So let me begin by convincing you that most of us—including you, dear reader—are wired for violence, even if in all likelihood we will never have an occasion to use it. We can begin with our younger selves. The psychologist Richard Tremblay has measured rates of violence over the course of the life span and shown that the most violent stage of life is not adolescence or even young adulthood but the aptly named terrible twos.2 A typical toddler at least sometimes kicks, bites, hits, and gets into fights, and the rate of physical aggression then goes steadily down over the course of childhood. Tremblay remarks, “Babies do not kill each other, because we do not give them access to knives and guns. The question . . . we’ve been trying to answer for the past 30 years is how do children learn to aggress. [But] that’s the wrong question. The right question is how do they learn not to aggress.”3
Now let’s turn to our inner selves. Have you ever fantasized about killing someone you don’t like? In separate studies, the psychologists Douglas Kenrick and David Buss have posed this question to a demographic that is known to have exceptionally low rates of violence—university students—and were stunned at the outcome.4 Between 70 and 90 percent of the men, and between 50 and 80 percent of the women, admitted to having at least one homicidal fantasy in the preceding year. When I described these studies in a lecture, a student shouted, “Yeah, and the others are lying!” At the very least, they may sympathize with Clarence Darrow when he said, “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”
The motives for imaginary homicides overlap with those on police blotters: a lover’s quarrel, a response to a threat, vengeance for an act of humiliation or betrayal, and family conflict, proportionally more often with stepparents than with biological parents. Often the reveries are played out before the mind’s eye in theatrical detail, like the jealous revenge fantasy entertained by Rex Harrison while conducting a symphony orchestra in Unfaithfully Yours. One young man in Buss’s survey estimated that he came “eighty percent of the way” toward killing a former friend who had lied to the man’s fiancée that he had been unfaithful to her and then made a move on the fiancée himself:First, I would break every bone in his body, starting with his fingers and toes, slowly making my way to larger ones. Then I would puncture his lungs and maybe a few other organs. Basically give him as much pain as possible before killing him.5
A woman said she had gone 60 percent of the way toward killing an exboyfriend who wanted to get back together and had threatened to send a video of the two of them having sex to her new boyfriend and her fellow students:I actually did this. I invited him over for dinner. And as he was in the kitchen, looking stupid peeling the carrots to make a salad, I came to him laughing, gently, so he wouldn’t suspect anything. I thought about grabbing a knife quickly and stabbing him in the chest repeatedly until he was dead. I actually did the first thing, but he saw my intentions, and ran away.
Many actual homicides are preceded by lengthy ruminations just like this. The small number of premeditated murders that are actually carried out must be the cusp of a colossal iceberg of homicidal desires submerged in a sea of inhibitions. As the forensic psychiatrist Robert Simon put it in a book title (paraphrasing Freud paraphrasing Plato), Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream.
Even people who don’t daydream about killing get intense pleasure from vicarious experiences of doing it or seeing it done. People spend large amounts of their time and income immersing themselves in any of a number of genres of bloody virtual reality: Bible stories, Homeric sagas, martyrologies, portrayals of hell, hero myths, Gilgamesh, Greek tragedies, Beowulf, the Bayeux Tapestry, Shakespearean dramas, Grimm’s fairy tales, Punch and Judy, opera, murder mysteries, penny dreadfuls, pulp fiction, dime novels, Grand Guignol, murder ballads, films noirs, Westerns, horror comics, superhero comics, the Three Stooges, Tom and Jerry, the Road Runner, video games, and movies starring a certain ex-governor of California. In Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment, the literary scholar Harold Schechter shows that today’s splatter films are mild stuff compared to the simulated torture and mutilation that have titillated audiences for centuries. Long before computer-generated imagery, theater directors would apply their ingenuity to grisly special effects, such as “phony heads that could be decapitated from dummies and impaled on pikes; fake skin that could be flayed from an actor’s torso; concealed bladders filled with animal blood that could produce a satisfying spurt of gore when punctured.”6
The vast mismatch between the number of violent acts that run through people’s imaginations and the number they carry out in the world tells us something about the design of the mind. Statistics on violence underestimate the importance of violence in the human condition. The human brain runs on the Latin adage “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Even in peaceable societies, people are fascinated by the logic of bluff and threat, the psychology of alliance and betrayal, the vulnerabilities of a human body and how they can be exploited or shielded. The universal pleasure that people take in violent entertainment, always in the teeth of censorship and moralistic denunciation, suggests that the mind craves information on the conduct of violence. 7 A likely explanation is that in evolutionary history, violence was not so improbable that people could afford not to understand how it works.8
The anthropologist Donald Symons has noticed a similar mismatch in the other major content of naughty reverie and entertainment, sex.9 People fantasize about and make art out of illicit sex vastly more often than they engage in it. Like adultery, violence may be improbable, but when an opportunity arises, the potential consequences for Darwinian fitness are gargantuan. Symons suggests that higher consciousness itself is designed for low-frequency, highimpact events. We seldom muse about daily necessities like grasping, walking, or speaking, let alone pay money to see them dramatized. What grabs our mental spotlight is illicit sex, violent death, and Walter Mittyish leaps of status.
Now to our brains. The human brain is a swollen and warped version of the brains of other mammals. All the major parts may be found in our furry cousins, where they do pretty much the same things, such as process information from the senses, control muscles and glands, and store and retrieve memories. Among these parts is a network of regions that has been called the Rage circuit. The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp describes what happened when he sent an electrical current through a part of the Rage circuit of a cat:Within the first few seconds of the electrical brain stimulation the peaceful animal was emotionally transformed. It leaped viciously toward me with claws unsheathed, fangs bared, hissing and spitting. It could have pounced in many different directions, but its arousal was directed right at my head. Fortunately, a Plexiglas wall separated me from the enraged beast. Within a fraction of a minute after terminating the stimulation, the cat was again relaxed and peaceful, and could be petted without further retribution.10
The Rage circuit in the cat brain has a counterpart in the human brain, and it too can be stimulated by an electrical current—not in an experiment, of course, but during neurosurgery. A surgeon describes what follows:The most significant (and the most dramatic) effect of stimulation has been the eliciting of a range of aggressive responses, from coherent, appropriately directed verbal responses (speaking to surgeon, “I feel I could get up and bite you”) to uncontrolled swearing and physically destructive behaviour. . . . On one occasion the patient was asked, 30 sec after cessation of the stimulus, if he had felt angry. He agreed that he had been angry, but that he no longer was, and he sounded very surprised.11
Cats hiss; humans swear. The fact that the Rage circuit can activate speech suggests that it is not an inert vestige but has functioning connections with the rest of the human brain.12 The Rage circuit is one of several circuits that control aggression in nonhuman mammals, and as we shall see, they help make sense of the varieties of aggression in humans as well.
If violence is stamped into our childhoods, our fantasy lives, our art, and our brains, then how is it possible that s
oldiers are reluctant to fire their guns in combat, when that is what they are there to do? A famous study of World War II veterans claimed that no more than 15 to 25 percent of them were able to discharge their weapons in battle; other studies have found that most of the bullets that are fired miss their targets.13 Now, the first claim is based on a dubious study, and the second is a red herring—most shots are fired in war not to pick off individual soldiers but to deter any of them from advancing.14 Nor is it surprising that when a soldier targets an enemy in combat conditions, it isn’t easy to score a direct hit. But let’s grant that anxiety on the battlefield is high and that many soldiers are paralyzed when the time comes to pull the trigger.
A nervousness about the use of deadly force may also be seen in street fights and barroom brawls. Most confrontations between macho ruffians are nothing like the stupendous fistfights in Hollywood westerns that so impressed Nabokov’s Humbert, with “the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in the belly, the flying tackle.” The sociologist Randall Collins has scrutinized photographs, videotapes, and eyewitness accounts of real fights and found that they are closer to a two-minute penalty for roughing in a boring hockey game than an action-packed brawl in Roaring Gulch.15 Two men glower, talk trash, swing and miss, clutch each other, sometimes fall to the ground. Occasionally a fist will emerge from the mutual embrace and land a couple of blows, but more often the men will separate, trade angry bluster and face-saving verbiage, and walk away with their egos more bruised than their bodies.
It’s true, then, that when men confront each other in face-to-face conflict, they often exercise restraint. But this reticence is not a sign that humans are gentle and compassionate. On the contrary, it’s just what one would expect from the analyses of violence by Hobbes and Darwin. Recall from chapter 2 that any tendency toward violence must have evolved in a world in which everyone else was evolving the same tendency. (As Richard Dawkins put it, a living thing differs from a rock or a river because it is inclined to hit back.) That means that the first move toward harming a fellow human simultaneously accomplishes two things:1. It increases the chance that the target will come to harm.
2. It gives the target an overriding goal of harming you before you harm him.
Even if you prevail by killing him, you will have given his kin the goal of killing you in revenge. It stands to reason that initiating serious aggression in a symmetrical standoff is something a Darwinian creature must consider very, very carefully—a reticence experienced as anxiety or paralysis. Discretion is the better part of valor; compassion has nothing to do with it.
When an opportunity does arise to eliminate a hated opponent with little danger of reprisal, a Darwinian creature will seize on it. We saw this in chimpanzee raiding. When a group of males patrolling a territory encounters a male from another community who has been isolated from his fellows, they will take advantage of the strength in numbers and tear him limb from limb. Pre-state peoples too decimate their enemies not in pitched battles but in stealthy ambushes and raids. Much of human violence is cowardly violence: sucker punches, unfair fights, preemptive strikes, predawn raids, mafia hits, drive-by shootings.
Collins also documents a recurring syndrome that he calls forward panic, though a more familiar term would be rampage. When an aggressive coalition has stalked or faced off against an opponent in a prolonged state of apprehension and fear, then catches the opponent in a moment of vulnerability, fear turns to rage, and the men will explode in a savage frenzy. A seemingly unstoppable fury drives them to beat the enemy senseless, torture and mutilate the men, rape the women, and destroy their property. A forward panic is violence at its ugliest. It is the state of mind that causes genocides, massacres, deadly ethnic riots, and battles in which no prisoners are taken. It also lies behind episodes of police brutality, such as the savage beating of Rodney King in 1991 after he had been apprehended in a high-speed car chase and had violently resisted his arrest. As the butchery gains momentum, rage may give way to ecstasy, and the rampagers may laugh and whoop in a carnival of barbarity. 16
No one has to be trained to carry out a rampage, and when they erupt in armies or police squads the commanders are often taken by surprise and have to take steps to quell them, since the overkill and atrocities serve no military or law-enforcement purpose. A rampage may be a primitive adaptation to seize a fleeting opportunity to decisively rout a dangerous enemy before it can remobilize and retaliate. The resemblance to lethal raiding among chimpanzees is uncanny, including the common trigger: an isolated member of the enemy who is outnumbered by a cluster of three or four allies.17 The instinct behind rampages suggests that the human behavioral repertoire includes scripts for violence that lie quiescent and may be cued by propitious circumstances, rather than building up over time like hunger or thirst.
THE MORALIZATION GAP AND THE MYTH OF PURE EVIL
In The Blank Slate I argued that the modern denial of the dark side of human nature—the doctrine of the Noble Savage—was a reaction against the romantic militarism, hydraulic theories of aggression, and glorification of struggle and strife that had been popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scientists and scholars who question the modern doctrine have been accused of justifying violence and have been subjected to vilification, blood libel, and physical assault.18 The Noble Savage myth appears to be another instance of an antiviolence movement leaving a cultural legacy of propriety and taboo.
But I am now convinced that a denial of the human capacity for evil runs even deeper, and may itself be a feature of human nature, thanks to a brilliant analysis by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister in his book Evil.19 Baumeister was moved to study the commonsense understanding of evil when he noticed that the people who perpetrate destructive acts, from everyday peccadilloes to serial murders and genocides, never think they are doing anything wrong. How can there be so much evil in the world with so few evil people doing it?
When psychologists are confronted with a timeless mystery, they run an experiment. Baumeister and his collaborators Arlene Stillwell and Sara Wotman couldn’t very well get people to commit atrocities in the lab, but they reasoned that everyday life has its share of smaller hurts that they could put under the microscope.20 They asked people to describe one incident in which someone angered them, and one incident in which they angered someone. The order of the two questions was randomly flipped from one participant to the next, and they were separated by a busywork task so the participants wouldn’t answer them in quick succession. Most people get angry at least once a week, and nearly everyone gets angry at least once a month, so there was no shortage of material.21 Both perpetrators and victims recounted plenty of lies, broken promises, violated rules and obligations, betrayed secrets, unfair acts, and conflicts over money.
But that was all that the perpetrators and victims agreed on. The psychologists pored over the narratives and coded features such as the time span of the events, the culpability of each side, the perpetrator’s motive, and the aftermath of the harm. If one were to weave composite narratives out of their tallies, they might look something like this:The Perpetrator’s Narrative: The story begins with the harmful act. At the time I had good reasons for doing it. Perhaps I was responding to an immediate provocation. Or I was just reacting to the situation in a way that any reasonable person would. I had a perfect right to do what I did, and it’s unfair to blame me for it. The harm was minor, and easily repaired, and I apologized. It’s time to get over it, put it behind us, let bygones be bygones.
The Victim’s Narrative: The story begins long before the harmful act, which was just the latest incident in a long history of mistreatment. The perpetrator’s actions were incoherent, senseless, incomprehensible. Either that or he was an abnormal sadist, motivated only by a desire to see me suffer, though I was completely innocent. The harm he did is grievous and irreparable, with effects that will last forever. None of us should ever forget it.it.
They can’t both be right—or more to the point, neithe
r of them can be right all of the time, since the same participants provided a story in which they were the victim and a story in which they were the perpetrator. Something in human psychology distorts our interpretation and memory of harmful events.
This raises an obvious question. Does our inner perpetrator whitewash our crimes in a campaign to exonerate ourselves? Or does our inner victim nurse our grievances in a campaign to claim the world’s sympathy? Since the psychologists were not flies on the wall at the time of the actual incidents, they had no way of knowing whose retrospective accounts should be trusted.
In an ingenious follow-up, Stillwell and Baumeister controlled the event by writing an ambiguous story in which one college roommate offers to help another with some coursework but reneges for a number of reasons, which leads the student to receive a low grade for the course, change his or her major, and switch to another university.22 The participants (students themselves) simply had to read the story and then retell it as accurately as possible in the first person, half of them taking the perspective of the perpetrator and half the perspective of the victim. A third group was asked to retell the story in the third person; the details they provided or omitted serve as a baseline for ordinary distortions of human memory that are unaffected by self-serving biases. The psychologists coded the narratives for missing or embellished details that would make either the perpetrator or the victim look better.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 72