The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  Defenders of religion claim that the two genocidal ideologies of the 20th century, fascism and communism, were atheistic. But the first claim is mistaken and the second irrelevant (chapter 4). Fascism happily coexisted with Catholicism in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Croatia, and though Hitler had little use for Christianity, he was by no means an atheist, and professed that he was carrying out a divine plan.1 Historians have documented that many of the Nazi elite melded Nazism with German Christianity in a syncretic faith, drawing on its millennial visions and its long history of anti-Semitism.2 Many Christian clerics and their flocks were all too happy to sign up, finding common cause with the Nazis in their opposition to the tolerant, secular, cosmopolitan culture of the Weimar era.3

  As for godless communism, godless it certainly was. But the repudiation of one illiberal ideology does not automatically grant immunity from others. Marxism, as Daniel Chirot observed (see page 330), helped itself to the worst idea in the Christian Bible, a millennial cataclysm that will bring about a utopia and restore prelapsarian innocence. And it violently rejected the humanism and liberalism of the Enlightenment, which placed the autonomy and flourishing of individuals as the ultimate goal of political systems.4

  At the same time, particular religious movements at particular times in history have worked against violence. In zones of anarchy, religious institutions have sometimes served as a civilizing force, and since many of them claim to hold the morality franchise in their communities, they can be staging grounds for reflection and moral action. The Quakers parlayed Enlightenment arguments against slavery and war into effective movements for abolition and pacifism, and in the 19th century other liberal Protestant denominations joined them (chapter 4). Protestant churches also helped to tame the wild frontier of the American South and West (chapter 3). African American churches supplied organizational infrastructure and rhetorical power to the civil rights movement (though as we saw, Martin Luther King rejected mainstream Christian theology and drew his inspiration from Gandhi, secular Western philosophy, and renegade humanistic theologians). These churches also worked with the police and community organizations to lower crime in African American inner cities in the 1990s (chapter 3). In the developing world, Desmond Tutu and other church leaders worked with politicians and nongovernmental organizations in the reconciliation movements that healed countries following apartheid and civil unrest (chapter 8).

  So the subtitle of Christopher Hitchens’s atheist bestseller, How Religion Poisons Everything, is an overstatement. Religion plays no single role in the history of violence because religion has not been a single force in the history of anything. The vast set of movements we call religions have little in common but their distinctness from the secular institutions that are recent appearances on the human stage. And the beliefs and practices of religions, despite their claims to divine provenance, are endogenous to human affairs, responding to their intellectual and social currents. When the currents move in enlightened directions, religions often adapt to them, most obviously in the discreet neglect of the bloodthirsty passages of the Old Testament. Not all of the accommodations are as naked as those of the Mormon church, whose leaders had a revelation from Jesus Christ in 1890 that the church should cease polygamy (around the time that polygamy was standing in the way of Utah’s joining the Union), and another one in 1978 telling them that the priesthood should accept black men, who were previously deemed to bear the mark of Cain. But subtler accommodations instigated by breakaway denominations, reform movements, ecumenical councils, and other liberalizing forces have allowed other religions to be swept along by the humanistic tide. It is when fundamentalist forces stand athwart those currents and impose tribal, authoritarian, and puritanical constraints that religion becomes a force for violence.

  THE PACIFIST’S DILEMMA

  Let me turn from the historical forces that don’t seem to be consistent reducers of violence to those that do. And let me try to place these forces into a semblance of an explanatory framework so that, rather than ticking off items on a list, we can gain insight into what they might have in common. What we seek is an understanding of why violence has always been so tempting, why people have always yearned to reduce it, why it has been so hard to reduce, and why certain kinds of changes eventually did reduce it. To be genuine explanations, these changes should be exogenous: they should not be a part of the very decline we are trying to explain, but independent developments that preceded and caused it.

  A good way to make sense of the changing dynamics of violence is to think back to the paradigmatic model of the benefits of cooperation (in this case, refraining from aggression), namely the Prisoner’s Dilemma (chapter 8). Let’s change the labels and call it the Pacifist’s Dilemma. A person or coalition may be tempted by the gains of a victory in predatory aggression (the equivalent of defecting against a cooperator), and certainly wants to avoid the sucker’s payoff of being defeated by an adversary who acts on the same temptation. But if they both opt for aggression, they will fall into a punishing war (mutual defection), which will leave them both worse off than if they had opted for the rewards of peace (mutual cooperation). Figure 10–1 is a depiction of the Pacifist’s Dilemma; the numbers for the gains and losses are arbitrary, but they capture the dilemma’s tragic structure.

  FIGURE 10–1. The Pacifist’s Dilemma

  The Pacifist’s Dilemma is by no stretch of the imagination a mathematical model, but I will keep pointing to it to offer a second way of conveying the ideas I will try to explain in words. The numbers capture the twofold tragedy of violence. The first part of the tragedy is that when the world has these payoffs, it is irrational to be a pacifist. If your adversary is a pacifist, you are tempted to exploit his vulnerability (the 10 points of victory are better than the 5 points of peace), whereas if he is an aggressor, you are better off enduring the punishment of a war (a loss of 50 points) than being a sucker and letting him exploit you (a devastating loss of 100). Either way, aggression is the rational choice.

  The second part of the tragedy is that the costs to a victim (−100, in this case) are vastly disproportionate to the benefits to the aggressor (10). Unless two adversaries are locked in a fight to the death, aggression is not zero-sum but negative-sum; they are collectively better off not doing it, despite the advantage to the victor. The advantage to a conqueror in gaining a bit more land is swamped by the disadvantage to the family he kills in stealing it, and the few moments of drive reduction experienced by a rapist are obscenely out of proportion to the suffering he causes his victim. The asymmetry is ultimately a consequence of the law of entropy: an infinitesimal fraction of the states of the universe are orderly enough to support life and happiness, so it’s easier to destroy and cause misery than to cultivate and cause happiness. All of this means that even the most steely-eyed utilitarian calculus, in which a disinterested observer tots up the total happiness and unhappiness, will deem violence undesirable, because it creates more unhappiness in its victims than happiness in its perpetrators, and lowers the aggregate amount of happiness in the world.

  But when we descend from the lofty vantage point of the disinterested observer to the earthly one of the players, we can see why violence is so hard to eliminate. Each side would be crazy to be the only one to opt for pacifism, because if his adversary was tempted by aggression, he would pay a terrible cost. The other-guy problem explains why pacifism, turning the other cheek, beating swords into plowshares, and other moralistic sentiments have not been a consistent reducer of violence: they only work if one’s adversary is overcome by the same sentiments at the same time. It also, I think, helps us to understand why violence can spiral upward or downward so unpredictably at various times in history. Each side has to be aggressive enough not to be a sitting duck for its adversary, and often the best defense is a good offense. The resulting mutual fear of attack—the Hobbesian trap or security dilemma—can escalate everyone’s belligerence (chapter 2). Even when the game is played repeatedly and the threat of reprisa
ls can (in theory) deter both sides, the strategic advantage of overconfidence and other self-serving biases can lead instead to cycles of feuding. By the same logic, a credible goodwill gesture can occasionally be reciprocated, unwinding the cycle and sending violence downward when everyone least expects it.

  And here is the key to identifying a common thread that might tie together the historical reducers of violence. Each should change the payoff structure of the Pacifist’s Dilemma—the numbers in the checkerboard—in a way that attracts the two sides into the upper left cell, the one that gives them the mutual benefits of peace.

  In light of the history and psychology we have reviewed, I believe we can identify five developments that have pushed the world in a peaceful direction. Each shows up, to varying degrees, in a number of historical sequences, quantitative datasets, and experimental studies. And each can be shown to move around the numbers in the Pacifist’s Dilemma in a way that entices people into the precious cell of peace. Let’s go through them in the order in which they were introduced in the preceding chapters.

  THE LEVIATHAN

  A state that uses a monopoly on force to protect its citizens from one another may be the most consistent violence-reducer that we have encountered in this book. Its simple logic was depicted in the aggressor-victim-bystander triangle in figure 2–1 and may be restated in terms of the Pacifist’s Dilemma. If a government imposes a cost on an aggressor that is large enough to cancel out his gains—say, a penalty that is three times the advantage of aggressing over being peaceful—it flips the appeal of the two choices of the potential aggressor, making peace more attractive than war (figure 10–2).

  In addition to changing the rational-actor arithmetic, a Leviathan—or his female counterpart Justitia, the goddess of justice—is a disinterested third party whose penalties are not inflated by the self-serving biases of the participants, and who is not a deserving target of revenge. A referee hovering over the game gives one’s opponent less of an incentive to strike preemptively or self-defensively, reducing one’s own desire to maintain an aggressive stance, putting the adversary at ease, and so on, and thus can ramp down the cycle of belligerence. And thanks to the generalized effects of self-control that have been demonstrated in the psychology lab, refraining from aggression can become a habit, so the civilized parties will inhibit their temptation to aggress even when Leviathan’s back is turned.

  FIGURE 10–2. How a Leviathan resolves the Pacifist’s Dilemma

  Leviathan effects lay behind the Pacification and Civilizing Processes that gave chapters 2 and 3 their names. When bands, tribes, and chiefdoms came under the control of the first states, the suppression of raiding and feuding reduced their rates of violent death fivefold (chapter 2). And when the fiefs of Europe coalesced into kingdoms and sovereign states, the consolidation of law enforcement eventually brought down the homicide rate another thirtyfold (chapter 3). Pockets of anarchy that lay beyond the reach of government retained their violent cultures of honor, such as the peripheral and mountainous backwaters of Europe, and the frontiers of the American South and West (chapter 3). The same is true of the pockets of anarchy in the socioeconomic landscape, such as the lower classes who are deprived of consistent law enforcement and the purveyors of contraband who cannot avail themselves of it (chapter 3). When law enforcement retreats, such as in instant decolonization, failed states, anocracies, police strikes, and the 1960s, violence can come roaring back (chapters 3 and 6). Inept governance turns out to be among the biggest risk factors for civil war, and is perhaps the principal asset that distinguishes the violence-torn developing world from the more peaceful developed world (chapter 6). And when the citizens of a country with a weak rule of law are invited into the lab, they indulge in gratuitous spiteful punishment that leaves everyone worse off (chapter 8).

  Leviathan, in the depiction that Hobbes commissioned, and Justitia, as represented in courthouse statuary, are both armed with swords. But sometimes the blindfold and the scales are enough. People avoid hits to their reputations as well as to their bodies and bank accounts, and occasionally the soft power of influential third parties or the threat of shaming and ostracism can have the same effect as police or armies that threaten them with force. This soft power is crucial in the international arena, where world government has always been a fantasy, but in which judgments by third parties, intermittently backed by sanctions or symbolic displays of force, can go a long way. The lowered risk of war when countries belong to international organizations or host international peacekeepers are two quantifiable examples of the pacifying effects of unarmed or lightly armed third parties (chapters 5 and 6).

  When Leviathan does brandish a sword, the benefit depends on its applying the force judiciously, adding penalties only to the “aggression” cells in its subjects’ decision matrix. When the Leviathan adds penalties indiscriminately to all four cells, brutalizing its subjects to stay in power, it can cause as much harm as it prevents (chapters 2 and 4). The benefits of democracies over autocracies and anocracies come when a government carefully eyedrops just enough force into the right cells of the decision matrix to switch the pacifist option from an agonizingly unattainable ideal to the irresistible choice.

  GENTLE COMMERCE

  The idea that an exchange of benefits can turn zero-sum warfare into positive-sum mutual profit was one of the key ideas of the Enlightenment, and it was revived in modern biology as an explanation of how cooperation among nonrelatives evolved. It changes the Pacifist’s Dilemma by sweetening the outcome of mutual pacifism with the mutual gains of exchange (figure 10–3).

  Though gentle commerce does not eliminate the disaster of being defeated in an attack, it eliminates the adversary’s incentive to attack (since he benefits from peaceful exchange too) and so takes that worry off the table. The profitability of mutual cooperation is at least partly exogenous because it depends on more than the agents’ willingness to trade: it depends as well on whether each one specializes in producing something the other one wants, and on the presence of an infrastructure that lubricates their exchange, such as transportation, finance, record-keeping, and the enforcement of contracts. And once people are enticed into voluntary exchange, they are encouraged to take each other’s perspectives to clinch the best deal (“the customer is always right”), which in turn may lead them to respectful consideration of each other’s interests, if not necessarily to warmth.

  FIGURE 10–3. How commerce resolves the Pacifist’s Dilemma

  In the theory of Norbert Elias, the Leviathan and gentle commerce were the two drivers of the European Civilizing Process (chapter 3). Beginning in the late Middle Ages, expanding kingdoms not only penalized plunder and nationalized justice, but supported an infrastructure of exchange, including money and the enforcement of contracts. This infrastructure, together with technological advances such as in roads and clocks, and the removal of taboos on interest, innovation, and competition, made commerce more attractive, and as a result merchants, craftsmen, and bureaucrats displaced knightly warriors. The theory has been supported by historical data showing that commerce did start to expand in the late Middle Ages, and by criminological data showing that rates of violent death really did plunge (chapters 9 and 3).

  Among larger entities such as cities and states, commerce was enhanced by oceangoing ships, new financial institutions, and a decline in mercantilist policies. These developments have been credited in part with the 18th-century domestication of warring imperial powers such as Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Spain into commercial states that made less trouble (chapter 5). Two centuries later the transformation of China and Vietnam from authoritarian communism to authoritarian capitalism was accompanied by a decreased willingness to indulge in the all-out ideological wars that in the preceding decades had made both countries the deadliest places on earth (chapter 6). In other parts of the world as well, the tilting of values away from national glory and toward making money may have taken the wind out of the sails of cantankerous revanc
hist movements (chapters 5 and 6). Part of the tilt may have come from a relaxation of the grip of ideologies that came to be seen as morally bankrupt, but another part may have come from a seduction by the lucrative rewards of the globalized economy.

  These narratives have been supported by quantitative studies. During the postwar decades that saw the Long Peace and the New Peace, international trade skyrocketed, and we saw that countries that trade with each other are less likely to cross swords, holding all else constant (chapter 5). Recall as well that countries that are more open to the world economy are less likely to host genocides and civil wars (chapter 6). Pulling in the other direction, governments that base their nation’s wealth on digging oil, minerals, and diamonds out of the ground rather than adding value to it via commerce and trade are more likely to fall into civil wars (chapter 6).

  The theory of gentle commerce is not only supported by numbers from international datasets but is consistent with a phenomenon long known to anthropologists: that many cultures maintain active networks of exchange, even when the goods exchanged are useless gifts, because they know it helps keep the peace among them.5 This is one of the phenomena in the ethnographic record that led Alan Fiske and his collaborators to suggest that people in a relationship of Equality Matching or Market Pricing feel that they are bound by mutual obligations and are less likely to dehumanize each other than when they are in a null or asocial relationship (chapter 9).