The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

  The nuclear strategy of “Mutual Assured Destruction” is the most obvious contemporary example of the law of retaliation. But it is an explicit version of an ancient impulse, the emotion of vengeance, that may have been installed in our brains by natural selection. Daly and Wilson observe, “In societies from every corner of the world, we can read of vows to avenge a slain father or brother, and of rituals that sanctify those vows—of a mother raising her son to avenge a father who died in the avenger’s infancy, of graveside vows, of drinking the deceased kinsman’s blood as a covenant, or keeping his bloody garment as a relic.”73 Modern states often find themselves at odds with their citizens’ craving for revenge. They prosecute vigilantes—people who “take the law into their own hands”—and, with a few recent exceptions, ignore the clamoring of crime victims and their relatives for a say in decisions to prosecute, plea-bargain, or punish.

  As we saw in Chapter 10, for revenge to work as a deterrent it has to be implacable. Exacting revenge is a risky business, because if an adversary was dangerous enough to have hurt you in the first place, he is not likely to take punishment lying down. Since the damage has already been done, a coolly rational victim may not see it in his interests to retaliate. And since the aggressor can anticipate this, he could call the victim’s bluff and abuse him with impunity. If, on the other hand, potential victims and their kin would be so consumed with the lust for retribution as to raise a son to avenge a slain father, drink the kinsman’s blood as a covenant, and so on, an aggressor might think twice before aggressing.74

  The law of retaliation requires that the vengeance have a moralistic pretext to distinguish it from a raw assault. The avenger must have been provoked by a prior act of aggression or other injustice. Studies of feuds, wars, and ethnic violence show that the perpetrators are almost always inflamed by some grievance against their targets.75 The danger inherent in this psychology is obvious: two sides may disagree over whether an initial act of violence was justified (perhaps as an act of self-defense, the recovery of ill-gotten gains, or retribution for an earlier offense) or was an act of unprovoked aggression. One side may count an even number of reprisals and feel that the scales of justice have been balanced, while the other side counts an odd number and feels that they still have a score to settle.76 Self-deception may embolden each side’s belief in the rectitude of its cause and make reconciliation almost impossible.

  Also necessary for vengeance to work as a deterrent is that the willingness to pursue it be made public, because the whole point of deterrence is to give would-be attackers second thoughts beforehand. And this brings us to Hobbes’s final reason for quarrel.

  THIRDLY, GLORY—THOUGH a more accurate word would be “honor.” Hobbes’s observation that men fight over “a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue” is as true now as it was in the seventeenth century. For as long as urban crime statistics have been recorded, the most frequent cause of homicide has been “argument”—what police blotters classify as “altercation of relatively trivial origin; insult, curse, jostling, etc.”77 A Dallas homicide detective recalls, “Murders result from little ol’ arguments over nothing at all. Tempers flare. A fight starts, and somebody gets stabbed or shot. I’ve worked on cases where the principals had been arguing over a 10 cent record on a juke box, or over a one dollar gambling debt from a dice game.”78

  Wars between nation-states are often fought over national honor, even when the material stakes are small. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, most Americans had become disenchanted over their country’s involvement in the war in Vietnam, which they thought was immoral or unwinnable or both. But rather than agreeing to withdraw American forces unconditionally, as the peace movement had advocated, a majority supported Richard Nixon and his slogan “Peace with Honor.” In practice this turned into a slow withdrawal of American troops that prolonged the military presence until 1973 at a cost of twenty thousand American lives and the lives of many more Vietnamese—and with the same outcome, defeat of the South Vietnamese government. A defense of national honor was behind other recent wars, such as the British retaking of the Falkland Islands in 1982 and the American invasion of Grenada in 1983. A ruinous 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras began with a disputed game between their national soccer teams.

  Because of the logic of deterrence, fights over personal or national honor are not as idiotic as they seem. In a hostile milieu, people and countries must advertise their willingness to retaliate against anyone who would profit at their expense, and that means maintaining a reputation for avenging any slight or trespass, no matter how small. They must make it known that, in the words of the Jim Croce song, “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape; you don’t spit into the wind; you don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger; and you don’t mess around with Jim.”

  The mentality is foreign to those of us who can get Leviathan to show up by dialing 911, but that option is not always available. It was not available to people in pre-state societies, or on the frontier in the Appalachians or the Wild West, or in the remote highlands of Scotland, the Balkans, or Indochina. It is not available to people who are unwilling to bring in the police because of the nature of their work, such as Prohibition rum-runners, inner-city drug dealers, and Mafia wise guys. And it is not available to nation-states in their dealings with one another. Daly and Wilson comment on the mentality that applies in all these arenas:

  In chronically feuding and warring societies, an essential manly virtue is the capacity for violence; head-hunting and coup counting may then become prestigious, and the commission of a homicide may even be an obligatory rite of passage. To turn the other cheek is not saintly but stupid. Or contemptibly weak.79

  So the social constructionists I cited earlier are not wrong in pointing to a culture of combative masculinity as a major cause of violence. But they are wrong in thinking that it is peculiarly American, that it is caused by separation from one’s mother or an unwillingness to express one’s emotions, and that it is an arbitrary social construction that can be “deconstructed” by verbal commentary. And fans of the public health approach are correct that rates of violence vary with social conditions, but they are wrong in thinking that violence is a pathology in anything like the medical sense. Cultures of honor spring up all over the world because they amplify universal human emotions like pride, anger, revenge, and the love of kith and kin, and because they appear at the time to be sensible responses to local conditions.80 Indeed, the emotions themselves are thoroughly familiar even when they don’t erupt in violence, such as in road rage, office politics, political mudslinging, academic backstabbing, and email flame wars.

  In Culture of Honor, the social psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen show that violent cultures arise in societies that are beyond the reach of the law and in which precious assets are easily stolen.81 Societies that herd animals meet both conditions. Herders tend to live in territories that are unsuitable for growing crops and thus far from the centers of government. And their major asset, livestock, is easier to steal than the major asset of farmers, land. In herding societies a man can be stripped of his wealth (and of his ability to acquire wealth) in an eyeblink. Men in that milieu cultivate a hair trigger for violent retaliation, not just against rustlers, but against anyone who would test their resolve by signs of disrespect that could reveal them to be easy pickings for rustlers. Scottish highlanders, Appalachian mountain men, Western cowboys, Masai warriors, Sioux Indians, Druze and Bedouin tribesmen, Balkan clansmen, and Indochinese Montagnards are familiar examples.

  A man’s honor is a kind of “social reality” in John Searle’s sense: it exists because everyone agrees it exists, but it is no less real for that, since it resides in a shared granting of power. When the lifestyle of a people changes, their culture of honor can stay with them for a long time, because it is difficult for anyone to be the first to renounce the culture. The very act of renouncing it can be a concession of weakness and low status even when the sh
eep and mountains are a distant memory.

  The American South has long had higher rates of violence than the North, including a tradition of dueling among “men of honor” such as Andrew Jackson. Nisbett and Cohen note that much of the South was originally settled by Scottish and Irish herdsman, whereas the North was settled by English farmers. Also, for much of its history the mountainous frontier of the South was beyond the reach of the law. The resulting Southern culture of honor is, remarkably, alive at the turn of the twenty-first century in laws and social attitudes. Southern states place fewer restrictions on gun ownership, allow people to shoot an assailant or burglar without having to retreat first, are tolerant of spanking by parents and corporal punishment by schools, are more hawkish on issues of national defense, and execute more of their criminals.82

  These attitudes do not float in a cloud called “culture” but are visible in the psychology of individual Southerners. Nisbett and Cohen advertised a fake psychology experiment at the liberal University of Michigan. To get to the lab, respondents had to squeeze by a stooge who was filing papers in a hallway. As a respondent brushed past him, the stooge slammed the drawer shut and muttered, “Asshole.” Students from Northern states laughed him off, but students from Southern states were visibly upset. The Southerners had elevated levels of testosterone and cortisol (a stress hormone) and reported lower levels of self-esteem. They compensated by giving a firmer handshake and acting more dominant toward the experimenter, and on the way out of the lab they refused to back down when another stooge approached in a narrow hallway and one of the two had to step aside. It’s not that Southerners walk around chronically fuming: a control group who had not been insulted were as cool and collected as the Northerners. And Southerners do not approve of violence in the abstract, only of violence provoked by an insult or trespass.

  African American inner-city neighborhoods are among the more conspicuously violent environments in Western democracies, and they too have an entrenched culture of honor. In his insightful essay “The Code of the Streets,” the sociologist Elijah Anderson describes the young men’s obsession with respect, their cultivation of a reputation for toughness, their willingness to engage in violent retaliation for any slight, and their universal acknowledgment of the rules of this code.83 Were it not for giveaways in their dialect, such as “If someone disses you, you got to straighten them out,” Anderson’s description of the code would be indistinguishable from accounts of the culture of honor among white Southerners.

  Inner-city African Americans were never goatherds, so why did they develop a culture of honor? One possibility is that they brought it with them from the South when they migrated to large cities after the two world wars—a nice irony for Southern racists who would blame inner-city violence on something distinctively African American. Another factor is that the young men’s wealth is easily stealable, since it is often in the form of cash or drugs. A third is that the ghettos are a kind of frontier in which police protection is unreliable—the gangsta rap group Public Enemy has a recording called “911 Is a Joke.” A fourth is that poor people, especially young men, cannot take pride in a prestigious job, a nice house, or professional accomplishments, and this may be doubly true for African Americans after centuries of slavery and discrimination. Their reputation on the streets is their only claim to status. Finally, Anderson points out that the code of the streets is self-perpetuating. A majority of African American families in the inner city subscribe to peaceable middle-class values they refer to as “decent.”84 But that is not enough to end the culture of honor:

  Everybody knows that if the rules are violated, there are penalties. Knowledge of the code is thus largely defensive; it is literally necessary for operating in public. Therefore, even though families with a decency orientation are usually opposed to the values of the code, they often reluctantly encourage their children’s familiarity with it to enable them to negotiate the inner-city environment.85

  Studies of the dynamics of ghetto violence are consistent with Anderson’s analysis. The jump in American urban crime rates between 1985 and 1993 can be tied in part to the appearance of crack cocaine and the underground economy it spawned. As the economist Jeff Grogger points out, “Violence is a way to enforce property rights in the absence of legal recourse.”86 The emergence of violence within the new drug economy then set off the expected Hobbesian trap. As the criminologist Jeffrey Fagan noted, gun use spread contagiously as “young people who otherwise wouldn’t carry guns felt that they had to in order to avoid being victimized by their armed peers.”87 And as we saw in the chapter on politics, conspicuous economic inequality is a good predictor of violence (better than poverty itself), presumably because men deprived of legitimate means of acquiring status compete for status on the streets instead.88 It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers.89

  HOBBES’S ANALYSIS OF the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a “pathology” except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms.

  But Hobbes is famous for presenting not just the causes of violence but a means of preventing it: “a common power to keep them all in awe.” His commonwealth was a means of implementing the principle “that a man be willing, when others are so too… to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.”90 People vest authority in a sovereign person or assembly who can use the collective force of the contractors to hold each one to the agreement, because “covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”91

  A governing body that has been granted a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence can neutralize each of Hobbes’s reasons for quarrel. By inflicting penalties on aggressors, the governing body eliminates the profitability of invading for gain. That in turn defuses the Hobbesian trap in which mutually distrustful peoples are each tempted to inflict a preemptive strike to avoid being invaded for gain. And a system of laws that defines infractions and penalties and metes them out disinterestedly can obviate the need for a hair trigger for retaliation and the accompanying culture of honor. People can rest assured that someone else will impose disincentives on their enemies, making it unnecessary for them to maintain a belligerent stance to prove they are not punching bags. And having a third party measure the infractions and the punishments circumvents the hazard of self-deception, which ordinarily convinces those on each side that they have suffered the greater number of offenses. These advantages of third-party intercession can also come from nongovernmental methods of conflict resolution, in which mediators try to help the hostile parties negotiate an agreement or arbitrators render a verdict but cannot enforce it.92 The problem with these toothless measures is that the parties can always walk away when the outcome doesn’t come out the way they want.

  Adjudication by an armed authority appears to be the most effective general violence-reduction technique ever invented. Though we debate whether tweaks in criminal policy, such as executing murderers versus locking them up for life, can reduce violence by a few percentage points, there can be no debate on the massive effects of having a criminal justice system as opposed to living in anarchy. The shockingly high homicide rates of pre-state societies, with 10 to 60 percent of the men dying at the hands of other men, provide one kind of evidence.93 Another is the emergence of a violent culture of honor in just about any corner of the world that is beyond the reach of the law.94 Many historians argue that people acquiesced to centralized authorities during the Middle Ages and other periods to relieve themselves of the burden of having to retaliate against those who would harm them and their kin.95 And the growth of those authorities may explain the hundredfold declin
e in homicide rates in European societies since the Middle Ages.96 The United States saw a dramatic reduction in urban crime rates from the first half of the nineteenth century to the second half, which coincided with the formation of professional police forces in the cities.97 The causes of the decline in American crime in the 1990s are controversial and probably multifarious, but many criminologists trace it in part to more intensive community policing and higher incarceration rates of violent criminals.98

  The inverse is true as well. When law enforcement vanishes, all manner of violence breaks out: looting, settling old scores, ethnic cleansing, and petty warfare among gangs, warlords, and mafias. This was obvious in the remnants of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and parts of Africa in the 1990s, but can also happen in countries with a long tradition of civility. As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order.99 This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).