The dark side of our communal feelings is a desire for our own group to dominate another group, no matter how we feel about its members as individuals. In a set of famous experiments, the psychologist Henri Tajfel told participants that they belonged to one of two groups defined by some trivial difference, such as whether they preferred the paintings of Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky.132 He then gave them an opportunity to distribute money between a member of their group and a member of the other group; the members were identified only by number, and the participants themselves had nothing to gain or lose from their choice. Not only did they allocate more money to their instant groupmates, but they preferred to penalize a member of the other group (for example, seven cents for a fellow Klee fan, one cent for a Kandinsky fan) than to benefit both individuals at the expense of the experimenter (nineteen cents for a fellow Klee fan, twenty-five cents for a Kandinsky fan). A preference for one’s group emerges early in life and seems to be something that must be unlearned, not learned. Developmental psychologists have shown that preschoolers profess racist attitudes that would appall their liberal parents, and that even babies prefer to interact with people of the same race and accent. 133
The psychologists Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto have proposed that people, to varying degrees, harbor a motive they call social dominance, though a more intuitive term is tribalism: the desire that social groups be organized into a hierarchy, generally with one’s own group dominant over the others.134 A social dominance orientation, they show, inclines people to a sweeping array of opinions and values, including patriotism, racism, fate, karma, caste, national destiny, militarism, toughness on crime, and defensiveness of existing arrangements of authority and inequality. An orientation away from social dominance, in contrast, inclines people to humanism, socialism, feminism, universal rights, political progressivism, and the egalitarian and pacifist themes in the Christian Bible.
The theory of social dominance implies that race, the focus of so much discussion on prejudice, is psychologically unimportant. As Tajfel’s experiments showed, people can divide the world into in-groups and out-groups based on any ascribed similarity, including tastes in expressionist painters. The psychologists Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides point out that in human evolutionary history members of different races were separated by oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges (which is why racial differences evolved in the first place) and seldom met each other face to face. One’s adversaries were villages, clans, and tribes of the same race. What looms large in people’s minds is not race but coalition; it just so happens that nowadays many coalitions (neighborhoods, gangs, countries) coincide with races. Any invidious treatment that people display toward other races can be just as readily elicited by members of other coalitions.135 Experiments by the psychologists G. Richard Tucker, Wallace Lambert, and later Katherine Kinzler have shown that one of the most vivid delineators of prejudice is speech: people distrust people who speak with an unfamiliar accent.136 The effect goes back to the charming story of the origin of the word shibboleth in Judges 12:5–6:And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of the Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.
The phenomenon of nationalism can be understood as an interaction between psychology and history. It is the welding together of three things: the emotional impulse behind tribalism; a cognitive conception of the “group” as a people sharing a language, territory, and ancestry; and the political apparatus of government.
Nationalism, Einstein said, is “the measles of the human race.” That isn’t always true—sometimes it’s just a head cold—but nationalism can get virulent when it is comorbid with the group equivalent of narcissism in the psychiatric sense, namely a big but fragile ego with an unearned claim to preeminence. Recall that narcissism can trigger violence when the narcissist is enraged by an insolent signal from reality. Combine narcissism with nationalism, and you get a deadly phenomenon that political scientists call ressentiment (French for resentment): the conviction that one’s nation or civilization has a historical right to greatness despite its lowly status, which can only be explained by the malevolence of an internal or external foe.137
Ressentiment whips up the emotions of thwarted dominance—humiliation, envy, and rage—to which narcissists are prone. Historians such as Liah Greenfield and Daniel Chirot have attributed the major wars and genocides in the early decades of the 20th century to ressentiment in Germany and Russia. Both nations felt they were realizing their rightful claims to preeminence, which perfidious enemies had denied them.138 It has not escaped the notice of observers of the contemporary scene that Russia and the Islamic world both nurse resentments about their undeserved lack of greatness, and that these emotions are nonnegligible threats to peace.139
Heading in the other direction are European countries like Holland, Sweden, and Denmark that stopped playing the preeminence game in the 18th century and pegged their self-esteem to more tangible if less heart-pounding achievements like making money and giving their citizens a pleasant lifestyle. 140 Together with countries that never cared about being magnificent in the first place, like Canada, Singapore, and New Zealand, their national pride, though considerable, is commensurate with their achievements, and in the arena of interstate relations they don’t make trouble.
Group-level ambition also determines the fate of ethnic neighbors. Experts on ethnicity dismiss the conventional wisdom that ancient hatreds inevitably keep neighboring peoples at each other’s throats.141 After all, there are some six thousand languages spoken on the planet, at least six hundred of which have substantial numbers of speakers.142 By any reckoning, the number of deadly ethnic conflicts that actually break out is a tiny fraction of the number that could break out. In 1996 James Fearon and David Laitin carried out one such reckoning. They focused on two parts of the world that each housed a combustible mixture of ethnic groups: the republics of the recently dissolved Soviet Union in the early 1990s, which had 45 of them, and newly decolonized Africa from 1960 to 1979, which had at least 160, probably many more. Fearon and Laitin counted the number of civil wars and incidents of intercommunal violence (such as deadly riots) as a proportion of the number of pairs of neighboring ethnic groups. They found that in the former Soviet Union, violence broke out in about 4.4 percent of the opportunities, and in Africa it broke out in fewer than 1 percent. Developed countries with mixtures of ethnic groups, such as New Zealand, Malaysia, Canada, Belgium, and recently the United States, have even better track records of ethnic nonviolence.143 The groups may get on each other’s nerves, but they don’t kill each other. Nor should this be surprising. Even if ethnic groups are like people and constantly jockey for status, remember that most of the time people don’t come to blows either.
Several things determine whether ethnic groups can coexist without bloodshed. As Fearon and Laitin point out, one important emollient is the way a group treats a loose cannon who attacks a member of the other group.144 If the malefactor is reeled in and punished by his own community, the victimized group can classify the incident as a one-on-one crime rather than as the first strike in a group-against-group war. (Recall that one reason international peacekeepers are effective is that they can chasten spoilers on one side to the satisfaction of the other.) The political scientist Stephen van Evera suggests that an even bigger factor is ideology. Things get ugly when intermingled ethnic groups long for states of their own, hope to unite with their diasporas in other countries, keep long memories of harms committed by their neighbors’ ancestors while being unrepentant for harms committed by their own, and live under crappy governments that mythologize one group’s glorious history while excluding othe
rs from the social contract.
Many peaceable countries today are in the process of redefining the nationstate by purging it of tribalist psychology. The government no longer defines itself as a crystallization of the yearning of the soul of a particular ethnic group, but as a compact that embraces all the people and groups that happen to find themselves on a contiguous plot of land. The machinery of government is often rubegoldbergian, with complex arrangements of devolution and special status and power-sharing and affirmative action, and the contraption is held together by a few national symbols such as a rugby team.145 People root for clothing instead of blood and soil. It is a messiness appropriate to the messiness of people’s divided selves, with coexisting identities as individuals and as members of overlapping groups.146
Social dominance is a guy thing. It’s not surprising that men, the more dominance-obsessed gender, have stronger tribalist feelings than women, including racism, militarism, and comfort with inequality.147 But men are more likely to find themselves at the receiving end of racism too. Contrary to the common assumption that racism and sexism are twin prejudices propping up a white male power structure, with African American women in double jeopardy, Sidanius and Pratto found that minority women are far less likely to be the target of racist treatment than minority men. Men’s attitudes toward women may be paternalistic or exploitative, but they are not combative, as they tend to be with other men. Sidanius and Pratto explain the difference with reference to the evolution of these invidious attitudes. Sexism ultimately arises from the genetic incentive of men to control the behavior, especially the sexual behavior, of women. Tribalism arises from the incentive of groups of men to compete with other groups for access to resources and mates.
The gender gaps in overconfidence, personal violence, and group-against-group hostility raise a frequently asked question: Would the world be more peaceful if women were in charge? The question is just as interesting if the tense and mood are changed. Has the world become more peaceful because women are more in charge? And will the world become more peaceful when women are even more in charge?
The answer to all three, I think, is a qualified yes. Qualified, because the link between sex and violence is more complicated than just “men are from Mars.” In War and Gender the political scientist Joshua Goldstein reviewed the intersection of those two categories and discovered that throughout history and in every society men have overwhelmingly made up and commanded the armies.148 (The archetype of the Amazons and other women warriors owes more to men being turned on by the image of strapping young women in battle gear, like Lara Croft and Xena, than to historical reality.) Even in the feminist 21st century, 97 percent of the world’s soldiers, and 99.9 percent of the world’s combat soldiers, are male. (In Israel, which famously drafts both sexes, women warriors spend most of their time in clinics or behind desks.) Men can also boast about occupying all the top slots in history’s list of conquering maniacs, bloodthirsty tyrants, and genocidal thugs.
But women have not been conscientious objectors through all of this bloodshed. On various occasions they have led armed forces or served in combat, and they frequently egg their men into battle or provide logistical support, whether as camp followers in earlier centuries or industrial riveters in the 20th. Many queens and empresses, including Isabella of Spain, Mary and Elizabeth I of England, and Catherine the Great of Russia, acquitted themselves well in internal oppression and external conquest, and several 20th-century heads of state, such as Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, and Chandrika Kumaratunga, led their nations in war.149
The discrepancy between what women are capable of doing in war and what they typically do is no paradox. In traditional societies women had to worry about abduction, rape, and infanticide by the enemy, so it’s not surprising that they should want their men to be on the winning side of a war. In societies with standing armies, differences between the sexes (including upper body strength, the willingness to plunder and kill, and the ability to bear and raise children), combined with the nuisance of mixed-sex armies (such as romantic intrigue between the sexes and dominance contests within them) have always militated toward a division of labor by sex, with the men providing the cannon fodder. As for leadership, women in any era who find themselves in positions of power will obviously carry out their job responsibilities, which in many eras have included the waging of war. A queen in an age of competing dynasties and empires could hardly have afforded to be the world’s only pacifist even if she were so inclined. And of course the two sexes’ traits overlap considerably, even in those for which the averages might differ, so with any trait relevant to military leadership or combat, many women will be more capable than most men.
But over the long sweep of history, women have been, and will be, a pacifying force. Traditional war is a man’s game: tribal women never band together and raid neighboring villages to abduct grooms.150 This sex difference set the stage for Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece go on a sex strike to pressure their men to end the Peloponnesian War. In the 19th century, feminism often overlapped with pacifism and other antiviolence movements such as abolitionism and animal rights.151 In the 20th, women’s groups have been active, and intermittently effective, in protesting nuclear tests, the Vietnam War, and violent strife in Argentina, Northern Ireland, and the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. In a review of almost three hundred American public opinion polls between the 1930s and 1980s, men were found to support the “more violent or forceful option” in 87 percent of the questions, the others being tied.152 For example, they were more supportive of military confrontation with Germany in 1939, Japan in 1940, Russia in 1960, and Vietnam in 1968. In every American presidential election since 1980, women have cast more votes for the Democratic candidate than men have, and in 2000 and 2004 majorities of women reversed the preference of men and voted against George W. Bush.153
Though women are slightly more peace-loving than their menfolk, the men and women of a given society have correlated opinions.154 In 1961 Americans were asked whether the country should “fight an all-out nuclear war rather than live under communist rule.” Eighty-seven percent of the men said yes, while “only” 75 percent of the women felt that way—proof that women are pacifist only in comparison to men of the same time and society. Gender gaps are larger when an issue divides the country (as in the Vietnam War), smaller when there is greater agreement (as in World War II), and nonexistent when the issue obsesses the entire society (as in the attitudes among Israelis and Arabs toward a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict).
But women’s position in society can affect its fondness for war even if the women themselves are not opposing war. A recognition of women’s rights and an opposition to war go together. In Middle Eastern countries, the poll respondents who were more favorable to gender equality were also more favorable to nonviolent solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict.155 Several ethnographic surveys of traditional cultures have found that the better a society treats its women, the less it embraces war.156 The same is true for modern countries, with the usual continuum running from Western Europe to blue American states to red American states to Islamic countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan.157 As we shall see in chapter 10, societies that empower their women are less likely to end up with large cohorts of rootless young men, with their penchant for making trouble.158 And of course the decades of the Long Peace and the New Peace have been the decades of the revolution in women’s rights. We don’t know what causes what, but biology and history suggest that all else being equal, a world in which women have more influence will be a world with fewer wars.
Dominance is an adaptation to anarchy, and it serves no purpose in a society that has undergone a civilizing process or in an international system regulated by agreements and norms. Anything that deflates the concept of dominance is likely to drive down the frequency of fights between individuals and wars between groups. That doesn’t mean that the emotions behind dominance will go away—they are very m
uch a part of our biology, especially in a certain gender—but they can be marginalized.
The mid- and late 20th century saw a deconstruction of the concept of dominance and related virtues like manliness, honor, prestige, and glory. Part of the deflation came from the informalization process, as in the Marx Brothers’ burlesque of jingoism in Duck Soup. Partly it has come from women’s inroads into professional life. Women have the psychological distance to see contests of dominance as boys making noise, so as they have become more influential, dominance has lost some of its aura. (Anyone who has worked in a mixed-sex environment is familiar with a woman belittling the wasteful posturing of her male colleagues as “typical male behavior.”) Partly it has come from cosmopolitanism, which exposes us to exaggerated cultures of honor in other countries and thereby gives us a perspective on our own. The word macho, recently borrowed from Spanish, has a disdainful air, connoting self-indulgent swagger rather than manly heroism. The Village People’s campy “Macho Man” and other homoerotic iconography has further undermined the trappings of masculine dominance.
Another deflationary force, I think, is the progress of biological science and its influence on literate culture. People have increasingly understood the drive for dominance as a vestige of the evolutionary process. A quantitative analysis of Google Books shows recent leaps in the popularity of the biological jargon behind dominance, including testosterone beginning in the 1940s, pecking order and dominance hierarchy beginning in the 1960s, and alpha male in the 1990s.159 Joining them in the 1980s was the facetious pseudo-medical term testosterone poisoning. Each of these phrases belittles the stakes in contests for dominance. They imply that the glory men seek may be a figment of their primate imaginations—the symptom of a chemical in their bloodstream, the acting out of instincts that make us laugh when we see them in roosters and baboons. Compare the distancing power of these biological terms to older words like glorious and honorable, which objectify the prize in a contest of dominance, presupposing that certain accomplishments just are glorious or honorable in the very nature of things. The frequency of both terms has been steadily falling in English-language books for a century and a half.160 An ability to hold our instincts up to the light, rather than naïvely accepting their products in our consciousness as just the way things are, is the first step in discounting them when they lead to harmful ends.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 78
