The desire for revenge is most easily modulated when the perpetrator falls within our natural circle of empathy. We are apt to forgive our kin and close friends for trespasses that would be unforgivable in others. And when our circle of empathy expands (a process we will examine in the next chapter), our circle of forgivability expands with it.
A second circumstance that cranks down revenge is a relationship with the perpetrator that is too valuable to sever. We may not like them, but we’re stuck with them, so we had better learn to live with them. During the presidential primary season, rivals for a party’s nomination can spend months slinging each other with mud or worse, and their body language during televised debates makes it clear that they can’t stand each other. But when the winner is decided, they bite their lips, swallow their pride, and unite against their common adversary in the other party. In many cases the winner even invites the loser onto the ticket or into the cabinet. The power of a shared goal to induce erstwhile enemies to reconcile was dramatically demonstrated in a famous 1950s experiment in which boys at a summer camp called Robbers Cave were divided into teams and on their own initiative waged war on each other for weeks, with raids and retaliations and dangerous weapons like rocks in socks.211 But when the psychologists arranged some “accidents” that left the boys no choice but to work together to restore the camp’s water supply and to pull a bus out of the muck, they fell into a truce, overcame their enmity, and even made some friendships across team lines.
The third modulator of revenge kicks in when we are assured that the perpetrator has become harmless. For all the warmth and fuzziness of forgiveness, you can’t afford to disarm if the person who harmed you is likely to do it again. So if a harm-doer wants to avoid your wrath and get back on your good side, he has to persuade you that he no longer harbors any motive to harm you. He may start out by claiming that his harm was an unfortunate result of a unique set of circumstances that will never be repeated—that is, that the action was unintentional or unavoidable or that the harm it did was unforeseen. Not coincidentally, these are the excuses that harm-doers believe about every harm they do, which is one side of the Moralization Gap. If that doesn’t work, he can accept your side of the story by acknowledging that he did something wrong, sympathize with your suffering, cancel the harm with restitution, and commit his credibility to an assurance that he will not repeat it. In other words, he can apologize. All of these tactics, studies have shown, can mollify a rankled victim.
The problem with an apology, of course, is that it can be cheap talk. An insincere apology can be more enraging than none at all, because it compounds the first harm with a second one, namely a cynical ploy to avert revenge. The aggrieved party needs to peer into the perpetrator’s soul and see that any intention to harm again has been exorcised. The devices that implement this born-again harmlessness are the self-conscious emotions of shame, guilt, and embarrassment.212 The problem for the perpetrator is how to make those emotions visible. As with all signaling problems, the way to make a signal credible is to make it costly. When a subordinate primate wants to appease a dominant one, he will make himself small, avert his gaze, and expose vulnerable body parts. The equivalent gestures in humans are called cringing, groveling, or bowing and scraping. We may also hand over control of the conspicuous parts of our bodies to our autonomic nervous system, the involuntary circuitry that controls blood flow, muscle tone, and the activity of the glands. An apology that is certified by blushing, stammering, and tears is more credible than one that is cool, calm, and collected. Crying and blushing are particularly affecting because they are felt from the inside as well as displayed on the outside and hence generate common knowledge. The emoter knows that onlookers know his emotional state, the onlookers know he knows it, and so on. Common knowledge obliterates self-deception: the guilty party can no longer deny the uncomfortable truth.213
McCullough notes that our revenge modulators offer a route to public conflict reduction that can supplement the criminal justice system. The potential payoff can be enormous because the court system is expensive, inefficient, unresponsive to the victim’s needs, and in its own way violent, since it forcibly incarcerates a guilty perpetrator. Many communities now have programs of restorative justice, sometimes supplementing a criminal trial, sometimes replacing it. The perpetrator and victim, often accompanied by family and friends, sit down together with a facilitator, who gives the victim an opportunity to express his or her suffering and anger, and the perpetrator an opportunity to convey sincere remorse, together with restitution for the harm. It sounds like daytime TV, but it can set at least some repentant perpetrators on the straight and narrow, while satisfying their victims and keeping the whole dispute out of the slowly grinding wheels of the criminal justice system.
On the international scene, the last two decades have seen an explosion of apologies by political leaders for crimes committed by their governments. The political scientist Graham Dodds has compiled “a fairly comprehensive chronological listing of major political apologies” through the centuries. His list begins in the year 1077, when “Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV apologized to Pope Gregory VII for church-state conflicts by standing barefoot in the snow for three days.”214 History had to wait more than six hundred years for the next one, when Massachusetts apologized in 1711 to the families of the victims of the Salem witch trials. The first apology of the 20th century, Germany’s admission to having started World War I in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, is perhaps not the best advertisement for the genre. But the spate of apologies in the last two decades bespeak a new era in the self-presentation of states. For the first time in history, the leaders of nations have elevated the ideals of historical truth and international reconciliation above self-serving claims of national infallibility and rectitude. In 1984 Japan sort of apologized for occupying Korea when Emperor Hirohito told the visiting South Korean president, “It is regrettable that there was an unfortunate period in this century.” But subsequent decades saw a string of ever-more-forthcoming apologies from other Japanese leaders. In the ensuing decades Germany apologized for the Holocaust, the United States apologized for interning Japanese Americans, the Soviet Union apologized for murdering Polish prisoners during World War II, Britain apologized to the Irish, Indians, and Maori, and the Vatican apologized for its role in the Wars of Religion, the persecution of Jews, the slave trade, and the oppression of women. Figure 8–6 shows how political apologies are a sign of our times.
FIGURE 8–6. Apologies by political and religious leaders, 1900–2004
Sources: Data from Dodds, 2003b, and Dodds, 2005.
Do apologies and other conciliatory gestures in the human social repertoire actually avert cycles of revenge? The political scientists William Long and Peter Brecke took up the question in their 2003 book War and Reconciliation: Reason and Emotion in Conflict Resolution. Brecke is the scholar who assembled the Conflict Catalog which I relied upon in chapter 5, and he and Long addressed the question with numbers. They selected 114 pairs of countries that fought an interstate war from 1888 to 1991, together with 430 civil wars. They then looked for reconciliation events—ceremonies or rituals that brought the leaders of the warring factions together—and compared the number of militarized disputes (incidents of saber-rattling or fighting) over several decades before and after the event to see if the rituals made any difference. They generated hypotheses and interpreted their findings using both rational actor theory and evolutionary psychology.
When it came to international disputes, emotional gestures made little difference. Long and Brecke identified 21 international reconciliation events and compared the ones that clearly cooled down the belligerents with the ones that left them as disputatious as ever. The successes depended not on symbolic gestures but on costly signaling. The leader of one or both countries made a novel, voluntary, risky, vulnerable, and irrevocable move toward peace that reassured his adversary that he was unlikely to resume hostilities. Anwar Sadat’s 1977 speech to the Israeli
parliament is the prototype. The gesture was a shocker, and it was unmistakably expensive, later costing Sadat his life. But it led to a peace treaty that has lasted to this day. There were few touchy-feely rituals, and today the two countries are hardly on good terms, but they are at peace. Long and Brecke note that sometimes pairs of countries that looked daggers at each for centuries can turn into good buddies—England and France, England and the United States, Germany and Poland, Germany and France—but the amity comes after decades of coexistence rather than as the immediate outcome of conciliatory gestures.
The psychology of forgiveness, recall, works best when the perpetrator and victim are already bound by kinship, friendship, alliance, or mutual dependence. It is not surprising, then, that conciliatory gestures are more effective in ending civil wars than international ones. The adversaries in a civil war are, at the very least, stuck with each other inside national boundaries, and they have a flag and a soccer team that put them in a fictive coalition. Often the ties run deeper. They may share a language or religion, may work together, and may be related by webs of marriage. In many rebellions and warlord conflicts the fighters may literally be sons, nephews, and neighborhood kids, and communities may have to welcome back the perpetrators of horrible atrocities against them if they are ever to knit their communities together. These and other ties that bind can prepare the way for gestures of apology and reconciliation. These gestures are more effective than the mechanism that leads to peace between states, namely the costly signaling of benevolent intentions, because in civil conflicts the two sides are not cleanly separated entities, and so cannot each speak with one voice, exchange messages in safety, and resume the status quo if an initiative fails.
Long and Brecke studied 11 reconciliation events since 1957 that symbolically terminated a civil conflict. With 7 of them (64 percent) there was no return to violence. That figure is impressive: among conflicts that did not have a reconciliation event, only 9 percent saw a cessation of violence. The common denominator to the success stories, they found, was a set of conciliation rituals that implemented a symbolic and incomplete justice rather than perfect justice or none at all. Just as a microphone near a loudspeaker can amplify its own output and create an earsplitting howl, retributive justice that visits new harm on the perpetrators can stoke the desire for retaliation in a spiral of competitive victimhood. Conversely, just as the feedback from a microphone can be squelched if the gain is turned down, cycles of communal violence can be squelched if the severity of retributive justice is modulated. A damping of the desire for justice is particularly indispensable after civil conflicts, in which the institutions of justice like the police and prison system are not only fragile but may themselves have been among the main perpetrators of the harm.
The prototype for reconciliation after a civil conflict is South Africa. Invoking the Xhosa concept of ubuntu or brotherhood, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu instituted a system of restorative rather than retributive justice to heal the country after decades of violent repression and rebellion under the apartheid regime. As with the tactics of the Rights Revolutions, Mandela and Tutu’s restorative justice both sampled from and contributed to the pool of ideas for nonviolent conflict resolution. Similar programs, Long and Brecke discovered, have cemented civil peace in Mozambique, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and El Salvador. They identify four ingredients of the successful elixir.
The first is a round of uncompromised truth-telling and acknowledgment of harm. It may take the form of truth and reconciliation commissions, in which perpetrators publicly own up to the harms they did, or of national factfinding committees, whose reports are widely publicized and officially endorsed. These mechanisms take direct aim at the self-serving psychology that stokes the Moralization Gap. Though truth-telling sheds no blood, it requires a painful emotional sacrifice on the part of the confessors in the form of shame, guilt, and a unilateral disarmament of their chief moral weapon, the claim to innocence. There is a vast psychological difference between a crime that everyone privately knows about but not everyone acknowledges and one that is “out there” as common knowledge. Just as blushing and tears make an apology more effective, the public acknowledgment of a wrong can rewrite the rules of a relationship between groups.
A second theme in successful reconciliations is an explicit rewriting of people’s social identities. People redefine the groups with which they identify. The perpetual victims of a society may take responsibility for running it. Rebels become politicians, bureaucrats, or businesspeople. The military surrenders its claim to embody the nation and demotes itself to their security guards.
The third theme appears to be the most important: incomplete justice. Rather than settling every score, a society has to draw a line under past violations and grant massive amnesty while prosecuting only the blatant ringleaders and some of the more depraved foot soldiers. Even then the punishments take the form of hits to their reputation, prestige, and privileges rather than blood for blood. There may, in addition, be reparations, but their restorative value is registered more on an emotional balance sheet than a financial one. Long and Brecke comment:In every instance of successful reconciliation save Mozambique justice was meted out, but never in full measure. This fact may be lamentable, even tragic, from certain legal or moral perspectives, yet it is consistent with the requisites of restoring social order postulated in the forgiveness hypothesis. In all cases of successful reconciliation, retributive justice could neither be ignored nor fully achieved.... Disturbing as it may be, people appear to be able to tolerate a substantial amount of injustice wrought by amnesty in the name of social peace.215
In other words, peel off the bumper sticker that says “If you want peace, work for justice.” Replace it with the one recommended by Joshua Goldstein: “If you want peace, work for peace.”216
Finally, the belligerents have to signal their commitment to a new relationship with a burst of verbal and nonverbal gestures. As Long and Brecke observe, “Legislatures passed solemn resolutions, peace accords were signed and embraces exchanged by heads of formerly rival groups, statues and monuments to the tragedy were erected, textbooks were rewritten, and a thousand other actions, large and small, were undertaken to underscore the notion that the past was different and the future more hopeful.”217
The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians stands in many people’s minds today as the nastiest ongoing cycle of deadly revenge. Not even Pollyanna would claim to have the key to solving it. But the applied psychology of reconciliation bears out the vision of the Israeli novelist Amos Oz on what a solution will have to look like:Tragedies can be resolved in one of two ways: there is the Shakespearean resolution and there is the Chekhovian one. At the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, the stage is strewn with dead bodies and maybe there’s some justice hovering high above. A Chekhov tragedy, on the other hand, ends with everybody disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, disappointed, absolutely shattered, but still alive. And I want a Chekhovian resolution, not a Shakespearean one, for the Israeli/Palestinian tragedy.218
SADISM
It’s hard to single out the most heinous form of human depravity—there are so many to choose from—but if genocide is the worst by quantity, sadism might be the worst by quality. The deliberate infliction of pain for no purpose but to enjoy a person’s suffering is not just morally monstrous but intellectually baffling, because in exchange for the agony of the victim the torturer receives no apparent personal or evolutionary benefit. And unlike many other sins, pure sadism is not a guilty pleasure that most people indulge in their fantasy lives; few of us daydream about watching cats burn to death. Yet torture is a recurring disfigurement in human history and current events, appearing in at least five circumstances.
Sadism can grow out of instrumental violence. The threat of torture can terrify political opponents, and it must at least occasionally be used to make the threat real. Torture may also be used to extract information from a criminal suspect or political enemy. Many police an
d national security forces engage in mild torture under euphemisms like “the third degree,” “moderate physical pressure,” and “enhanced interrogation,” and these tactics may sometimes be effective.219 And as moral philosophers since Jeremy Bentham have pointed out, in theory torture can even be justifiable, most famously in the ticking-bomb scenario in which a criminal knows the location of an explosive that will kill and maim many innocent people and only torture would force him to disclose its location.220
Yet among the many arguments against the use of torture is that it seldom stays instrumental for long. Torturers get carried away. They inflict so much suffering on their victims that the victims will say anything to make it stop, or become so delirious with agony as to be incapable of responding.221 Often the victims die, which makes the extraction of information moot. And in cases like the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, the use of torture, far from serving a useful purpose, was a strategic catastrophe for the country that allowed it to happen, inflaming enemies and alienating friends.
A second occasion for torture is in criminal and religious punishment. Here again there is a granule of instrumental motivation, namely to deter wrongdoers with the prospect of pain that would cancel out their gain. Yet as Beccaria and other Enlightenment reformers pointed out, any calculus of deterrence can achieve the same goals with punishments that are less severe but more reliable. And surely the death penalty, if it is applied at all, is a sufficient disincentive to capital crimes without needing the then-customary practice of preceding it with prolonged gruesome torture. In practice, corporal punishment and excruciating capital punishment escalate into orgies of cruelty for its own sake.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 81