bacterial infection. But the other putative causes suffer from a lack of evidence as well.
Aggressive parents often have aggressive children, but people who conclude that aggression is learned from parents in a “cycle of violence” never consider the possibility that violent tendencies could be inherited as well as learned. Unless one looks at adopted children and shows that they act more like their adoptive parents than like their biological parents, cycles of violence prove nothing. Similarly, the psychologists who note that men commit more acts of violence than women and then blame it on a culture of masculinity are wearing intellectual blinkers that keep them from noticing that men and women differ in their biology as well as in their social roles. American children are exposed to violent role models, of course, but they are also exposed to clowns, preachers, folk singers, and drag queens; the question is why children find some people more worthy of imitation than others.
To show that violence is caused by special themes of American culture, a bare minimum of evidence would be a correlation in which the cultures that have those themes also tend to be more violent. Even that correlation, if it existed, would not prove that the cultural themes cause the violence rather than the other way around. But there may be no such correlation in the first place.
To begin with, American culture is not uniquely violent. All societies have violence, and America is not the most violent one in history or even in today’s world. Most countries in the Third World, and many of the former republics of the Soviet Union, are considerably more violent, and they have nothing like the American tradition of individualism.21 As for cultural norms of masculinity and sexism, Spain has its machismo, Italy its braggadocio, and Japan its rigid gender roles, yet their homicide rates are a fraction of that of the more feminist-influenced United States. The archetype of a masculine hero prepared to use violence in a just cause is one of the most common motifs in mythology, and it can be found in many cultures with relatively low rates of violent crime. James Bond, for example—who actually has a license to kill—is British, and martial arts films are popular in many industrialized Asian countries. In any case, only a bookworm who has never actually seen an American movie or television program could believe that they glorify murderous fanatics like Timothy McVeigh or teenagers who randomly shoot classmates in high school cafeterias. Masculine heroes in the mass media are highly moralistic: they fight bad guys.
Among conservative politicians and liberal health professionals alike it is an article of faith that violence in the media is a major cause of American violent crime. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics testified before Congress that over 3,500 studies had investigated the connection and only 18 failed to find one. Any social scientist can smell fishy numbers here, and the psychologist Jonathan Freedman decided to look for himself. In fact, only two hundred studies have looked for a connection between media violence and violent behavior, and more than half failed to find one.22 The others found correlations that are small and readily explainable in other ways—for example, that violent children seek out violen
t entertainment, and that children are temporarily aroused (but not permanently affected) by action-packed footage. Freedman and several other psychologists who have reviewed the literature have concluded that exposure to media violence has little or no effect on violent behavior in the world.23 Reality checks from recent history suggest the same thing. People were more violent in the centuries before television and movies were invented. Canadians watch the same television shows as Americans but have a fourth their homicide rate. When the British colony of St. Helena installed television for the first time in 1995, its people did not become more violent.24 Violent computer games took off in the 1990s, a time when crime rates plummeted.
What about the other usual suspects? Guns, discrimination, and poverty play a role in violence, but in no case is it a simple or decisive one. Guns surely make it easier for people to kill, and harder for them to de-escalate a fight before a death occurs, and thus multiply the lethality of conflicts large and small. Nonetheless, many societies had sickening rates of violence before guns were invented, and people do not automatically kill one another just because they have access to guns. The Israelis and Swiss are armed to the teeth but have low rates of violent personal crime, and among American states, Maine and North Dakota have the lowest homicide rates but almost every home has a gun.25 The idea that guns increase lethal crime, though certainly plausible, has been so difficult to prove that in 1998 the legal scholar John Lott published a book of statistical analyses with a title that flaunts the opposite conclusion: More Guns, Less Crime. Even if he is wrong, as I suspect he is, it is not so easy to show that more guns mean more crime.
As for discrimination and poverty, again it is hard to show a direct cause-and-effect relationship. Chinese immigrants to California in the nineteenth century and Japanese-Americans in World War II faced severe discrimination, but they did not react with high rates of violence. Women are poorer than men and are more likely to need money to feed children, but they are less likely to steal things by force. Different subcultures that are equally impoverished can vary radically in their rates of violence, and as we shall see, in many cultures relatively affluent men can be quick to use lethal force.26 Though no one could object to a well-designed program that was shown to reduce crime, one cannot simply blame crime rates on a lack of commitment to social programs. These programs first flourished in the 1960s, the decade in which rates of violent crime skyrocketed.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature Page 45