The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  “Alice’s Restaurant” • “Blowin’ in the Wind” • “Cruel War” • “Eve of Destruction” • “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” • “Give Peace a Chance” • “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” • “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” • “If I Had a Hammer” • “Imagine” • “It’s a Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall” • “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” • “Machine Gun” • “Masters of War” • “Sky Pilot” • “Three-Five-Zero-Zero” • “Turn! Turn! Turn!” • “Universal Soldier” • “What’s Goin’ On?” • “With God on Our Side” • “War (What Is It Good For?)” • “Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy” • “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

  As in the 1700s and the 1930s, artists did not just preach about war to make it seem immoral but satirized it to make it seem ridiculous. During the 1969 Woodstock concert, Country Joe and the Fish sang the jaunty “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag,” whose chorus was:And it’s One, Two, Three, what are we fighting for?

  Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn; next stop is Vietnam!

  And it’s Five, Six, Seven, open up the Pearly Gates.

  There ain’t no time to wonder why; Whoopee! We’re all going to die.

  In his 1967 monologue “Alice’s Restaurant,” Arlo Guthrie told of being drafted and sent to an army psychiatrist at the induction center in New York:And I went up there, I said, “Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL.” And I started jumpin’ up and down yelling, “KILL, KILL,” and he started jumpin’ up and down with me and we was both jumpin’ up and down yelling, “KILL, KILL.” And the sergeant came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, “You’re our boy.”

  It’s easy to dismiss this cultural moment as baby-boomer nostalgia. As Tom Lehrer satirized it, they won all the battles, but we had the good songs. But in a sense we did win the battles. In the wake of nationwide protests, Lyndon Johnson shocked the country by not seeking his party’s nomination in the 1968 presidential election. Though a reaction against the increasingly unruly protests helped elect Richard Nixon in 1968, Nixon shifted the country’s war plans from a military victory to a face-saving withdrawal (though not before another twenty thousand Americans and a million Vietnamese had died in the fighting). After a 1973 cease-fire, American troops were withdrawn, and Congress effectively ended the war by prohibiting additional intervention and cutting off funding for the South Vietnamese government.

  The United States was then said to have fallen into a “Vietnam Syndrome” in which it shied away from military engagement. By the 1980s it had recovered well enough to fight several small wars and to support anticommunist forces in several proxy wars, but clearly its military policy would never be the same. The phenomenon called “casualty dread,” “war aversion,” and “the Dover Doctrine” (the imperative to minimize flag-draped coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base) reminded even the more hawkish presidents that the country would not tolerate casualty-intensive military adventures. By the 1990s the only politically acceptable American wars were surgical routs achieved with remote-control technology. They could no longer be wars of attrition that ground up soldiers by the tens of thousands, nor aerial holocausts visited on foreign civilians as in Dresden, Hiroshima, and North Vietnam.

  The change is palpable within the American military itself. Military leaders at all levels have become aware that gratuitous killing is a public-relations disaster at home and counterproductive abroad, alienating allies and emboldening enemies.178 The Marine Corps has instituted a martial-arts program in which leathernecks are indoctrinated in a new code of honor, the Ethical Marine Warrior.179 The catechism is “The Ethical Warrior is a protector of life. Whose life? Self and others. Which others? All others.” The code is instilled with empathy-expanding allegories such as “The Hunting Story,” recounted by Robert Humphrey, a retired officer whose martial bona fides were impeccable, having commanded a rifle platoon on Iwo Jima in World War II.180 In this story, an American military unit is serving in a poor Asian country, and one day members of the unit go boar hunting as a diversion:They took a truck from the motor pool and headed out to the boondocks, stopping at a village to hire some local men to beat the brush and act as guides.

  This village was very poor. The huts were made of mud and there was no electricity or running water. The streets were unpaved dirt and the whole village smelled. Flies abounded. The men looked surly and wore dirty clothes. The women covered their faces, and the children had runny noses and were dressed in rags.

  It wasn’t long before one American in the truck said, “This place stinks.” Another said, “These people live just like animals.” Finally, a young air force man said, “Yeah, they got nothin’ to live for; they may as well be dead.”

  What could you say? It seemed true enough.

  But just then, an old sergeant in the truck spoke up. He was the quiet type who never said much. In fact, except for his uniform, he kind of reminded you of one of the tough men in the village. He looked at the young airman and said, “You think they got nothin’ to live for, do you? Well, if you are so sure, why don’t you just take my knife, jump down off the back of this truck, and go try to kill one of them?”

  There was dead silence in the truck....

  The sergeant went on to say, “I don’t know either why they value their lives so much. Maybe it’s those snotty nosed kids, or the women in the pantaloons. But whatever it is, they care about their lives and the lives of their loved ones, same as we Americans do. And if we don’t stop talking bad about them, they will kick us out of this country!”

  [A soldier] asked him what we Americans, with all our wealth, could do to prove our respect for the peasants’ human equality despite their destitution. The sergeant answered easily, “You got to be brave enough to jump off the back of this truck, knee deep in the mud and sheep dung. You got to have the courage to walk through this village with a smile on your face. And when you see the smelliest, scariest looking peasant, you got to be able to look him in the face and let him know, just with your eyes, that you know he is a man who hurts like you do, and hopes like you do, and wants for his kids just like we all do. It is that way or we lose.”

  The code of the Ethical Warrior, even as an aspiration, shows that the American armed forces have come a long way from a time when its soldiers referred to Vietnamese peasants as gooks, slopes, and slants and when the military was slow to investigate atrocities against civilians such as the massacre at My Lai. As former Marine captain Jack Hoban, who helped to implement the Ethical Warrior program, wrote to me, “When I first joined the Marines in the 1970s it was ‘Kill, kill, kill.’ The probability that there would have been an honor code that trained marines to be ‘protectors of all others—including the enemy, if possible’ would have been 0 percent.”

  To be sure, the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first decade of the 21st century show that the country is far from reluctant to go to war. But even they are nothing like the wars of the past. In both conflicts the interstate war phase was quick and (by historical standards) low in battle deaths.181 Most of the deaths in Iraq were caused by intercommunal violence in the anarchy that followed, and by 2008 the toll of 4,000 American deaths (compare Vietnam’s 58,000) helped elect a president who within two years brought the country’s combat mission to an end. In Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force followed a set of humanitarian protocols during the height of the anti-Taliban bombing campaign in 2008 that Human Rights Watch praised for its “very good record of minimizing harm to civilians.”182 The political scientist Joshua Goldstein, in a discussion of how policies of smart targeting had massively reduced civilian deaths in Kosovo and in both Iraq wars, comments on the use of armed drones against Taliban and Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009:Where an army previously would have blasted its way in to the militants’ hideouts, killing and displacing c
ivilians by the tens of thousands as it went, and then ultimately reducing whole towns and villages to rubble with inaccurate artillery and aerial bombing in order to get at a few enemy fighters, now a drone flies in and lets fly a single missile against a single house where militants are gathered. Yes, sometimes such attacks hit the wrong house, but by any historical comparison the rate of civilian deaths has fallen dramatically.

  So far has this trend come, and so much do we take it for granted, that a single errant missile that killed ten civilians in Afghanistan was front-page news in February 2010. This event, a terrible tragedy in itself, nonetheless was an exception to a low overall rate of harm to civilians in the middle of a major military offensive, one of the largest in eight years of war. Yet, these ten deaths brought the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan to offer a profuse apology to the president of Afghanistan, and the world news media to play up the event as a major development in the offensive. The point is not that killing ten civilians is OK, but rather that in any previous war, even a few years ago, this kind of civilian death would barely have caused a ripple of attention. Civilian deaths, in sizable numbers, used to be universally considered a necessary and inevitable, if perhaps unfortunate, by-product of war. That we are entering an era when these assumptions no longer apply is good news indeed.183

  Goldstein’s assessment was confirmed in 2011 when Science magazine reported data from WikiLeaks documents and from a previously classified civilian casualty database of the American-led military coalition. The documents revealed that around 5,300 civilians had been killed in Afghanistan from 2004 through 2010, the majority (around 80 percent) by Taliban insurgents rather than coalition forces. Even if the estimate is doubled, it would represent an extraordinarily low number of civilian deaths for a major military operation—in the Vietnam War, by comparison, at least 800,000 civilians died in battle.184

  As big as the change in American attitudes toward war has been, the change in Europe is beyond recognition. As the foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan puts it, “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.”185 In February 2003 mass demonstrations in European cities protested the impending American-led invasion of Iraq, drawing a million people each in London, Barcelona, and Rome, and more than half a million in Madrid and Berlin.186 In London the signs read “No Blood for Oil”; “Stop Mad Cowboy Disease”; “America, the Real Rogue State”; “Make Tea, Not War”; “Down with This Sort of Thing”; and simply “No.” Germany and France conspicuously refused to join the United States and Britain, and Spain pulled out soon afterward. Even the war in Afghanistan, which aroused less opposition in Europe, is being fought mainly by American soldiers. Not only do they make up more than half of the forty-four-nation NATO military operation, but the continental forces have acquired a certain reputation when it comes to martial virtues. A Canadian armed forces captain wrote to me from Kabul in 2003:During this morning’s Kalashnikov concerto, I was waiting for the tower guards in our camp to open fire. I think they were asleep. That’s par for the course. Our towers are manned by the Bundeswehr, and they haven’t been doing a good job . . . when they’re actually there. I qualified that last comment because the Germans have already abandoned the towers several times. The first time was when we got hit by rockets. The remaining instances had something to do with it being cold in the towers. A German Lieutenant with whom I spoke about this lack of honour and basic soldier etiquette replied that it was Canada’s responsibility to provide heaters for the towers. I snapped back by mentioning that it was Germany’s responsibility to provide warm clothing to its soldiers. I was tempted to mention something about Kabul not being Stalingrad, but I held my tongue.

  The German army of today is not what it once was. Or, as I’ve heard mentioned here several times: “This ain’t the Wehrmacht.” Given the history of our people, I can make the argument that that’s a very good thing indeed. However, since my safety now rests upon the vigilance of the Herrenvolk’s progeny, I’m slightly concerned to say the least.187

  In a book titled Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe (and in Britain, The Monopoly on Violence: Why Europeans Hate Going to War), the historian James Sheehan argues that Europeans have changed their very conception of the state. It is no longer the proprietor of a military force that enhances the grandeur and security of the nation, but a provisioner of social security and material well-being. Nonetheless, for all the differences between the American “mad cowboys” and the European “surrender monkeys,” the parallel movement of their political culture away from war over the past six decades is more historically significant than their remaining differences.

  IS THE LONG PEACE A NUCLEAR PEACE?

  What went right? How is it that, in defiance of experts, doomsday clocks, and centuries of European history, World War III never happened? What allowed distinguished military historians to use giddy phrases like “a change of spectacular proportions,” “the most striking discontinuity in the history of warfare,” and “nothing like this in history”?

  To many people, the answer is obvious: the bomb. War had become too dangerous to contemplate, and leaders were scared straight. The balance of nuclear terror deterred them from starting a war that would escalate to a holocaust and put an end to civilization, if not human life itself.188 As Winston Churchill said in his last major speech to Parliament, “It may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.” 189 In the same vein, the foreign policy analyst Kenneth Waltz has suggested that we “thank our nuclear blessings,” and Elspeth Rostow proposed that the nuclear bomb be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.190

  Let’s hope not. If the Long Peace were a nuclear peace, it would be a fool’s paradise, because an accident, a miscommunication, or an air force general obsessed with precious bodily fluids could set off an apocalypse. Thankfully, a closer look suggests that the threat of nuclear annihilation deserves little credit for the Long Peace.191

  For one thing, weapons of mass destruction had never braked the march to war before. The benefactor of the Nobel Peace Prize wrote in the 1860s that his invention of dynamite would “sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions, [since] as soon as men will find that in one instant whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they will surely abide in golden peace.”192 Similar predictions have been made about submarines, artillery, smokeless powder, and the machine gun.193 The 1930s saw a widespread fear that poison gas dropped from airplanes could bring an end to civilization and human life, yet that dread did not come close to ending war either.194 As Luard puts it, “There is little evidence in history that the existence of supremely destructive weapons alone is capable of deterring war. If the development of bacteriological weapons, poison gas, nerve gases, and other chemical armaments did not deter war in 1939, it is not easy to see why nuclear weapons should do so now.”195

  Also, the theory of the nuclear peace cannot explain why countries without nuclear weapons also forbore war—why, for example, the 1995 squabble over fishing rights between Canada and Spain, or the 1997 dispute between Hungary and Slovakia over damming the Danube, never escalated into war, as crises involving European countries had so often done in the past. During the Long Peace leaders of developed countries never had to calculate which of their counterparts they could get away with attacking (yes for Germany and Italy, no for Britain and France), because they never contemplated a military attack in the first place. Nor were they deterred by nuclear godparents—it wasn’t as if the United States had to threaten Canada and Spain with a nuclear spanking if they got too obstreperous in their dispute over flatfish.

  As for the superpowers themselves, Mueller points to a simpler explanation for why they avoided fighting each other: they were deterred plenty by the prospect of a conventional war. World War II showed that assembly lines could mass-produce tanks, artillery, and bombers that were capable of killing tens of m
illions of people and reducing cities to rubble. This was especially obvious in the Soviet Union, which had suffered the greatest losses in the war. It’s unlikely that the marginal difference between the unthinkable damage that would be caused by a nuclear war and the thinkable but still staggering damage that would be caused by a conventional war was the main thing that kept the great powers from fighting.

  Finally, the nuclear peace theory cannot explain why the wars that did take place often had a nonnuclear force provoking (or failing to surrender to) a nuclear one—exactly the matchup that the nuclear threat ought to have deterred.196 North Korea, North Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Panama, and Yugoslavia defied the United States; Afghan and Chechen insurgents defied the Soviet Union; Egypt defied Britain and France; Egypt and Syria defied Israel; Vietnam defied China; and Argentina defied the United Kingdom. For that matter, the Soviet Union established its stranglehold on Eastern Europe during just those years (1945–49) when the United States had nuclear weapons and it did not. The countries that goaded their nuclear superiors were not suicidal. They correctly anticipated that for anything but an existential danger, the implicit threat of a nuclear response was a bluff. The Argentinian junta ordered the invasion of the Falkland Islands in full confidence that Britain would not retaliate by reducing Buenos Aires to a radioactive crater. Nor could Israel have credibly threatened the amassed Egyptian armies in 1967 or 1973, to say nothing of Cairo.

  Schelling, and the political scientist Nina Tannenwald, have each written of “a nuclear taboo”—a shared perception that nuclear weapons fall into a uniquely dreadful category.197 The use of a single tactical nuclear weapon, even one comparable in damage to conventional weaponry, would be seen as a breach in history, a passage into a new world with unimaginable consequences. The obloquy has attached itself to every form of nuclear detonation. The neutron bomb, a weapon that would cause minimal blast damage but would kill soldiers with a transient burst of radiation, fell deadborn from the military lab because of universal loathing, even though, as the political scientist Stanley Hoffman pointed out, it satisfied the moral philosophers’ requirements for waging a just war.198 The half-crazed “Atoms for Peace” schemes of the 1950s and 1960s, in which nuclear explosions would be harnessed to dig canals, excavate harbors, or propel rockets into space, are now the stuff of incredulous reminiscences of a benighted age.