The generalization that anarchy in the sense of a lack of government leads to anarchy in the sense of violent chaos may seem banal, but it is often overlooked in today’s still-romantic climate. Government in general is anathema to many conservatives, and the police and prison system are anathema to many liberals. Many people on the left, citing uncertainty about the deterrent value of capital punishment compared to life imprisonment, maintain that deterrence is not effective in general. And many oppose more effective policing of inner-city neighborhoods, even though it may be the most effective way for their decent inhabitants to abjure the code of the streets. Certainly we must combat the racial inequities that put too many African American men in prison, but as the legal scholar Randall Kennedy has argued, we must also combat the racial inequities that leave too many African Americans exposed to criminals.100 Many on the right oppose decriminalizing drugs, prostitution, and gambling without factoring in the costs of the zones of anarchy that, by their own free-market logic, are inevitably spawned by prohibition policies. When demand for a commodity is high, suppliers will materialize, and if they cannot protect their property rights by calling the police, they will do so with a violent culture of honor. (This is distinct from the moral argument that our current drug policies incarcerate multitudes of nonviolent people.) Schoolchildren are currently fed the disinformation that Native Americans and other peoples in pre-state societies were inherently peaceable, leaving them uncomprehending, indeed contemptuous, of one of our species’ greatest inventions, democratic government and the rule of law.
Where Hobbes fell short was in dealing with the problem of policing the police. In his view, civil war was such a calamity that any government—monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy—was preferable to it. He did not seem to appreciate that in practice a leviathan would not be an otherworldly sea monster but a human being or group of them, complete with the deadly sins of greed, mistrust, and honor. (As we saw in the preceding chapter, this became the obsession of the heirs of Hobbes who framed the American Constitution.) Armed men are always a menace, so police who are not under tight democratic control can be a far worse calamity than the crime and feuding that go on without them. In the twentieth century, according to the political scientist R. J. Rummel in Death by Government, 170 million people were killed by their own governments. Nor is murder-by-government a relic of the tyrannies of the middle of the century. The World Conflict List for the year 2000 reported:
The stupidest conflict in this year’s count is Cameroon. Early in the year, Cameroon was experiencing widespread problems with violent crime. The government responded to this crisis by creating and arming militias and paramilitary groups to stamp out the crime extrajudicially. Now, while violent crime has fallen, the militias and paramilitaries have created far more chaos and death than crime ever would have. Indeed, as the year wore on mass graves were discovered that were tied to the paramilitary groups.101
The pattern is familiar from other regions of the world (including our own) and shows that civil libertarians’ concern about abusive police practices is an indispensable counterweight to the monopoly on violence we grant the state.
DEMOCRATIC LEVIATHANS HAVE proven to be an effective antiviolence measure, but they leave much to be desired. Because they fight violence with violence or the threat of violence, they can be a danger themselves. And it would be far better if we could find a way to get people to abjure violence to begin with rather than punishing them after the fact. Worst of all, no one has yet figured out how to set up a worldwide democratic leviathan that would penalize the aggressive competition, defuse the Hobbesian traps, and eliminate the cultures of honor that hold between the most dangerous perpetrators of violence of all, nation-states. As Kant noted, “The depravity of human nature is displayed without disguise in the unrestricted relations which obtain between the various nations.”102 The great question is how to get people and nations to repudiate violence from the start, preempting escalations of hostility before they can take off.
In the 1960s it all seemed so simple. War is unhealthy for children and other living things. What if they gave a war and nobody came? War: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! The problem with these sentiments is that the other side has to feel the same way at the same time. In 1939 Neville Chamberlain offered his own antiwar slogan, “Peace in our time.” It was followed by a world war and a holocaust, because his adversary did not agree that war is good for absolutely nothing. Chamberlain’s successor, Churchill, explained why peace is not a simple matter of unilateral pacifism: “Nothing is worse than war? Dishonor is worse than war. Slavery is worse than war.” A popular bumper sticker captures a related sentiment: IF YOU WANT PEACE, WORK FOR JUSTICE. The problem is that what one side sees as honor and justice the other side may see as dishonor and injustice. Also, “honor” can be a laudable willingness to defend life and liberty, but it can also be a reckless refusal to de-escalate.
Sometimes all sides really do see that they would be better off beating their swords into plowshares. Scholars such as John Keegan and Donald Horowitz have noted a general decline in the taste for violence as a means of settling disputes within most Western democracies in the last half-century.103 Civil wars, corporal and capital punishment, deadly ethnic riots, and foreign wars requiring face-to-face killing have declined or vanished. And as I have mentioned, though some decades in recent centuries have been more violent than others, the overall trend in crime has been downward.
One possible reason is the cosmopolitan forces that work to expand people’s moral circle. Another may be the long-term effects of living with a leviathan. Today’s civility in Europe, after all, followed centuries of beheadings and public hangings and exiles to penal colonies. And Canada may be more peaceable than its neighbor in part because its government outraced its people to the land. Unlike the United States, where settlers fanned out over a vast two-dimensional landscape with innumerable nooks and crannies, the habitable portion of Canada is a one-dimensional ribbon along the American border without remote frontiers and enclaves in which cultures of honor could fester. According to the Canadian studies scholar Desmond Morton, “Our west expanded in an orderly, peaceful fashion, with the police arriving before the settlers.”104
But people can become less truculent without the external incentives of dollars and cents or governmental brute force. People all over the world have reflected on the futility of violence (at least when they are evenly enough matched with their adversaries that no one can prevail). A New Guinean native laments, “War is bad and nobody likes it. Sweet potatoes disappear, pigs disappear, fields deteriorate, and many relatives and friends get killed. But one cannot help it.”105 Chagnon reports that some Yanomamö men reflect on the futility of their feuds and a few make it known that they will have nothing to do with raiding.106 In such cases it can become clear that both sides would come out ahead by splitting the differences between them rather than continuing to fight over them. During the trench warfare of World War I, weary British and German soldiers would probe each other’s hostile intent with momentary respites in shelling. If the other side responded with a respite in kind, long periods of unofficial peace broke out beneath the notice of their bellicose commanders.107 As a British soldier said, “We don’t want to kill you, and you don’t want to kill us, so why shoot?”108
The most consequential episode in which belligerents sought a way to release their deadly embrace was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the United States discovered Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and demanded that they be removed. Khrushchev and Kennedy were both reminded of the human costs of the nuclear brink they were approaching, Khrushchev by memories of two world wars fought on his soil, Kennedy by a graphic briefing of the aftermath of an atomic bomb. And each understood they were in a Hobbesian trap. Kennedy had just read The Guns of August and saw how the leaders of great nations could blunder into a pointless war. Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy:
You and I should not now pull on the ends of the rop
e in which you have tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter this knot will become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the knot will have to be cut.109
By identifying the trap, they could formulate a shared goal of escaping it. In the teeth of opposition from many of their advisers and large sectors of their publics, both made concessions that averted a catastrophe.
The problem with violence, then, is that the advantages of deploying it or renouncing it depend on what the other side does. Such scenarios are the province of game theory, and game theorists have shown that the best decision for each player individually is sometimes the worst decision for both collectively. The most famous example is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which partners in crime are held in separate cells. Each is promised freedom if he is the first to implicate his partner (who then will get a harsh sentence), a light sentence if neither implicates the other, and a moderate sentence if each implicates the other. The optimal strategy for each prisoner is to defect from their partnership, but when both do so they end up with a worse outcome than if each stayed loyal. Yet neither can stay loyal out of fear that his partner might defect and leave him with the worst outcome of all. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is similar to the pacifist’s dilemma: what is good for one (belligerence) is bad for both, but what is good for both (pacifism) is unattainable when neither can be sure the other is opting for it.
The only way to win a Prisoner’s Dilemma is to change the rules or find a way out of the game. The World War I soldiers changed the rules in a way that has been much discussed in evolutionary psychology: play it repeatedly and apply a strategy of reciprocity, remembering the other player’s last action and repaying him in kind.110 But in many antagonistic encounters that is not an option, because when the other player defects he can destroy you—or, in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis, destroy the world. In that case the players had to recognize they were in a futile game and mutually decide to get out of it.
Glover draws an important conclusion about how the cognitive component of human nature might allow us to reduce violence even when it appears to be a rational strategy at the time:
Sometimes, apparently rational self-interested strategies turn out (as in the prisoners’ dilemma…) to be self-defeating. This may look like a defeat for rationality, but it is not. Rationality is saved by its own open-endedness. If a strategy of following accepted rules of rationality is sometimes self-defeating, this is not the end. We revise the rules to take account of this, so producing a higher-order rational strategy. This in turn may fail, but again we go up a level. At whatever level we fail, there is always the process of standing back and going up a further level.111
The process of “standing back and going up a further level” might be necessary to overcome the emotional impediments to peace as well as the intellectual ones. Diplomatic peacemakers try to hurry along the epiphanies that prompt adversaries to extricate themselves from a deadly game. They try to blunt competition by carefully fashioning compromises over the disputed resources. They try to defuse Hobbesian traps via “confidence-building measures” such as making military activities transparent and bringing in third parties as guarantors. And they try to bring the two sides into each other’s moral circles by facilitating trade, cultural exchanges, and people-to-people activities.
This is fine as far as it goes, but the diplomats are sometimes frustrated that at the end of the day the two sides seem to hate each other as much as they did at the beginning. They continue to demonize their opponents, warp the facts, and denounce the conciliators on their own side as traitors. Milton J. Wilkinson, a diplomat who failed to get the Greeks and Turks to bury the hatchet over Cyprus, suggests that peacemakers must understand the emotional faculties of adversaries and not just neutralize the current rational incentives. The best-laid plans of peacemakers are often derailed by the adversaries’ ethnocentrism, sense of honor, moralization, and self-deception.112 These mindsets evolved to deal with hostilities in the ancestral past, and we must bring them into the open if we are to work around them in the present.
An emphasis on the open-endedness of human rationality resonates with the finding from cognitive science that the mind is a combinatorial, recursive system.113 Not only do we have thoughts, but we have thoughts about our thoughts, and thoughts about our thoughts about our thoughts. The advances in human conflict resolution we have encountered in this chapter—submitting to the rule of law, figuring out a way for both sides to back down without losing face, acknowledging the possibility of one’s own self-deception, accepting the equivalence of one’s own interests and other people’s—depend on this ability.
Many intellectuals have averted their gaze from the evolutionary logic of violence, fearing that acknowledging it is tantamount to accepting it or even to approving it. Instead they have pursued the comforting delusion of the Noble Savage, in which violence is an arbitrary product of learning or a pathogen that bores into us from the outside. But denying the logic of violence makes it easy to forget how readily violence can flare up, and ignoring the parts of the mind that ignite violence makes it easy to overlook the parts that can extinguish it. With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.
Chapter 18
Gender
NOW THAT ITS namesake year has come and gone, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey provides an opportunity to measure imagination against reality. Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 sci-fi classic traced out the destiny of our species from ape-men on the savanna to a transcendence of time, space, and bodies that we can only dimly comprehend. Clarke and the director, Stanley Kubrick, contrived a radical vision of life in the third millennium, and in some ways it has come to pass. A permanent space station is being built, and voice mail and the Internet are a routine part of our lives. In other regards Clarke and Kubrick were overoptimistic about the march of progress. We still don’t have suspended animation, missions to Jupiter, or computers that read lips and plot mutinies. And in still other regards they missed the boat completely. In their vision of the year 2001, people recorded their words on typewriters; Clarke and Kubrick did not anticipate word processors or laptop computers. And in their depiction of the new millennium, the American women were “girl assistants”: secretaries, receptionists, and flight attendants.
That these visionaries did not anticipate the revolution in women’s status of the 1970s is a pointed reminder of how quickly social arrangements can change. It was not so long ago that women were seen as fit only to be housewives, mothers, and sexual partners, were discouraged from entering the professions because they would be taking the place of a man, and were routinely subjected to discrimination, condescension, and sexual extortion. The ongoing liberation of women after millennia of oppression is one of the great moral achievements of our species, and I consider myself fortunate to have lived through some of its major victories.
The change in the status of women has several causes. One is the inexorable logic of the expanding moral circle, which led also to the abolition of despotism, slavery, feudalism, and racial segregation.1 In the midst of the Enlightenment, the early feminist Mary Astell (1688-1731) wrote:
If absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State how comes it to be so in a Family? or if in a Family why not in a State? since no reason can be alleg’d for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other.
If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves? As they must be if the being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men, be the perfect Condition of Slavery?2
Another cause is the technological and economic progress that made it possible for couples to have sex and raise children without a pitiless division of labor in which a mother had to devote every waking moment to keeping the children alive. Clean water, sanitation, and modern medicine lowered infant mortality and reduced the desire for large
broods of children. Baby bottles and pasteurized cow’s milk, and then breast pumps and freezers, made it possible to feed babies without their mothers being chained to them around the clock. Mass production made it cheaper to buy things than to make them by hand, and plumbing, electricity, and appliances reduced the domestic workload even more. The increased value of brains over brawn in the economy, the extension of the human lifespan (with the prospect of decades of life after childrearing), and the affordability of extended education changed the values of women’s options in life. Contraception, amniocentesis, ultrasound, and reproductive technologies made it possible for women to defer childbearing to the optimal points in their lives.
And of course the other major cause of women’s progress is feminism: the political, literary, and academic movements that channeled these advances into tangible changes in policies and attitudes. The first wave of feminism, bookended in the United States by the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920, gave women the right to vote, to serve as jurors, to hold property in marriage, to divorce, and to receive an education. The second wave, flowering in the 1970s, brought women into the professions, changed the division of labor in the home, exposed sexist biases in business, government, and other institutions, and threw a spotlight on women’s interests in all walks of life. The recent progress in women’s rights has not drained feminism of its raison d’être. In much of the Third World, women’s position has not improved since the Middle Ages, and in our own society women are still subjected to discrimination, harassment, and violence.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature Page 49