The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  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: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: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

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  Not only that, but consider the people who learn about the promise of a perfect world yet nonetheless oppose it. They are the only things standing in the way of a plan that could lead to infinite goodness. How evil are they? You do the math.

  The second genocidal hazard of a utopia is that it has to conform to a tidy blueprint. In a utopia, everything is there for a reason. What about the people? Well, groups of people are diverse. Some of them stubbornly, perhaps essentially, cling to values that are out of place in a perfect world. They may be entrepreneurial in a world that works by communal sharing, or bookish in a world that works by labor, or brash in a world that works by piety, or clannish in a world that works by unity, or urban and commercial in a world that has returned to its roots in nature. If you are designing the perfect society on a clean sheet of paper, why not write these eyesores out of the plans from the start?

  In Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, the historian Ben Kiernan notes another curious feature of utopian ideologies. Time and again they hark back to a vanished agrarian paradise, which they seek to restore as a healthful substitute for prevailing urban decadence. In chapter 4 we saw that after the Enlightenment had emerged from the intellectual bazaar of cosmopolitan cities, the German counter-Enlightenment romanticized the attachment of a people to their land—the blood and soil of Kiernan’s title. The ungovernable metropolis, with its fluid population and ethnic and occupational enclaves, is an affront to a mindset that envisions a world of harmony, purity, and organic wholeness. Many of the nationalisms of the 19th and early 20th centuries were guided by utopian images of ethnic groups flourishing in their native homelands, often based on myths of ancestral tribes who settled the territory at the dawn of time.116 This agrarian utopianism lay behind Hitler’s dual obsessions: his loathing of Jewry, which he associated with commerce and cities, and his deranged plan to depopulate Eastern Europe to provide farmland for German city-dwellers to colonize. Mao’s massive agrarian communes and Pol Pot’s expulsion of Cambodian city-dwellers to rural killing fields are other examples.

  Commercial activities, which tend to be concentrated in cities, can themselves be triggers of moralistic hatred. As we shall see in chapter 9, people’s intuitive sense of economics is rooted in tit-for-tat exchanges of concrete goods or services of equivalent value—say, three chickens for one knife. It does not easily grasp the abstract mathematical apparatus of a modern economy, such as money, profit, interest, and rent.117 In intuitive economics, farmers and craftsmen produce palpable items of value. Merchants and other middlemen, who skim off a profit as they pass goods along without causing new stuff to come into being, are seen as parasites, despite the value they create by enabling transactions between producers and consumers who are unacquainted or separated by distance. Moneylenders, who loan out a sum and then demand additional money in return, are held in even greater contempt, despite the service they render by providing people with money at times in their lives when it can be put to the best use. People tend to be oblivious to the intangible contributions of merchants and moneylenders and view them as bloodsuckers. (Once again the metaphor comes from biology.) Antipathy toward individual middlemen can easily transfer to antipathy to ethnic groups. The capital necessary to prosper in middlemen occupations consists mainly of expertise rather than land or factories, so it is easily shared among kin and friends, and it is highly portable. For these reasons it’s common for particular ethnic groups to specialize in the middleman niche and to move to whatever communities currently lack them, where they tend to become prosperous minorities—and targets of envy and resentment.118 Many victims of discrimination, expulsion, riots, and genocide have been social or ethnic groups that specialize in middlemen niches. They include various bourgeois minorities in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia, the Indians in East Africa and Oceania, the Ibos in Nigeria, the Armenians in Turkey, the Chinese in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam, and the Jews in Europe.119

  Democides are often scripted into the climax of an eschatological narrative, a final spasm of violence that will usher in millennial bliss. The parallels between the utopian ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries and the apocalyptic visions of traditional religions have often been noticed by historians of genocide. Daniel Chirot, writing with the social psychologist Clark McCauley, observes:Marxist eschatology actually mimicked Christian doctrine. In the beginning, there was a perfect world with no private property, no classes, no exploitation, and no alienation—the Garden of Eden. Then came sin, the discovery of private property, and the creation of exploiters. Humanity was cast from the Garden to suffer inequality and want. Humans then experimented with a series of modes of production, from the slave, to the feudal, to the capitalist mode, always seeking the solution and not finding it. Finally there came a true prophet with a message of salvation, Karl Marx, who preached the truth of Science. He promised redemption but was not heeded, except by his close disciples who carried the truth forward. Eventually, however, the proletariat, the carriers of the true faith, will be converted by the religious elect, the leaders of the party, and join to create a more perfect world. A final, terrible revolution will wipe out capitalism, alienation, exploitation, and inequality. After that, history will end because there will be perfection on earth, and the true believers will have been saved.120

  Drawing on the work of the historians Joachim Fest and George Mosse, they also comment on Nazi eschatology:It was not an accident that Hitler promised a Thousand Year Reich, a millennium of perfection, similar to the thousand-year reign of goodness promised in Revelation before the return of evil, the great battle between good and evil, and the final triumph of God over Satan. The entire imagery of his Nazi Party and regime was deeply mystical, suffused with religious, often Christian, liturgical symbolism, and it appealed to a higher law, to a mission decreed by fate and entrusted to the prophet Hitler.121

  Finally, there are the job requirements. Would you want the stress and responsibility of running a perfect world? Utopian leadership selects for monumental narcissism and ruthlessness.122 Its leaders are possessed of a certainty about the rectitude of their cause and an impatience for incremental reforms or on-the-fly adjustments guided by feedback from the human consequences of their grand schemes. Mao, who had his image plastered all over China and his little red book of sayings issued to every citizen, was described by his doctor and only confidant Li Zhisui as voracious for flattery, demanding of sexual servicing by concubine
s, and devoid of warmth and compassion.123 In 1958 he had a revelation that the country could double its steel production in a year if peasant families contributed to the national output by running backyard smelters. On pain of death for failing to meet the quotas, peasants melted down their woks, knives, shovels, and doorknobs into lumps of useless metal. It was also revealed to him that China could grow large quantities of grain on small plots of land, freeing the rest for grasslands and gardens, if farmers planted the seedlings deep and close together so that class solidarity would make them grow strong and thick.124 Peasants were herded into communes of 50,000 to implement this vision, and anyone who dragged his feet or pointed out the obvious was executed as a class enemy. Impervious to signals from reality informing him that his Great Leap Forward was a great leap backward, Mao masterminded a famine that killed between 20 million and 30 million people.

  The motives of leaders are critical in understanding genocide, because the psychological ingredients—the mindset of essentialism; the Hobbesian dynamic of greed, fear, and vengeance; the moralization of emotions like disgust; and the appeal of utopian ideologies—do not overcome an entire population at once and incite them to mass killing. Groups that avoid, distrust, or even despise each other can coexist without genocide indefinitely.125 Think, for example, of African Americans in the segregated American South, Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, and Africans in South Africa under apartheid. Even in Nazi Germany, where anti-Semitism had been entrenched for centuries, there is no indication that anyone but Hitler and a few fanatical henchmen thought it was a good idea for the Jews to be exterminated. 126 When a genocide is carried out, only a fraction of the population, usually a police force, military unit, or militia, actually commits the murders.127