Sorry, you must be a member of this group to do that.
Sam Harris's Blog, page 30
November 26, 2011
November 14, 2011
November 5, 2011
The Truth about Violence
(Photo by Pensiero)
As a teenager, I once had an opportunity to fly in a police helicopter over a major American city. Naively, I thought the experience might be uneventful. Perhaps there would be no crime between 8:00 and 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday night. However, from the moment we were airborne, there was a fresh emergency every fifteen seconds: Shots fired… rape in progress… victim stabbed…It was a deluge. Of course, the impression this left on me was, in part, the result of a sampling bias: I was hearing nothing but incident reports from a city of 4 million people, most of whom would never encounter violence directly. (No one calls the police to say "Everything is still okay!") Yet it was uncanny to discover the chaos that lurked at the margins of my daily routine. A few minutes from where I might otherwise have been eating dinner, rapes, robberies, and murders were in progress.
Just as it is prudent to wear your seat belt while driving, it makes sense to know how best to respond to violence. In fact, it is overwhelmingly likely that some of you will become the targets of violence in the future. The purpose of this essay is to help you prepare for it. While I do not consider myself an expert on personal security, I know enough to have strong opinions. In my youth, I practiced martial arts for many years and eventually taught self-defense classes in college.[] My education included work with firearms and a variety of other weapons. I eventually stopped training and moved on to other things, but my interest in self-defense has resurfaced. It's hard to say why. No doubt receiving occasional death threats and other strange communications has been a factor. But I think that having a family has played a much larger role. I now feel acutely responsible for the safety of those closest to me.
In my experience, most people do not want to think about the reality of human violence. I have friends who sleep with their front doors unlocked and who would never consider receiving instruction in self-defense. For them, gun ownership seems like an ugly and uncivilized flirtation with paranoia. Happily, most of these people will never encounter violence in any form. And good luck will make their unconcern seem perfectly justified.
But here are the numbers: In 2010, there were 403.6 violent crimes per 100,000 persons in the United States. (The good news: This is an overall decrease of 13.4 percent from the level in 2001.) Thus, the average American has a 1 in 250 chance of being robbed, assaulted, raped, or murdered each year. Actually, the chance is probably greater than this, because we know that certain crimes, such as assault and rape, are underreported.
Of course, your risks vary depending on who you are and where you live. In Compton, one of the more dangerous parts of Los Angeles, your chances of experiencing violent crime in 2010 were 1 in 71; if you lived in Beverly Hills they were 1 in 458. Still, even in good neighborhoods, the likelihood of being attacked is hardly remote. In the comparative safety of Beverly Hills, assuming the crime rate stays constant, the probability that you will be robbed, assaulted, raped or murdered at some point over the next 30 years is 1 in 16. (The average risk in the U.S. is 1 in 9; in Compton it's better than 1 in 3.) Again, these statistics surely paint too rosy a picture, because many crimes go unreported.
It may seem onerous to prepare yourself and your family to respond to violence, but not doing so is also a form of preparation. Failing to prepare is, generally speaking, preparing very well to do the wrong thing. Although most of us are good at recognizing danger, our instincts often lead us to behave in ways that increase our chances of being injured or killed once a threat emerges.
Why can't civilized people like ourselves simply rely on the police? Well, look around you: Do you see a cop? Unless you happen to be a police officer yourself, or are married to one, you are very unlikely to be attacked in the presence of law enforcement. The role of the police is to respond in the aftermath of a crime and, with a little luck, to catch the person who committed it. If you are ever targeted by a violent predator, whether you and your family are injured or killed will depend on what you do in the first moments of the encounter. When it comes to survival, therefore, you are entirely on your own. Once you escape and are in a safe place, by all means call the police. But dialing 911 when an intruder has broken into your home is not a strategy for self-defense.[]
However, instruction in self-defense need not consume your life. The most important preparations are mental. While I certainly recommend that you receive some physical training, merely understanding the dynamics of violence can make you much safer than you might otherwise be.
Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places.
The primary goal of self-defense is to avoid becoming the victim of violence. The best way to do this is to not be where violence is likely to occur. Of course, that's not always possible—but without question, it is your first and best line of defense. If you visit dangerous neighborhoods at night, or hike alone and unarmed on trails near a big city, or frequent places where drunken young men gather, you are running some obvious risks.
I once knew an experienced martial artist who decided to walk across Central Park late at night. He was aware of the danger, but he thought "I have a black belt in karate. Why shouldn't I be able to walk wherever I want?" As it happened, this rhetorical question was answered almost immediately: My friend hadn't ventured more than a hundred yards into the darkness of the park before he was confronted by three men, one of whom plunged a hypodermic needle into his thigh without a word. Our hero bolted and escaped, otherwise unharmed, but he spent the next three months wondering whether he had been infected with HIV, hepatitis, or some other blood-borne disease. (He was fine.) The lesson: Whatever your training, you needn't be foolish.
Similarly, all men should learn to recognize and shun status-seeking displays of aggression. This is one problem that women generally don't have to worry about. It is, for instance, very rare for a woman to find herself party to an exchange like this:
"What are you looking at, asshole?"
"Who are you calling an asshole?"
"You, bitch. What are you going to do about it?"
Nevertheless, young men are easily lured into social dominance games from which neither party can find a face-saving exit. The violence that erupts at such moments is as unnecessary as it is predictable. If you want to preserve your health and stay out of prison, you must learn to avoid or defuse conflict of this kind.
When a conflict turns physical, there is always a risk that someone will be severely injured or killed. Imagine spending a year or more in prison because you couldn't resist punching some bully who dearly deserved it, but who then hit his head on a fire hydrant and died from a brain injury. As a matter of law, the moment you engage in avoidable violence of this kind—rising to a challenge and escalating the conflict—you lose any legal claim to self-defense. Rather, you were fighting—which is illegal—and in this case you accidentally killed your opponent. You are now likely to get more practice fighting in prison. (Meanwhile, the costs of your criminal defense, and perhaps a subsequent civil lawsuit, could easily bankrupt you.) Take this maxim to heart: Self-defense is not about winning fights with aggressive men who probably have less to lose than you do.[]
Another principle is lurking here that should be made explicit: Never threaten your opponent. The purpose of his verbal challenge was to get you to respond in such a way as to make him feel justified in attacking you. You shouldn't collaborate in this process or advertise your readiness to defend yourself. Even if violence seems unavoidable, and you decide to strike preemptively, you should do so from a seemingly unaggressive posture, retaining the element of surprise. (This requires training.) Putting up your dukes and agreeing to fight has no place in a self-defense repertoire.[]
Thus, whatever ego problems or impulse-control issues you have should be worked out ahead of time. You should forget about saving face while recognizing that if you ever find yourself in a social-dominance contest you will probably feel a deep urge to say or do the wrong thing.[] Deciding on an appropriate course of action in advance is your best protection against being dangerously stupid in the heat of the moment. The challenge for every man is to decline to play an ancient game whose rules and imperatives have been inscribed in his very cells. If you want to avoid unnecessary violence, you must keep your inner ape on a very short leash.
"What are you looking at, asshole?"
"Sorry, man. I was just spacing out. It's been a long day."
De-escalate and move on.
You should also learn to trust your feelings of apprehension about other people—revising them only slowly and with good reason. This may seem like a very depressing piece of advice. It is. Most of us don't want to see the world this way, and we take great pains to avoid being rude or appearing racist, suspicious, etc. But violent predators invariably play upon this commitment to civility. The truth is that most of us are very good at detecting ulterior motives and malevolence in others. We must learn to trust these intuitions. To read the reports of rapes, murders, kidnappings and other violent crimes is to continually discover how easily good people can be manipulated by bad ones.
You are under no obligation, for instance, to give a stranger who has rung your doorbell, or decided to stand unusually close to you on the street, the benefit of the doubt. If a man who makes you uncomfortable steps onto an elevator with you, step off. If a man approaches you while you are sitting in your car and something about him doesn't seem right, you don't need to roll down your window and have a conversation. Victims of crime often sense that something is wrong in the first moments of encountering their attackers but feel too socially inhibited to create the necessary distance and escape.
Principle #2: Do not defend your property.
Whatever your training, you should view any invitation to violence as an opportunity to die—or to be sent to prison for killing another human being. Violence must truly be the last resort. Thus, if someone sticks a gun in your face and demands your wallet, you should hand it over without hesitation—and run.
If you look out your kitchen window and see a group of youths destroying your car, you should remain inside and call the police. It doesn't matter if you happen to be a Navy Seal who keeps a loaded shotgun by the front door. You don't want to kill a teenager for vandalism, and you don't want to get shot by one for hesitating to pull the trigger. Unless you or another person is being physically harmed, or an attack seems imminent, avoiding violence should be your only concern.
Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape.
If you have principles 1 and 2 firmly installed in your brain, any violence that finds you is, by definition, unavoidable. There is a tremendous power in knowing this: When you find yourself without other options, you are free to respond with full commitment.
This is the core principle of self-defense: Do whatever you can to avoid a physical confrontation, but the moment avoidance fails, attack explosively for the purposes of escape—not to mete out justice, or to teach a bully a lesson, or to apprehend a criminal. Your goal is to get away with minimum trauma (to you), while harming your attacker in any way that seems necessary to ensure your escape.[]
If you find yourself in such a situation, you should assume that your opponent is a career criminal who has victimized many others before you.[] Do not waste an instant imagining that you can reason with him. Most victims of violence are so terrified of being injured or killed that they will believe any promise a predator makes. It is not difficult to see why.
Imagine: You are loading groceries into your car and man appears at your side with a gun.
"Get in the car, and you won't get hurt."
Your instincts are probably bad here: Getting in the car is the last thing you should do.
"Get in the car, or I'll blow your head off."
However bad your options may appear in the moment, complying with the demands of a person who is seeking to control your movements is a terrible idea. Yes, there are criminals whose only goal is to steal your property. But anyone who attempts to control you—by moving you to another room, putting you in a car, tying you up—probably intends to kill you (or worse). And you must understand in advance that your natural reaction to this situation—to freeze, to comply with instructions—will be the wrong one.
If someone puts a gun to your head and demands your purse or wallet, hand it over immediately and run. Don't worry about being shot in the back: If your attacker is going to shoot you for running, he was going to shoot you if you stayed in place, and at point-blank range. By running, you make yourself harder to kill. Any attempt to move you, even by a few feet—backing you off a sidewalk and into an alley, forcing you behind a row of bushes—is unacceptable and should mobilize all your physical and emotional resources.[]
If you find yourself in a situation where a predator is trying to control you, the time for listening to instructions and attempting to remain calm has passed. It will get no easier to resist and escape after these first moments. The presence of weapons, the size or number of your attackers—these details are irrelevant. However bad the situation looks, it will only get worse. To hesitate is to put yourself at the mercy of a sociopath. You have no alternative but to explode into action, whatever the risk. Recognizing when this line has been crossed, and committing to escape at any cost, is more important than mastering physical techniques.
Herein lies a crucial distinction between traditional martial arts and realistic self-defense: Most martial artists train for a "fight." Opponents assume ready stances, just out of each other's range, and then practice various techniques or spar (engage in controlled fighting). This does not simulate real violence. It doesn't prepare you to respond effectively to a sudden attack, in which you have been hit before you even knew you were threatened, and it doesn't teach you to strike preemptively, without telegraphing your moves, once you have determined that an attack is imminent.
Whatever your physical skills, when you commit to using force against another person, your overriding goal is still to escape. Even if you are at home, in possession of a firearm, and well trained to use it, when confronted by an intruder your best defense is to get out of the house as quickly as possible. In such a circumstance, a gun is a means of ensuring that no one can block your exit.[]
Nothing good ever comes to people who allow themselves to be moved to a remote location at the mercy of a violent predator. The police call such places "secondary crime scenes." They are always better for the attacker and worse for his victim because they are more isolated than the first point of contact. And although your home may be the most familiar place on earth to you, the moment an intruder enters, it becomes the equivalent of a secondary crime scene. You should also expect that any criminal who breaks into your home when you're inside it has come prepared to murder you and your family. To naive readers, this may sound like an extraordinarily paranoid assumption. It isn't. Mere burglars generally make sure a house is empty before breaking in.
If a window shatters in the middle of the night and someone comes through it, your life is on the line. There is nothing to talk about, no offer of cash or jewelry to muster, no demands worth listening to. You must do whatever it takes to escape.
One of the most common and disturbing features of home invasions is how the victims' concern for one another and desire to stay together is inevitably used against them. By exploiting these bonds, even a single attacker can immobilize an entire family. By merely holding a knife to the wife's throat, he can get the husband to submit to being tied up. Again, it is perfectly natural for victims in these circumstances to hope that if they just cooperate, their attacker will show them mercy. If you get nothing else from this article, engrave this iron law on your mind: The moment it is clear that an assailant wants more than your property (which must be assumed in any home invasion), you must escape.
What if your attacker has a knife to your child's throat and tells you that everything is going to be okay as long as you cooperate by lying face down on the floor? Don't do it. It would be better to flee the house—because as soon as you leave, he will know that the clock is ticking: Within moments, you will be at a neighbor's home summoning help. If this intruder is going to murder your child before fleeing himself, he was going to murder your child anyway—either before or after he killed you. And he was going to take his time doing it. Granted, it is almost impossible to imagine leaving one's child in such a circumstance—but if you can't leave, you must grab a weapon and press your own attack. Complying in the hope that a sociopath will keep his promise to you is always the wrong move.
Here is how the police look at it:
From a cop's point of view, citizens seem to keep making the same mistakes over and over, until all cases begin to sound alike…. The objective of a violent criminal is to control you, emotionally and physically. Everything he does—his threats and promises—is intended to terrify and control you. The more control you give to the violent criminal, even if you see it as temporary, the less likely you are to escape. For most crime victims, their temporary cooperation backfired into full control over them. Time works against the victim and for the criminal. The longer you stall, the more you talk, the deeper you sink.
(S. Strong. Strong on Defense. pp. 49-50).
True self-defense is based not on techniques but on principles. Yes, it is good to know how to deliver a palm strike or elbow to a person's head with real power (technique), but it is far more important to know when to unleash with whatever tools you have for the purpose of immediate escape (principle). You must install a trigger in your mind—to act explosively once a certain line has been crossed—and you must understand that your inclination will most likely be to freeze and acquiesce, in the hope of avoiding injury or death. Mental preparation is a matter of resolving, in advance, to burst past these inhibitions and escape immediately, or fight with everything you've got until escape is possible.
Certain scenarios are intrinsically confusing and should be discussed with your family in advance: What if a person dressed as a police officer comes to your door and asks to be let in? Unless you are absolutely certain that he is a cop—e.g. you can see that he arrived in a marked police car—you should explain that you have no way of knowing who he is and then call the police yourself. Thousands of crimes are committed each year by people impersonating cops. (Anyone can buy a uniform and a badge over the Internet.) Similarly, many home invasions begin with a criminal's acting like a person in distress: A woman or a teenager might come to your door reporting an accident or some other emergency. Again, the safe move is to keep your door locked and call the police.
Finally, you do not need to learn hundreds of techniques to become proficient in the physical aspects of self-defense. Rather, you should train a small number of skills nearly to the point of reflex. Although you cannot do this by simply reading books or watching videos, I have recommended a few resources below that will help you start thinking along practical lines.
It is unpleasant to study the details of crime and violence—and for this reason many of us never do. I am convinced, however, that some planning and preparation can greatly reduce a person's risk. And though there are exceptions to every rule, I don't believe that there are important exceptions to the advice I have given here. May you never have occasion to find it useful.
Recommended Reading
G. de Becker, The Gift of Fear.
R. Miller, Meditations on Violence.
R. Miller, Facing Violence.
S. Strong, Strong on Defense.
G. Thompson, The Fence.
G. Thompson, Dead or Alive.
People who appear to know what they are talking about:
Tony Blauer: http://www.tonyblauer.com/
Marc MacYoung: http://nononsenseselfdefense.com/
Rory Miller: http://chirontraining.com/Site/Home.html
Lee Morrison: http://www.urbancombatives.com/
Geoff Thompson: http://www.geoffthompson.com
There are important differences between effective self-defense training and most martial arts. Training to fight for sport or to master a traditional fighting system, no matter how impressive its techniques, is not the same as training to survive real-world violence. For instance, most students and fans of mixed martial arts (MMA) know that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is the gold standard for fighting on the ground. However, a preference for fighting on the ground is a major liability in the real world. An approach that often works brilliantly in MMA makes no sense when one's goal is to end an encounter quickly and escape, when there are no rules to prevent an attacker from gouging your eyes or using a weapon, or when a second assailant arrives and begins kicking you in the head. Of course, it is essential to know what to do on the ground if you ever find yourself there—and for this, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a perfect tool. But from the perspective of self-defense, you want to remain standing and mobile if given the chance. [NOTE to the note: I have received a fair amount of grief for this note from BJJ practitioners who misunderstood it. I think BJJ is awesome—which is why I am now training in it. And if you find yourself on the ground, it is exactly what you want to know. I did not mean to suggest that BJJ practitioners were unaware of the liability of being on the ground in a self-defense situation, nor was I denying that many fights (even most) go the ground eventually. However, I am claiming that the first tool you want in your self-defense arsenal (beyond awareness and avoidance) is to be able to strike hard with good targeting from a seemingly unaggressive posture (e.g. "the fence"). Hit first, fast, and hard—and run. If this plan fails, and your opponent grabs you, BJJ is brilliant.—SH]
There are also important distinctions between how men and women need to think about the threat of violence. Women are almost never the targets of social-dominance games of the sort I describe here. Rather, they must worry about rapists and other true predators. (For the purposes of this article, I ignore the subject of domestic violence.) And women's attackers often outweigh them by fifty or a hundred pounds. These facts make their security concerns both more pressing and less ambiguous. ↩
The only exception to this rule is if you happen to have a "safe room"—a fortified room in your house equipped with a phone line that cannot be cut. Of course, very few people have one. ↩
It is also worth remembering that you can't assess another person's fighting skills just by looking at him. I've trained with some very scary looking guys who didn't know much of anything and hit with very little power. And I have known men who were small and seemingly out of shape but were absolute killers. A word to the macho: You do not know who you are talking to—and you don't know if he is armed.↩
Other principles follow from this. If you carry a weapon, you should never draw it to threaten your assailant in the hope that he will back down. As Rory Miller points out, if such a threat display fails, it almost guarantees that you will have to use the weapon, or it will be used against you. (And if you threaten with a weapon, the other person can claim to be acting in self-defense.) Therefore, reach for a weapon only if you are prepared to use it and believe you would be justified in doing so.↩
Strangely, carrying a weapon can make it much easier to ignore provocations of this kind. If you are armed, you cannot afford to be lured into casual altercations, no matter how obnoxious your opponent. The impulse to save face easily yields to a deeper form of self-interest: With a weapon, you simply must avoid conflict unless you are given no choice.↩
Admittedly, there are some gray areas here. If you are very experienced and attacked by a much smaller man who appears to be unarmed, you might decide to modulate your initial response and give him a chance to realize that he has picked the wrong target. But even here, if you have followed principles 1 and 2, the onus is on your attacker, and it is only prudent to assume that he is armed, or that he may have friends in the vicinity.↩
As of 2009, violent offenders in the U.S. served an average of 52 months in prison before being returned to the streets. For murderers the average was 118 months; for rapists it was 94 months (BJS.gov). Why genuine murderers and rapists are ever released is a mystery to me—and if we didn't have to make room in our prisons for graduate students caught selling MDMA, perhaps we could keep true predators off our streets. To make matters worse, a Canadian study found that psychopaths are 2.5 times as likely as ordinary criminals to be released from prison—because they successfully con parole boards. And the re-arrest rate for violent offenders is over 60 percent within three years. This paints a rather terrifying picture of our collective masochism: We do not keep dangerous criminals off our streets; rather, we have turned our prisons into graduate schools for predatory violence, and we release their graduates back into society, knowing that most will continue harming innocent people. ↩
If you are present while a place of business is being robbed and you cannot immediately escape, it makes sense to obey orders—to freeze, to get down on the floor—because the focus is not on you. Most robbers just want to get the money from the register and run. However, if they begin taking hostages or shooting people, you should immediately do whatever it takes to escape. Better to dive through a plate-glass window than to allow yourself to be herded to the back of the store. Many scenarios of this kind are discussed in the books I recommend here. ↩
Again, this is provided you don't have a "safe room." Gun tactics are beyond the scope of this essay, but here are a few points to know: You should never attempt to clear your house of intruders yourself. That is a job for the police, and they will probably use five officers with body armor and other specialized equipment to do it. You should also be aware that the interior walls of a home do not stop bullets (and criminals know this). Unless you can get to a fortified position that allows for continuous phone communication with the police, defending in place can entail more risk than attempting to exit the building.↩
The Truth about Violence
(Photo by Julie Mcinnes, Getty Images)
As a teenager, I once had an opportunity to fly in a police helicopter over a major American city. Naively, I thought the experience might be uneventful. Perhaps there would be no crime between 8:00 and 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday night. However, from the moment we were airborne, there was a fresh emergency every fifteen seconds: Shots fired… rape in progress… victim stabbed…It was a deluge. Of course, the impression this left on me was, in part, the result of a sampling bias: I was hearing nothing but incident reports from a city of 4 million people, most of whom would never encounter violence directly. (No one calls the police to say "Everything is still okay!") Yet it was uncanny to discover the chaos that lurked at the margins of my daily routine. A few minutes from where I might otherwise have been eating dinner, rapes, robberies, and murders were in progress.
Just as it is prudent to wear your seat belt while driving, it makes sense to know how best to respond to violence. In fact, it is overwhelmingly likely that some of you will become the targets of violence in the future. The purpose of this essay is to help you prepare for it. While I do not consider myself an expert on personal security, I know enough to have strong opinions. In my youth, I practiced martial arts for many years and eventually taught self-defense classes in college.[] My education included work with firearms and a variety of other weapons. I eventually stopped training and moved on to other things, but my interest in self-defense has resurfaced. It's hard to say why. No doubt receiving occasional death threats and other strange communications has been a factor. But I think that having a family has played a much larger role. I now feel acutely responsible for the safety of those closest to me.
In my experience, most people do not want to think about the reality of human violence. I have friends who sleep with their front doors unlocked and who would never consider receiving instruction in self-defense. For them, gun ownership seems like an ugly and uncivilized flirtation with paranoia. Happily, most of these people will never encounter violence in any form. And good luck will make their unconcern seem perfectly justified.
But here are the numbers: In 2010, there were 403.6 violent crimes per 100,000 persons in the United States. (The good news: This is an overall decrease of 13.4 percent from the level in 2001.) Thus, the average American has a 1 in 250 chance of being robbed, assaulted, raped, or murdered each year. Actually, the chance is probably greater than this, because we know that certain crimes, such as assault and rape, are underreported.
Of course, your risks vary depending on who you are and where you live. In Compton, one of the more dangerous parts of Los Angeles, your chances of experiencing violent crime in 2010 were 1 in 71; if you lived in Beverly Hills they were 1 in 458. Still, even in good neighborhoods, the likelihood of being attacked is hardly remote. In the comparative safety of Beverly Hills, assuming the crime rate stays constant, the probability that you will be robbed, assaulted, raped or murdered at some point over the next 30 years is 1 in 16. (The average risk in the U.S. is 1 in 9; in Compton it's better than 1 in 3.) Again, these statistics surely paint too rosy a picture, because many crimes go unreported.
It may seem onerous to prepare yourself and your family to respond to violence, but not doing so is also a form of preparation. Failing to prepare is to be well prepared to do the wrong thing. Although most of us are good at recognizing danger, our instincts often lead us to behave in ways that increase our chances of being injured or killed once a threat emerges.
Why can't civilized people like ourselves simply rely on the police? Well, look around you: Do you see a cop? Unless you happen to be a police officer yourself, or are married to one, you are very unlikely to be attacked in the presence of law enforcement. The role of the police is to respond in the aftermath of a crime and, with a little luck, to catch the person who committed it. If you are ever targeted by a violent predator, whether you and your family are injured or killed will depend on what you do in the first moments of the encounter. When it comes to survival, therefore, you are entirely on your own. Once you escape and are in a safe place, by all means call the police. But dialing 911 when an intruder has broken into your home is not a strategy for self-defense.[]
However, instruction in self-defense need not consume your life. The most important preparations are mental. While I certainly recommend that you receive some physical training, merely understanding the dynamics of violence can make you much safer than you might otherwise be.
Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places.
The primary goal of self-defense is to avoid becoming the victim of violence. The best way to do this is to not be where violence is likely to occur. Of course, that's not always possible—but without question, it is your first and best line of defense. If you visit dangerous neighborhoods at night, or hike alone and unarmed on trails near a big city, or frequent places where drunken young men gather, you are running some obvious risks.
I once knew an experienced martial artist who decided to walk across Central Park late at night. He was aware of the danger, but he thought "I have a black belt in karate. Why shouldn't I be able to walk wherever I want?" As it happened, this rhetorical question was answered almost immediately: My friend hadn't ventured more than a hundred yards into the darkness of the park before he was confronted by three men, one of whom plunged a hypodermic needle into his thigh without a word. Our hero bolted and escaped, otherwise unharmed, but he spent the next three months wondering whether he had been infected with HIV, hepatitis, or some other blood-borne disease. (He was fine.) The lesson: Whatever your training, you needn't be foolish.
Similarly, all men should learn to recognize and shun status-seeking displays of aggression. This is one problem that women generally don't have to worry about. It is, for instance, very rare for a woman to find herself party to an exchange like this:
"What are you looking at, asshole?"
"Who are you calling an asshole?"
"You, bitch. What are you going to do about it?"
Nevertheless, young men are easily lured into social dominance games from which neither party can find a face-saving exit. The violence that erupts at such moments is as unnecessary as it is predictable. If you want to preserve your health and stay out of prison, you must learn to avoid or defuse conflict of this kind.
When a conflict turns physical, there is always a risk that someone will be severely injured or killed. Imagine spending a year or more in prison because you couldn't resist punching some bully who dearly deserved it, but who then hit his head on a fire hydrant and died from a brain injury. As a matter of law, the moment you engage in avoidable violence of this kind—rising to a challenge and escalating the conflict—you lose any legal claim to self-defense. Rather, you were fighting—which is illegal—and in this case you accidentally killed your opponent. You are now likely to get more practice fighting in prison. (Meanwhile, the costs of your criminal defense, and perhaps a subsequent civil lawsuit, could easily bankrupt you.) Take this maxim to heart: Self-defense is not about winning fights with aggressive men who probably have less to lose than you do.[]
Another principle is lurking here that should be made explicit: Never threaten your opponent. The purpose of his verbal challenge was to get you to respond in such a way as to make him feel justified in attacking you. You shouldn't collaborate in this process or advertise your readiness to defend yourself. Even if violence seems unavoidable, and you decide to strike preemptively, you should do so from a seemingly unaggressive posture, retaining the element of surprise. (This requires training.) Putting up your dukes and agreeing to fight has no place in a self-defense repertoire.[]
Thus, whatever ego problems or impulse-control issues you have should be worked out ahead of time. You should forget about saving face while recognizing that if you ever find yourself in a social-dominance contest you will probably feel a deep urge to say or do the wrong thing.[] Deciding on an appropriate course of action in advance is your best protection against being dangerously stupid in the heat of the moment. The challenge for every man is to decline to play an ancient game whose rules and imperatives have been inscribed in his very cells. If you want to avoid unnecessary violence, you must keep your inner ape on a very short leash.
"What are you looking at, asshole?"
"Sorry, man. I was just spacing out. It's been a long day."
De-escalate and move on.
You should also learn to trust your feelings of apprehension about other people—revising them only slowly and with good reason. This may seem like a very depressing piece of advice. It is. Most of us don't want to see the world this way, and we take great pains to avoid being rude or appearing racist, suspicious, etc. But violent predators invariably play upon this commitment to civility. The truth is that most of us are very good at detecting ulterior motives and malevolence in others. We must learn to trust these intuitions. To read the reports of rapes, murders, kidnappings and other violent crimes is to continually discover how easily good people can be manipulated by bad ones.
You are under no obligation, for instance, to give a stranger who has rung your doorbell, or decided to stand unusually close to you on the street, the benefit of the doubt. If a man who makes you uncomfortable steps onto an elevator with you, step off. If a man approaches you while you are sitting in your car and something about him doesn't seem right, you don't need to roll down your window and have a conversation. Victims of crime often sense that something is wrong in the first moments of encountering their attackers but feel too socially inhibited to create the necessary distance and escape.
Principle #2: Do not defend your property.
Whatever your training, you should view any invitation to violence as an opportunity to die—or to be sent to prison for killing another human being. Violence must truly be the last resort. Thus, if someone sticks a gun in your face and demands your wallet, you should hand it over without hesitation—and run.
If you look out your kitchen window and see a group of youths destroying your car, you should remain inside and call the police. It doesn't matter if you happen to be a Navy Seal who keeps a loaded shotgun by the front door. You don't want to kill a teenager for vandalism, and you don't want to get shot by one for hesitating to pull the trigger. Unless you or another person is being physically harmed, or an attack seems imminent, avoiding violence should be your only concern.
Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape.
If you have principles 1 and 2 firmly installed in your brain, any violence that finds you is, by definition, unavoidable. There is a tremendous power in knowing this: When you find yourself without other options, you are free to respond with full commitment.
This is the core principle of self-defense: Do whatever you can to avoid a physical confrontation, but the moment avoidance fails, attack explosively for the purposes of escape—not to mete out justice, or to teach a bully a lesson, or to apprehend a criminal. Your goal is to get away with minimum trauma (to you), while harming your attacker in any way that seems necessary to ensure your escape.[]
If you find yourself in such a situation, you should assume that your opponent is a career criminal who has victimized many others before you.[] Do not waste an instant imagining that you can reason with him. Most victims of violence are so terrified of being injured or killed that they will believe any promise a predator makes. It is not difficult to see why.
Imagine: You are loading groceries into your car and man appears at your side with a gun.
"Get in the car, and you won't get hurt."
Your instincts are probably bad here: Getting in the car is the last thing you should do.
"Get in the car, or I'll blow your head off."
However bad your options may appear in the moment, complying with the demands of a person who is seeking to control your movements is a terrible idea. Yes, there are criminals whose only goal is to steal your property. But anyone who attempts to control you—by moving you to another room, putting you in a car, tying you up—probably intends to kill you (or worse). And you must understand in advance that your natural reaction to this situation—to freeze, to comply with instructions—will be the wrong one.
If someone puts a gun to your head and demands your purse or wallet, hand it over immediately and run. Don't worry about being shot in the back: If your attacker is going to shoot you for running, he was going to shoot you if you stayed in place, and at point-blank range. By running, you make yourself harder to kill. Any attempt to move you, even by a few feet—backing you off a sidewalk and into an alley, forcing you behind a row of bushes—is unacceptable and should mobilize all your physical and emotional resources.[]
If you find yourself in a situation where a predator is trying to control you, the time for listening to instructions and attempting to remain calm has passed. It will get no easier to resist and escape after these first moments. The presence of weapons, the size or number of your attackers—these details are irrelevant. However bad the situation looks, it will only get worse. To hesitate is to put yourself at the mercy of a sociopath. You have no alternative but to explode into action, whatever the risk. Recognizing when this line has been crossed, and committing to escape at any cost, is more important than mastering physical techniques.
Herein lies a crucial distinction between traditional martial arts and realistic self-defense: Most martial artists train for a "fight." Opponents assume ready stances, just out of each other's range, and then practice various techniques or spar (engage in controlled fighting). This does not simulate real violence. It doesn't prepare you to respond effectively to a sudden attack, in which you have been hit before you even knew you were threatened, and it doesn't teach you to strike preemptively, without telegraphing your moves, once you have determined that an attack is imminent.
Whatever your physical skills, when you commit to using force against another person, your overriding goal is still to escape. Even if you are at home, in possession of a firearm, and well trained to use it, when confronted by an intruder your best defense is to get out of the house as quickly as possible. In such a circumstance, a gun is a means of ensuring that no one can block your exit.[]
Nothing good ever comes to people who allow themselves to be moved to a remote location at the mercy of a violent predator. The police call such places "secondary crime scenes." They are always better for the attacker and worse for his victim because they are more isolated than the first point of contact. And although your home may be the most familiar place on earth to you, the moment an intruder enters, it becomes the equivalent of a secondary crime scene. You should also expect that any criminal who breaks into your home when you're inside it has come prepared to murder you and your family. To naive readers, this may sound like an extraordinarily paranoid assumption. It isn't. Mere burglars generally make sure a house is empty before breaking in.
If a window shatters in the middle of the night and someone comes through it, your life is on the line. There is nothing to talk about, no offer of cash or jewelry to muster, no demands worth listening to. You must do whatever it takes to escape.
One of the most common and disturbing features of home invasions is how the victims' concern for one another and desire to stay together is inevitably used against them. By exploiting these bonds, even a single attacker can immobilize an entire family. By merely holding a knife to the wife's throat, he can get the husband to submit to being tied up. Again, it is perfectly natural for victims in these circumstances to hope that if they just cooperate, their attacker will show them mercy. If you get nothing else from this article, engrave this iron law on your mind: The moment it is clear that an assailant wants more than your property (which must be assumed in any home invasion), you must escape.
What if your attacker has a knife to your child's throat and tells you that everything is going to be okay as long as you cooperate by lying face down on the floor? Don't do it. It would be better to flee the house—because as soon as you leave, he will know that the clock is ticking: Within moments, you will be at a neighbor's home summoning help. If this intruder is going to murder your child before fleeing himself, he was going to murder your child anyway—either before or after he killed you. And he was going to take his time doing it. Granted, it is almost impossible to imagine leaving one's child in such a circumstance—but if you can't leave, you must grab a weapon and press your own attack. Complying in the hope that a sociopath will keep his promise to you is always the wrong move.
Here is how the police look at it:
From a cop's point of view, citizens seem to keep making the same mistakes over and over, until all cases begin to sound alike…. The objective of a violent criminal is to control you, emotionally and physically. Everything he does—his threats and promises—is intended to terrify and control you. The more control you give to the violent criminal, even if you see it as temporary, the less likely you are to escape. For most crime victims, their temporary cooperation backfired into full control over them. Time works against the victim and for the criminal. The longer you stall, the more you talk, the deeper you sink.
(S. Strong. Strong on Defense. pp. 49-50).
True self-defense is based not on techniques but on principles. Yes, it is good to know how to deliver a palm strike or elbow to a person's head with real power (technique), but it is far more important to know when to unleash with whatever tools you have for the purpose of immediate escape (principle). You must install a trigger in your mind—to act explosively once a certain line has been crossed—and you must understand that your inclination will most likely be to freeze and acquiesce, in the hope of avoiding injury or death. Mental preparation is a matter of resolving, in advance, to burst past these inhibitions and escape immediately, or fight with everything you've got until escape is possible.
Certain scenarios are intrinsically confusing and should be discussed with your family in advance: What if a person dressed as a police officer comes to your door and asks to be let in? Unless you are absolutely certain that he is a cop—e.g. you can see that he arrived in a marked police car—you should explain that you have no way of knowing who he is and then call the police yourself. Thousands of crimes are committed each year by people impersonating cops. (Anyone can buy a uniform and a badge over the Internet.) Similarly, many home invasions begin with a criminal's acting like a person in distress: A woman or a teenager might come to your door reporting an accident or some other emergency. Again, the safe move is to keep your door locked and call the police.
Finally, you do not need to learn hundreds of techniques to become proficient in the physical aspects of self-defense. Rather, you should train a small number of skills nearly to the point of reflex. Although you cannot do this by simply reading books or watching videos, I have recommended a few resources below that will help you start thinking along practical lines.
It is unpleasant to study the details of crime and violence—and for this reason many of us never do. I am convinced, however, that some planning and preparation can greatly reduce a person's risk. And though there are exceptions to every rule, I don't believe that there are important exceptions to the advice I have given here. May you never have occasion to find it useful.
Recommended Reading
G. de Becker, The Gift of Fear.
R. Miller, Meditations on Violence.
R. Miller, Facing Violence.
S. Strong, Strong on Defense.
G. Thompson, The Fence.
People who appear to know what they are talking about:
Tony Blauer: http://www.tonyblauer.com/
Marc MacYoung: http://nononsenseselfdefense.com/
Rory Miller: http://chirontraining.com/Site/Home.html
Lee Morrison: http://www.urbancombatives.com/
Geoff Thompson: http://www.geoffthompson.com
There are also important distinctions between how men and women need to think about the threat of violence. Women are almost never the targets of social-dominance games of the sort I describe here. Rather, they must worry about rapists and other true predators. (For the purposes of this article, I ignore the subject of domestic violence.) And women's attackers often outweigh them by fifty or a hundred pounds. These facts make their security concerns both more pressing and less ambiguous. ↩
The only exception to this rule is if you happen to have a "safe room"—a fortified room in your house equipped with a phone line that cannot be cut. Of course, very few people have one. ↩
It is also worth remembering that you can't assess another person's fighting skills just by looking at him. I've trained with some very scary looking guys who didn't know much of anything and hit with very little power. And I have known men who were small and seemingly out of shape but were absolute killers. A word to the macho: You do not know who you are talking to—and you don't know if he is armed.↩
Other principles follow from this. If you carry a weapon, you should never draw it to threaten your assailant in the hope that he will back down. As Rory Miller points out, if such a threat display fails, it almost guarantees that you will have to use the weapon, or it will be used against you. (And if you threaten with a weapon, the other person can claim to be acting in self-defense.) Therefore, reach for a weapon only if you are prepared to use it and believe you would be justified in doing so.↩
Strangely, carrying a weapon can make it much easier to ignore provocations of this kind. If you are armed, you cannot afford to be lured into casual altercations, no matter how obnoxious your opponent. The impulse to save face easily yields to a deeper form of self-interest: With a weapon, you simply must avoid conflict unless you are given no choice.↩
Admittedly, there are some gray areas here. If you are very experienced and attacked by a much smaller man who appears to be unarmed, you might decide to modulate your initial response and give him a chance to realize that he has picked the wrong target. But even here, if you have followed principles 1 and 2, the onus is on your attacker, and it is only prudent to assume that he is armed, or that he may have friends in the vicinity.↩
The only data I could find on prisoner release and recidivism in the United States are out of date, but they are nonetheless shocking. As of 1992, violent offenders in the U.S. served an average of 43 months in jail and prison before being returned to the streets. For murderers the average was 71 months; for rapists it was 65 months. Why genuine murderers and rapists are ever released is a mystery to me—and if we didn't have to make room in our prisons for graduate students caught selling MDMA, perhaps we could keep true predators off our streets. To make matters worse, a Canadian study found that psychopaths are 2.5 times as likely as ordinary criminals to be released from prison—because they successfully con parole boards. And the re-arrest rate for violent offenders is over 60 percent within three years. This paints a rather terrifying picture of our collective masochism: We do not keep dangerous criminals off our streets; rather, we have turned our prisons into graduate schools for predatory violence, and we release their graduates back into society, knowing that most will continue harming innocent people. ↩
If you are present while a place of business is being robbed and you cannot immediately escape, it makes sense to obey orders—to freeze, to get down on the floor—because the focus is not on you. Most robbers just want to get the money from the register and run. However, if they begin taking hostages or shooting people, you should immediately do whatever it takes to escape. Better to dive through a plate-glass window than to allow yourself to be herded to the back of the store. Many scenarios of this kind are discussed in the books I recommend here. ↩
Again, this is provided you don't have a "safe room." Gun tactics are beyond the scope of this essay, but here are a few points to know: You should never attempt to clear your house of intruders yourself. That is a job for the police, and they will probably use five officers with body armor and other specialized equipment to do it. You should also be aware that the interior walls of a home do not stop bullets (and criminals know this). Unless you can get to a fortified position that allows for continuous phone communication with the police, defending in place can entail more risk than attempting to exit the building.↩
October 19, 2011
The Mystery of Consciousness II
(Photo by h.koppdelaney)
The universe is filled with physical phenomena that appear devoid of consciousness. From the birth of stars and planets, to the early stages of cell division in a human embryo, the structures and processes we find in Nature seem to lack an inner life. At some point in the development of certain complex organisms, however, consciousness emerges. This miracle does not depend on a change of materials—for you and I are built of the same atoms as a fern or a ham sandwich. Rather, it must be a matter of organization. Arranging atoms in a certain way appears to bring consciousness into being. And this fact is among the deepest mysteries given to us to contemplate.
Many readers of my previous essay did not understand why the emergence of consciousness should pose a special problem to science. Every feature of the human mind and body emerges over the course development: Why is consciousness more perplexing than language or digestion? The problem, however, is that the distance between unconsciousness and consciousness must be traversed in a single stride, if traversed at all. Just as the appearance of something out of nothing cannot be explained by our saying that the first something was "very small," the birth of consciousness is rendered no less mysterious by saying that the simplest minds have only a glimmer of it.
This situation has been characterized as an "explanatory gap" and the "hard problem of consciousness," and it is surely both. I am sympathetic with those who, like the philosopher Colin McGinn and the psychologist Steven Pinker, have judged the impasse to be total: Perhaps the emergence of consciousness is simply incomprehensible in human terms. Every chain of explanation must end somewhere—generally with a brute fact that neglects to explain itself. Consciousness might represent a terminus of this sort. Defying analysis, the mystery of inner life may one day cease to trouble us.
However, many people imagine that consciousness will yield to scientific inquiry in precisely the way that other difficult problems have in the past. What, for instance, is the difference between a living system and a dead one? Insofar as the question of consciousness itself can be kept off the table, it seems that the difference is now reasonably clear to us. And yet, as late as 1932, the Scottish physiologist J.S. Haldane (father of J.B.S. Haldane) wrote:
What intelligible account can the mechanistic theory of life give of the…recovery from disease and injuries? Simply none at all, except that these phenomena are so complex and strange that as yet we cannot understand them. It is exactly the same with the closely related phenomena of reproduction. We cannot by any stretch of the imagination conceive a delicate and complex mechanism which is capable, like a living organism, of reproducing itself indefinitely often.
Scarcely twenty years passed before our imaginations were duly stretched. Much work in biology remains to be done, of course, but anyone who entertains vitalism at this point stands convicted of basic ignorance about the nature of living systems. The jury is no longer out on questions of this sort, and more than half a century has passed since the earth's creatures required an élan vital to propagate themselves or to recover from injury. Are doubts that we will arrive at a physical explanation of consciousness analogous to doubts about the feasibility of explaining life in terms of processes that are not alive?
The analogy is a bad one: Life is defined according to external criteria; Consciousness is not (and, I think, cannot be). We would never have occasion to say of something that does not eat, excrete, grow, or reproduce that it might nevertheless be "alive." It might, however, be conscious.
But other analogies seem to offer hope. Consider our sense of sight: Doesn't vision emerge from processes that are themselves blind? And doesn't such a miracle of emergence make consciousness seem less mysterious?
Unfortunately, no. In the case of vision, we are speaking merely about the transduction of one form of energy into another (electromagnetic into electrochemical). Photons cause light-sensitive proteins to alter the spontaneous firing rates of our rods and cones, beginning an electrochemical cascade that affects neurons in many areas of the brain—achieving, among other things, a topographical mapping of the visual scene onto the visual cortex. While this chain of events is complicated, the fact of its occurrence is not in principle mysterious. The emergence of vision from a blind apparatus strikes us as a difficult problem simply because when we think of vision, we think of the conscious experience of seeing. That eyes and visual cortices emerged over the course of evolution presents no special obstacles to us; that there should be "something that it is like" to be the union of an eye and a visual cortex is itself the problem of consciousness—and it is as intractable in this form as in any other.
But couldn't a mature neuroscience nevertheless offer a proper explanation of human consciousness in terms of its underlying brain processes? We have reasons to believe that reductions of this sort are neither possible nor conceptually coherent. Nothing about a brain, studied at any scale (spatial or temporal), even suggests that it might harbor consciousness. Nothing about human behavior, or language, or culture, demonstrates that these products are mediated by subjectivity. We simply know that they are—a fact that we appreciate in ourselves directly and in others by analogy.
Here is where the distinction between studying consciousness and studying its contents becomes paramount. It is easy to see how the contents of consciousness might be understood at the level of the brain. Consider, for instance, our experience of seeing an object—its color, contours, apparent motion, location in space, etc. arise in consciousness as a seamless unity, even though this information is processed by many separate systems in the brain. Thus when a golfer prepares to hit a shot, he does not first see the ball's roundness, then its whiteness, and only then its position on the tee. Rather, he enjoys a unified perception of a ball. Many neuroscientists believe that this phenomenon of "binding" can be explained by disparate groups of neurons firing in synchrony. Whether or not this theory is true, it is perfectly intelligible—and it suggests, as many other findings in neuroscience do, that the character of our experience can often be explained in terms of its underlying neurophysiology. However, when we ask why it should be "like something" to see in the first place, we are returned to the mystery of consciousness in full.
For these reasons, it is difficult to imagine what experimental findings could render the emergence of consciousness comprehensible. This is not to say, however, that our understanding of ourselves won't change in surprising ways through our study of the brain. There seems to be no limit to how a maturing neuroscience might reshape our beliefs about the nature of conscious experience. Are we fully conscious during sleep and merely failing to form memories? Can human minds be duplicated or merged? Is it possible to love your neighbor as yourself? A precise, functional neuroanatomy of our mental states would help to answer such questions—and the answers might well surprise us. And yet, whatever insights arise from correlating mental and physical events, it seems unlikely that one side of the world will be fully reduced to the other.
While we know many things about ourselves in anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary terms, we do not know why it is "like something" to be what we are. The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in this universe. How is it that unconscious events can give rise to consciousness? Not only do we have no idea, but it seems impossible to imagine what sort of idea could fit in the space provided. Therefore, although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our mental life. That doesn't leave much scope for conventional religious doctrines, but it does offer a deep foundation (and motivation) for introspection. Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly, or not discovered at all.
The Mystery of Consciousness II
(Photo by h.koppdelaney)
The universe is filled with physical phenomena that appear devoid of consciousness. From the birth of stars and planets, to the early stages of cell division in a human embryo, the structures and processes we find in Nature seem to lack an inner life. At some point in the development of certain complex organisms, however, consciousness emerges. This miracle does not depend on a change of materials—for you and I are built of the same atoms as a fern or a ham sandwich. Rather, it must be a matter of organization. Arranging atoms in a certain way appears to bring consciousness into being. And this fact is among the deepest mysteries given to us to contemplate.
Many readers of my previous essay did not understand why the emergence of consciousness should pose a special problem to science. Every feature of the human mind and body emerges over the course development: Why is consciousness more perplexing than language or digestion? The problem, however, is that the distance between unconsciousness and consciousness must be traversed in a single stride, if traversed at all. Just as the appearance of something out of nothing cannot be explained by our saying that the first something was "very small," the birth of consciousness is rendered no less mysterious by saying that the simplest minds have only a glimmer of it.
This situation has been characterized as an "explanatory gap" and the "hard problem of consciousness," and it is surely both. I am sympathetic with those who, like the philosopher Colin McGinn and the psychologist Steven Pinker, have judged the impasse to be total: Perhaps the emergence of consciousness is simply incomprehensible in human terms. Every chain of explanation must end somewhere—generally with a brute fact that neglects to explain itself. Consciousness might represent a terminus of this sort. Defying analysis, the mystery of inner life may one day cease to trouble us.
However, many people imagine that consciousness will yield to scientific inquiry in precisely the way that other difficult problems have in the past. What, for instance, is the difference between a living system and a dead one? Insofar as the question of consciousness itself can be kept off the table, it seems that the difference is now reasonably clear to us. And yet, as late as 1932, the Scottish physiologist J.S. Haldane (father of J.B.S. Haldane) wrote:
What intelligible account can the mechanistic theory of life give of the…recovery from disease and injuries? Simply none at all, except that these phenomena are so complex and strange that as yet we cannot understand them. It is exactly the same with the closely related phenomena of reproduction. We cannot by any stretch of the imagination conceive a delicate and complex mechanism which is capable, like a living organism, of reproducing itself indefinitely often.
Scarcely twenty years passed before our imaginations were duly stretched. Much work in biology remains to be done, of course, but anyone who entertains vitalism at this point stands convicted of basic ignorance about the nature of living systems. The jury is no longer out on questions of this sort, and more than half a century has passed since the earth's creatures required an élan vital to propagate themselves or to recover from injury. Are doubts that we will arrive at a physical explanation of consciousness analogous to doubts about the feasibility of explaining life in terms of processes that are not alive?
The analogy is a bad one: Life is defined according to external criteria; Consciousness is not (and, I think, cannot be). We would never have occasion to say of something that does not eat, excrete, grow, or reproduce that it might nevertheless be "alive." It might, however, be conscious.
But other analogies seem to offer hope. Consider our sense of sight: Doesn't vision emerge from processes that are themselves blind? And doesn't such a miracle of emergence make consciousness seem less mysterious?
Unfortunately, no. In the case of vision, we are speaking merely about the transduction of one form of energy into another (electromagnetic into electrochemical). Photons cause light-sensitive proteins to alter the spontaneous firing rates of our rods and cones, beginning an electrochemical cascade that affects neurons in many areas of the brain—achieving, among other things, a topographical mapping of the visual scene onto the visual cortex. While this chain of events is complicated, the fact of its occurrence is not in principle mysterious. The emergence of vision from a blind apparatus strikes us as a difficult problem simply because when we think of vision, we think of the conscious experience of seeing. That eyes and visual cortices emerged over the course of evolution presents no special obstacles to us; that there should be "something that it is like" to be the union of an eye and a visual cortex is itself the problem of consciousness—and it is as intractable in this form as in any other.
But couldn't a mature neuroscience nevertheless offer a proper explanation of human consciousness in terms of its underlying brain processes? We have reasons to believe that reductions of this sort are neither possible nor conceptually coherent. Nothing about a brain, studied at any scale (spatial or temporal), even suggests that it might harbor consciousness. Nothing about human behavior, or language, or culture, demonstrates that these products are mediated by subjectivity. We simply know that they are—a fact that we appreciate in ourselves directly and in others by analogy.
Here is where the distinction between studying consciousness and studying its contents becomes paramount. It is easy to see how the contents of consciousness might be understood at the level of the brain. Consider, for instance, our experience of seeing an object—its color, contours, apparent motion, location in space, etc. arise in consciousness as a seamless unity, even though this information is processed by many separate systems in the brain. Thus when a golfer prepares to hit a shot, he does not first see the ball's roundness, then its whiteness, and only then its position on the tee. Rather, he enjoys a unified perception of a ball. Many neuroscientists believe that this phenomenon of "binding" can be explained by disparate groups of neurons firing in synchrony. Whether or not this theory is true, it is perfectly intelligible—and it suggests, as many other findings in neuroscience do, that the character of our experience can often be explained in terms of its underlying neurophysiology. However, when we ask why it should be "like something" to see in the first place, we are returned to the mystery of consciousness in full.
For these reasons, it is difficult to imagine what experimental findings could render the emergence of consciousness comprehensible. This is not to say, however, that our understanding of ourselves won't change in surprising ways through our study of the brain. There seems to be no limit to how a maturing neuroscience might reshape our beliefs about the nature of conscious experience. Are we fully conscious during sleep and merely failing to form memories? Can human minds be duplicated or merged? Is it possible to love your neighbor as yourself? A precise, functional neuroanatomy of our mental states would help to answer such questions—and the answers might well surprise us. And yet, whatever insights arise from correlating mental and physical events, it seems unlikely that one side of the world will be fully reduced to the other.
While we know many things about ourselves in anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary terms, we do not know why it is "like something" to be what we are. The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in this universe. How is it that unconscious events can give rise to consciousness? Not only do we have no idea, but it seems impossible to imagine what sort of idea could fit in the space provided. Therefore, although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our mental life. That doesn't leave much scope for conventional religious doctrines, but it does offer a deep foundation (and motivation) for introspection. Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly, or not discovered at all.
October 11, 2011
The Mystery of Consciousness
(Photo by AlicePopkorn)
You are not aware of the electrochemical events occurring at each of the trillion synapses in your brain at this moment. But you are aware, however dimly, of sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, and moods. At the level of your experience, you are not a body of cells, organelles, and atoms; you are consciousness and its ever-changing contents, passing through various stages of wakefulness and sleep, and from cradle to grave.
The term "consciousness" is notoriously difficult to define. Consequently, many a debate about its character has been waged without the participants' finding even a common topic as common ground. By "consciousness," I mean simply "sentience," in the most unadorned sense. To use the philosopher Thomas Nagel's construction: A creature is conscious if there is "something that it is like" to be this creature; an event is consciously perceived if there is "something that it is like" to perceive it. Whatever else consciousness may or may not be in physical terms, the difference between it and unconsciousness is first and foremost a matter of subjective experience. Either the lights are on, or they are not.[]
To say that a creature is conscious, therefore, is not to say anything about its behavior; no screams need be heard, or wincing seen, for a person to be in pain. Behavior and verbal report are fully separable from the fact of consciousness: We can find examples of both without consciousness (a primitive robot) and consciousness without either (a person suffering "locked-in syndrome").[]
It is surely a sign of our intellectual progress that a discussion of consciousness no longer has to begin with a debate about its existence. To say that consciousness may only seem to exist is to admit its existence in full—for if things seem any way at all, that is consciousness. Even if I happen to be a brain in a vat at this moment—all my memories are false; all my perceptions are of a world that does not exist—the fact that I am having an experience is indisputable (to me, at least). This is all that is required for me (or any other conscious being) to fully establish the reality of consciousness. Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.[]
As our understanding of the physical world has evolved, our notion of what counts as "physical" has broadened considerably. A world teeming with fields and forces, vacuum fluctuations, and the other gossamer spawn of modern physics is not the physical world of common sense. In fact, our common sense seems to be stuck somewhere in the 16th century. We have also generally forgotten that many of the patriarchs of physics in the first half of the 20th century regularly impugned the "physicality" of the universe. Nonreductive views like those of Eddington, Jeans, Pauli, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger seem to have had no lasting impact.[] In some ways we can be thankful for this, for a fair amount of mumbo jumbo was in the air. Wolfgang Pauli, for instance, though one of the titans of modern physics, was also a devotee of Carl Jung, who apparently analyzed no fewer than 1,300 of the great man's dreams.[] Pauli's thoughts about the irreducibility of mind seem to have had as much to do with Jung's least credible ideas as with quantum mechanics.
Such numinous influences eventually subsided. And once physicists got down to the serious business of building bombs, we were apparently returned to a universe of objects—and to a style of discourse, across all branches of science and philosophy, that made the mind seem ripe for reduction to the "physical" world.
The problem, however, is that no evidence for consciousness exists in the physical world.[] Physical events are simply mute as to whether it is "like something" to be what they are. The only thing in this universe that attests to the existence of consciousness is consciousness itself; the only clue to subjectivity, as such, is subjectivity. Absolutely nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, suggests that it is a locus of experience. Were we not already brimming with consciousness ourselves, we would find no evidence of it in the physical universe—nor would we have any notion of the many experiential states that it gives rise to. The painfulness of pain, for instance, puts in an appearance only in consciousness. And no description of C-fibers or pain-avoiding behavior will bring the subjective reality into view.
If we look for consciousness in the physical world, all we find are increasingly complex systems giving rise to increasingly complex behavior—which may or may not be attended by consciousness. The fact that the behavior of our fellow human beings persuades us that they are (more or less) conscious does not get us any closer to linking consciousness to physical events. Is a starfish conscious? A scientific account of the emergence of consciousness would answer this question. And it seems clear that we will not make any progress by drawing analogies between starfish behavior and our own. It is only in the presence of animals sufficiently like ourselves that our intuitions about (and attributions of) consciousness begin to crystallize. Is there "something that it is like" to be a cocker spaniel? Does it feel its pains and pleasures? Surely it must. How do we know? Behavior, analogy, parsimony.[]
Most scientists are confident that consciousness emerges from unconscious complexity. We have compelling reasons for believing this, because the only signs of consciousness we see in the universe are found in evolved organisms like ourselves. Nevertheless, this notion of emergence strikes me as nothing more than a restatement of a miracle. To say that consciousness emerged at some point in the evolution of life doesn't give us an inkling of how it could emerge from unconscious processes, even in principle.
I believe that this notion of emergence is incomprehensible—rather like a naive conception of the big bang. The idea that everything (matter, space-time, their antecedent causes, and the very laws that govern their emergence) simply sprang into being out of nothing seems worse than a paradox. "Nothing," after all, is precisely that which cannot give rise to "anything," let alone "everything." Many physicists realize this, of course. Fred Hoyle, who coined "big bang" as a term of derogation, is famous for opposing this creation myth on philosophical grounds, because such an event seems to require a "preexisting space and time." In a similar vein, Stephen Hawking has said that the notion that the universe had a beginning is incoherent, because something can begin only with reference to time, and here we are talking about the beginning of space-time itself. He pictures space-time as a four-dimensional closed manifold, without beginning or end—much like the surface of a sphere.
Naturally, it all depends on how one defines "nothing." The physicist Lawrence Krauss has written a wonderful book arguing that the universe does indeed emerge from nothing. But in the present context, I am imagining a nothing that is emptier still—a condition without antecedent laws of physics or anything else. It might still be true that the laws of physics themselves sprang out of nothing in this sense, and the universe along with them—and Krauss says as much. Perhaps that is precisely what happened. I am simply claiming that this is not an explanation of how the universe came into being. To say "Everything came out of nothing" is to assert a brute fact that defies our most basic intuitions of cause and effect—a miracle, in other words.
Likewise, the idea that consciousness is identical to (or emerged from) unconscious physical events is, I would argue, impossible to properly conceive—which is to say that we can think we are thinking it, but we are mistaken. We can say the right words, of course—"consciousness emerges from unconscious information processing." We can also say "Some squares are as round as circles" and "2 plus 2 equals 7." But are we really thinking these things all the way through? I don't think so.
Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. It seems to me that just as "something" and "nothing," however juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work, an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness. However, this is not to say that some other thesis about consciousness must be true. Consciousness may very well be the lawful product of unconscious information processing. But I don't know what that sentence means—and I don't think anyone else does either.
Follow-up article: The Mystery of Consciousness II
It's true that some philosophers and neuroscientists will want to pull the brakes right here. Daniel Dennett, with whom I agree about so many things, tells me that if I can't imagine the falsehood of the above statement, I'm not trying hard enough. However, on a question as rudimentary as the ontology of consciousness, the debate often comes down to irreconcilable intuitions. At a certain point one has to admit that one cannot understand what one's opponents are talking about.↩
It is possible that some robots are conscious. If consciousness is the sort of thing that comes into being purely by virtue of information processing, then even our cellphones and coffeemakers may be conscious. But few of us imagine that there is "something that it is like" to be even the most advanced computer. Whatever its relationship to information processing, consciousness is an internal reality that cannot necessarily be appreciated from the outside and need not be associated with behavior or responsiveness to stimuli. If you doubt this, you must read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean Dominique-Bauby's astonishing and heartbreaking account of his own "locked-in syndrome"—which he dictated by signing to a nurse with his left eyelid—and then try to imagine what his predicament would have been if even this degree of motor control had been denied him.↩
While Descartes is probably the first Western philosopher to make this point, others have continued to emphasize it—notably the philosophers John Searle and David Chalmers. I do not agree with Descartes's dualism, or with some of what Searle and Chalmers have said about the nature of consciousness, but I agree that its subjective reality is both primary and indisputable. Of course, this does not rule out the possibility that consciousness is, in fact, identical to certain brain processes.
And, again, I should say that philosophers like Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland just don't buy this. But I do not understand why. My not seeing how consciousness can possibly be an illusion entails my not understanding how they (or anyone else) can think that it might be one. I agree, of course, that we may be profoundly mistaken about consciousness—about how it arises, about its connection to matter, about precisely what we are conscious of and when, etc. But this is not the same as saying that consciousness itself may be entirely illusory. The state of being utterly confused about the nature of consciousness is itself a demonstration of consciousness.↩
The stuff of the world is mind-stuff. (Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World)
The old dualism of mind and matter… seems likely to disappear ... through substantial matter resolving itself into a creation and manifestation of mind. (Jeans, The Mysterious Universe)
The only acceptable point of view appears to be the one that recognizes both sides of reality—the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical—as compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously. (Pauli, Writings on Physics and Philosophy)
The conception of the objective reality of the elementary particles has thus evaporated not into the cloud of some obscure new reality concept, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of the particle but rather our knowledge of this behavior. (Heisenberg, The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics)
[W]e simply cannot see how material events can be transformed into sensation and thought, however many textbooks—go on talking nonsense on the subject. (Schrödinger, My View of the World)
↩
Dyson, F. (2002). The Conscience of Physics. Nature, 420(12 December), 607-608.↩
Leibniz was perhaps the first to make this point explicit, in his analogy of the mill:
Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in a simple substance, and not in a compound or in a machine, that perception must be sought for. Further, nothing but this (namely, perceptions and their changes) can be found in a simple substance. It is also in this alone that all the internal activities of simple substances can consist. (The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings, para. 17)↩
Some scientists and philosophers have formed the mistaken impression that it is always more parsimonious to deny consciousness in animals than to attribute it to them. I have argued elsewhere that this is not the case (The End of Faith, pp. 276-277). To deny consciousness in chimpanzees, for instance, is to assume the burden of explaining why their genetic, neuroanatomical, and behavioral similarity to us is an insufficient basis for consciousness (good luck).↩
Follow-up article: The Mystery of Consciousness II
The Mystery of Consciousness
(Photo by AlicePopkorn)
You are not aware of the electrochemical events occurring at each of the trillion synapses in your brain at this moment. But you are aware, however dimly, of sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, and moods. At the level of your experience, you are not a body of cells, organelles, and atoms; you are consciousness and its ever-changing contents, passing through various stages of wakefulness and sleep, and from cradle to grave.
The term "consciousness" is notoriously difficult to define. Consequently, many a debate about its character has been waged without the participants' finding even a common topic as common ground. By "consciousness," I mean simply "sentience," in the most unadorned sense. To use the philosopher Thomas Nagel's construction: A creature is conscious if there is "something that it is like" to be this creature; an event is consciously perceived if there is "something that it is like" to perceive it. Whatever else consciousness may or may not be in physical terms, the difference between it and unconsciousness is first and foremost a matter of subjective experience. Either the lights are on, or they are not.[]
To say that a creature is conscious, therefore, is not to say anything about its behavior; no screams need be heard, or wincing seen, for a person to be in pain. Behavior and verbal report are fully separable from the fact of consciousness: We can find examples of both without consciousness (a primitive robot) and consciousness without either (a person suffering "locked-in syndrome").[]
It is surely a sign of our intellectual progress that a discussion of consciousness no longer has to begin with a debate about its existence. To say that consciousness may only seem to exist is to admit its existence in full—for if things seem any way at all, that is consciousness. Even if I happen to be a brain in a vat at this moment—all my memories are false; all my perceptions are of a world that does not exist—the fact that I am having an experience is indisputable (to me, at least). This is all that is required for me (or any other conscious being) to fully establish the reality of consciousness. Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.[]
As our understanding of the physical world has evolved, our notion of what counts as "physical" has broadened considerably. A world teeming with fields and forces, vacuum fluctuations, and the other gossamer spawn of modern physics is not the physical world of common sense. In fact, our common sense seems to be stuck somewhere in the 16th century. We have also generally forgotten that many of the patriarchs of physics in the first half of the 20th century regularly impugned the "physicality" of the universe. Nonreductive views like those of Eddington, Jeans, Pauli, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger seem to have had no lasting impact.[] In some ways we can be thankful for this, for a fair amount of mumbo jumbo was in the air. Wolfgang Pauli, for instance, though one of the titans of modern physics, was also a devotee of Carl Jung, who apparently analyzed no fewer than 1,300 of the great man's dreams.[] Pauli's thoughts about the irreducibility of mind seem to have had as much to do with Jung's least credible ideas as with quantum mechanics.
Such numinous influences eventually subsided. And once physicists got down to the serious business of building bombs, we were apparently returned to a universe of objects—and to a style of discourse, across all branches of science and philosophy, that made the mind seem ripe for reduction to the "physical" world.
The problem, however, is that no evidence for consciousness exists in the physical world.[] Physical events are simply mute as to whether it is "like something" to be what they are. The only thing in this universe that attests to the existence of consciousness is consciousness itself; the only clue to subjectivity, as such, is subjectivity. Absolutely nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, suggests that it is a locus of experience. Were we not already brimming with consciousness ourselves, we would find no evidence of it in the physical universe—nor would we have any notion of the many experiential states that it gives rise to. The painfulness of pain, for instance, puts in an appearance only in consciousness. And no description of C-fibers or pain-avoiding behavior will bring the subjective reality into view.
If we look for consciousness in the physical world, all we find are increasingly complex systems giving rise to increasingly complex behavior—which may or may not be attended by consciousness. The fact that the behavior of our fellow human beings persuades us that they are (more or less) conscious does not get us any closer to linking consciousness to physical events. Is a starfish conscious? A scientific account of the emergence of consciousness would answer this question. And it seems clear that we will not make any progress by drawing analogies between starfish behavior and our own. It is only in the presence of animals sufficiently like ourselves that our intuitions about (and attributions of) consciousness begin to crystallize. Is there "something that it is like" to be a cocker spaniel? Does it feel its pains and pleasures? Surely it must. How do we know? Behavior, analogy, parsimony.[]
Most scientists are confident that consciousness emerges from unconscious complexity. We have compelling reasons for believing this, because the only signs of consciousness we see in the universe are found in evolved organisms like ourselves. Nevertheless, this notion of emergence strikes me as nothing more than a restatement of a miracle. To say that consciousness emerged at some point in the evolution of life doesn't give us an inkling of how it could emerge from unconscious processes, even in principle.
I believe that this notion of emergence is incomprehensible—rather like a naive conception of the big bang. The idea that everything (matter, space-time, their antecedent causes, and the very laws that govern their emergence) simply sprang into being out of nothing seems worse than a paradox. "Nothing," after all, is precisely that which cannot give rise to "anything," let alone "everything." Many physicists realize this, of course. Fred Hoyle, who coined "big bang" as a term of derogation, is famous for opposing this creation myth on philosophical grounds, because such an event seems to require a "preexisting space and time." In a similar vein, Stephen Hawking has said that the notion that the universe had a beginning is incoherent, because something can begin only with reference to time, and here we are talking about the beginning of space-time itself. He pictures space-time as a four-dimensional closed manifold, without beginning or end—much like the surface of a sphere.
Naturally, it all depends on how one defines "nothing." The physicist Lawrence Krauss has written a wonderful book arguing that the universe does indeed emerge from nothing. But in the present context, I am imagining a nothing that is emptier still—a condition without antecedent laws of physics or anything else. It might still be true that the laws of physics themselves sprang out of nothing in this sense, and the universe along with them—and Krauss says as much. Perhaps that is precisely what happened. I am simply claiming that this is not an explanation of how the universe came into being. To say "Everything came out of nothing" is to assert a brute fact that defies our most basic intuitions of cause and effect—a miracle, in other words.
Likewise, the idea that consciousness is identical to (or emerged from) unconscious physical events is, I would argue, impossible to properly conceive—which is to say that we can think we are thinking it, but we are mistaken. We can say the right words, of course—"consciousness emerges from unconscious information processing." We can also say "Some squares are as round as circles" and "2 plus 2 equals 7." But are we really thinking these things all the way through? I don't think so.
Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. It seems to me that just as "something" and "nothing," however juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work, an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness. However, this is not to say that some other thesis about consciousness must be true. Consciousness may very well be the lawful product of unconscious information processing. But I don't know what that sentence means—and I don't think anyone else does either.
Follow-up article: The Mystery of Consciousness II
It is possible that some robots are conscious. If consciousness is the sort of thing that comes into being purely by virtue of information processing, then even our cellphones and coffeemakers may be conscious. But few of us imagine that there is "something that it is like" to be even the most advanced computer. Whatever its relationship to information processing, consciousness is an internal reality that cannot necessarily be appreciated from the outside and need not be associated with behavior or responsiveness to stimuli. If you doubt this, you must read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean Dominique-Bauby's astonishing and heartbreaking account of his own "locked-in syndrome"—which he dictated by signing to a nurse with his left eyelid—and then try to imagine what his predicament would have been if even this degree of motor control had been denied him.↩
While Descartes is probably the first Western philosopher to make this point, others have continued to emphasize it—notably the philosophers John Searle and David Chalmers. I do not agree with Descartes's dualism, or with some of what Searle and Chalmers have said about the nature of consciousness, but I agree that its subjective reality is both primary and indisputable. Of course, this does not rule out the possibility that consciousness is, in fact, identical to certain brain processes.
And, again, I should say that philosophers like Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland just don't buy this. But I do not understand why. My not seeing how consciousness can possibly be an illusion entails my not understanding how they (or anyone else) can think that it might be one. I agree, of course, that we may be profoundly mistaken about consciousness—about how it arises, about its connection to matter, about precisely what we are conscious of and when, etc. But this is not the same as saying that consciousness itself may be entirely illusory. The state of being utterly confused about the nature of consciousness is itself a demonstration of consciousness.↩
The stuff of the world is mind-stuff. (Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World)
The old dualism of mind and matter… seems likely to disappear ... through substantial matter resolving itself into a creation and manifestation of mind. (Jeans, The Mysterious Universe)
The only acceptable point of view appears to be the one that recognizes both sides of reality—the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical—as compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously. (Pauli, Writings on Physics and Philosophy)
The conception of the objective reality of the elementary particles has thus evaporated not into the cloud of some obscure new reality concept, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of the particle but rather our knowledge of this behavior. (Heisenberg, The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics)
[W]e simply cannot see how material events can be transformed into sensation and thought, however many textbooks—go on talking nonsense on the subject. (Schrödinger, My View of the World)
↩
Dyson, F. (2002). The Conscience of Physics. Nature, 420(12 December), 607-608.↩
Leibniz was perhaps the first to make this point explicit, in his analogy of the mill:
Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in a simple substance, and not in a compound or in a machine, that perception must be sought for. Further, nothing but this (namely, perceptions and their changes) can be found in a simple substance. It is also in this alone that all the internal activities of simple substances can consist. (The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings, para. 17)↩
Some scientists and philosophers have formed the mistaken impression that it is always more parsimonious to deny consciousness in animals than to attribute it to them. I have argued elsewhere that this is not the case (The End of Faith, pp. 276-277). To deny consciousness in chimpanzees, for instance, is to assume the burden of explaining why their genetic, neuroanatomical, and behavioral similarity to us is an insufficient basis for consciousness (good luck).↩
Follow-up article: The Mystery of Consciousness II
October 3, 2011
Twilight of Violence
Steven Pinker is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, the author of several magnificent books about the human mind, and one of the most influential scientists on earth. He is also my friend, an occasional mentor, and an advisor to my nonprofit foundation, Project Reason.
Steve's new book is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Reviewing it for the New York Times Book Review, the philosopher Peter Singer called it "a supremely important book." I have no doubt that it is, and I very much look forward to reading it. In the meantime, Steve was kind enough to help produce a written interview for this blog.
I suspect that when most people hear the thesis of your book—that human violence has steadily declined—they are skeptical: Wasn't the 20th century the most violent in history?
Probably not. Data from previous centuries are far less complete, but the existing estimates of death tolls, when calculated as a proportion of the world's population at the time, show at least nine atrocities before the 20th century (that we know of) which may have been worse than World War II. They arose from collapsing empires, horse tribe invasions, the slave trade, and the annihilation of native peoples, with wars of religion close behind. World War I doesn't even make the top ten.
Also, a century comprises a hundred years, not just fifty, and the second half of the 20th century was host to a Long Peace among great powers and developed nations (the subject of one of the book's chapters) and more recently, to a New Peace in the rest of the world (the subject of another chapter), with unusually low rates of warfare.
Need I remind you that the "atheist regimes" of the 20th century killed tens of millions of people?
This is a popular argument among theoconservatives and critics of the new atheism, but for many reasons it is historically inaccurate.
First, the premise that Nazism and Communism were "atheist" ideologies makes sense only within a religiocentric worldview that divides political systems into those that are based on Judaeo-Christian ideology and those that are not. In fact, 20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judaeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any of hundreds of other belief systems. They were based on the ideas of Hitler and Marx, not David Hume and Bertrand Russell, and the horrors they inflicted are no more a vindication of Judeao-Christianity than they are of astrology or alchemy or Scientology.
Second, Nazism and Fascism were not atheistic in the first place. Hitler thought he was carrying out a divine plan. Nazism received extensive support from many German churches, and no opposition from the Vatican. Fascism happily coexisted with Catholicism in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Croatia.
Third, according to the most recent compendium of history's worst atrocities, Matthew White's Great Big Book of Horrible Things (Norton, 2011), religions have been responsible for 13 of the 100 worst mass killings in history, resulting in 47 million deaths. Communism has been responsible for 6 mass killings and 67 million deaths. If defenders of religion want to crow, "We were only responsible for 47 million murders—Communism was worse!", they are welcome to do so, but it is not an impressive argument.
Fourth, many religious massacres took place in centuries in which the world's population was far smaller. Crusaders, for example, killed 1 million people in world of 400 million, for a genocide rate that exceeds that of the Nazi Holocaust. The death toll from the Thirty Years War was proportionally double that of World War I and in the range of World War II in Europe.
When it comes to the history of violence, the significant distinction is not one between theistic and atheistic regimes. It's the one between regimes that were based on demonizing, utopian ideologies (including Marxism, Nazism, and militant religions) and secular liberal democracies that are based on the ideal of human rights. I present data from the political scientist Rudolph Rummel showing that democracies are vastly less murderous than alternative forms of government.
Your claim that violence has declined depends on comparing rates of violence relative to population size. Is that really a fair measure? Should we give ourselves credit for being less violent just because there has been population growth?
You can think about it in a number of ways, but they all lead to the conclusion that it is the proportion, rather than the absolute number, of deaths that is relevant. First, if the population grows, so does the potential number of murderers and despots and rapists and sadists. So if the absolute number of victims of violence stays the same or even increases, while the proportion decreases, something important must have changed to allow all those extra people to grow up free of violence.
Second, if one focuses on absolute numbers, one ends up with moral absurdities such as these: (a) it's better to reduce the size of a population by half and keep the rates of rape and murder the same than to reduce the rates of rape and murder by a third; (b) even if a society's practices were static, so that its rates of war and violence don't change, its people would be worse and worse off as the population grows, because a greater absolute number of them would suffer; (c) every child brought into the world is a moral evil, because there is a nonzero probability that he or she will be a victim of violence.
As I note in the book, "Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. So the number of people in a given time and place who enjoy full lives has to be counted as a moral good, against which we calibrate the moral bad of the number who are victims of violence. Another way of expressing this frame of mind is to ask, `If I were one of the people who were alive in a particular era, what would be the chances that I would be a victim of violence?' [Either way, we are led to] the conclusion that in comparing the harmfulness of violence across societies, we should focus on the rate, rather than the number, of violent acts."
Where did you get your data?
It depends. For the contrast between nonstate and state societies, I used data from forensic archeology and from quantitative ethnography. For the history of homicide in Europe, data from coroners and town records go back centuries. Western governments today keep good data on homicides (the violent crime of choice, because a dead body is hard to explain away), and several of them conduct crime victimization surveys for other crimes (which avoid the distortion of how willing victims are to report crimes to the police). For wars large and small, and other kinds of armed conflict since 1946, we have the Uppsala Conflict Data Project/Human Security Report Project and the Peace Research Institute of Oslo. For larger wars since 1816, I used datasets from the Correlates of War Project. Some historians and political scientists (such as Pitirim Sorokin, Quincy Wright, Peter Brecke, and Jack Levy) have tried to quantify war deaths in earlier periods, and "atrocitologists" such as Matthew White and Rudolph Rummel have done so for genocides, deliberate famines, and other kinds of mass violence. And of course in recent decades almost no aspect of life has gone unquantified by pollsters, government bureaucrats, and social scientists.
Haven't we just been lucky? If Churchill hadn't stood up to Hitler, if Stalin hadn't been willing to sacrifice tens of millions of Russians, if German scientists had succeeded in their nuclear program, then most of the world would be living under the horrors of the Third Reich.
True, but these counterfactuals go both ways. As John Mueller has put it, "had Adolf Hitler gone into art rather than politics, had he been gassed a bit more thoroughly by the British in the trenches in 1918, had he, rather than the man marching next to him, been gunned down in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, had he failed to survive the automobile crash he experienced in 1930, had he been denied the leadership position in Germany, or had he been removed from office at almost any time before September 1939 (and possibly even before May 1940), Europe's greatest war would most probably never have taken place."
One could argue that in fact the world has just emerged from a run of stupendous bad luck, one in which three extraordinarily bloodthirsty men—Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—managed to take over powerful states, and were responsible for a majority of the deaths from war and genocide in the 20th century. Many historians have argued as follows: No Hitler, no Holocaust; no Stalin, no Purge; no Mao, no Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
I repeat: Haven't we just been lucky? On a number of occasions, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world seems to have come dangerously close to nuclear annihilation.
According to the most recent analyses of documents from the Cuban Missile Crisis (see, e.g., Max Frankel's High Noon in the Cold War), both the US and USSR desperately tried to get out of the crisis, avoiding unnecessary provocations and offering greater concessions than they had to. Other allegedly just-this-close brushes with Armageddon, such as the Vietnam and Yom Kippur wars, were even less perilous. As Mueller puts it, the metaphor of an escalator, in which one misstep could have carried leaders up and away to all-out nuclear war, is misleading. A better metaphor is a ladder: each rung made leaders increasingly acrophobic, and in every case they nervously sought a way to step back down.
You attribute a part of the decline of violence to the forces of modernity and enlightenment. Yet Germany before the Nazi takeover was the most cultured, advanced, and cosmopolitan society in the world. Doesn't this show that cultural and intellectual sophistication are no protection against barbarism?
It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind. Weimar Germany did have subcultures that were sophisticated and cosmopolitan. But it also had subcultures, both elite and grassroots, that loathed secular modernity and Enlightenment universalism and signed on to Counter-Enlightenment sentiments of romantic militarism and nationalism—the valorization of blood and soil. The problem was that members of the second subculture murdered the members of the first. In a section called "Ideology" I discuss social psychology experiments showing how the silencing of dissenting views can result in the takeover of a society by a belief system that few of its individual members hold individually—the phenomenon of "extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds."
Have there been times in history when violence has increased? If so, couldn't it happen again?
Of course. Examples of increases of violence I discuss include a rise in the concentration of destructiveness of European wars up until World War II, the heyday of genocidal dictators in the middle decades of the 20th century, the rise of crime in the 1960s, and the bulge of civil wars in the developing world following decolonization. Yet every one of these developments has been systematically reversed.
The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with. The point of Better Angels is that in each case humanity has succeeded in reducing them. I even present some statistical evidence for this cycle of unpleasant shocks followed by sadder-but-wiser recoveries.
As to whether violence might increase in the future: of course it might. My argument is not that an increase in violence in the future is impossible; it's that a decrease in violence has taken place in the past. These are different claims.
Most people seem to think that wars erupt over scarce resources? Is this true?
Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, and most shortages of resources don't lead to war. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s did not lead to an American Civil war; nor did the tsunamis of 2003 and 2011 lead to war in Indonesia or Japan. And several statistical studies of recent armed conflicts have failed to find a correlation between drought or other forms of environmental degradation and war. Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity.
Are you willing to make any predictions about violence in the future?
I think that the humanitarian movements that have gathered momentum since the Enlightenment will continue to make progress. The burning of heretics, gruesome executions, blood sports, slavery, debtors' prisons, foot-binding, eunuchism, and wars between developed states won't make a comeback any time soon. Most likely capital punishment, violence against women, human trafficking, the beating and bullying of children, and the persecution of homosexuals will continue to decline, albeit bumpily and unevenly, over a span of decades. I'm willing to go out on this limb because international moral shaming campaigns in the past (such as those against piracy, whaling, and slavery) have generally succeeded over the long term. I think there is also a non-negligible chance that within the next 25–50 years there will be fewer bloodthirsty despots, and that nuclear weapons could be abolished. But terrorist attacks, civil war, and wars involving non-democracies are too capricious to predict, since they depend so much on the actions of individuals. Also, crime rates have defied every expert prediction, and it would be foolish to say that they could not go back up.
One of my great concerns is that technology is making it easier for one person to harm vast numbers of other people. It is certainly conceivable that one event—a hugely successful act of bioterrorism, for instance—could suddenly displace us from this historical trend toward pacifism that you describe. And, as Jonathan Glover pointed out in his fine book Humanity—technology has made it so that those things that are most harmful are not necessarily most disturbing. Thus, if waging war becomes increasingly like playing a video game, the gamer-soldiers of the future might be appalled by the brutality of a bar fight but capable of annihilating whole populations by remote control with a clear conscience. There is also the worry that the most destructive technologies will find their way into the hands of people who have not had their moral intuitions tuned by modernity—think Mongols with nuclear weapons. I'm wondering to what degree you share these concerns.
Yes, I discuss all of them. It's an interesting question—almost a philosophical question—whether a single kook with a nuke, or a small number of fanatics with other weapons of mass destruction, would count as displacing the world from its historical trend toward pacifism, if the vast majority of the world were appalled by the destruction and continued its pacific trajectory. A large number of deaths from a single renegade perpetrator would be a misleading indicator of the state of the world. But more to the point, I don't think that it's inevitable, or even particularly likely, that a terrorist group will get its hands on a loose nuke or build a garage nuke, nor that it would engineer an epidemic-scale pathogen.
I also admire Glover's Humanity (I wrote a glowing review of it for the New York Times when it came out), but I don't think that the transition from face-to-face to remote-control styles of killing have led to an increase in deaths. In past centuries, men with swords, spears, daggers, bows and arrows, pikes, bayonets, and muskets could kill people by the millions, while today's drones are targeted to take out enemies in the single digits—and when an errant drone in Afghanistan killed ten civilians (which would have been a rounding error in previous wars), it was an international incident that brought out profuse apologies. I argue in the book that weaponry is overrated as a driver of violence—human intentions are vastly more important. And while it's true that people have an aversion to causing direct bodily harm to a stranger, this skittishness is easily set aside, or even inverted into a ferocious savagery, under a variety of circumstances, including vengeance, panic, and sadism.
Can you recommend other books on violence?
Violence has always brought out the best in novelists and playwrights, and it has produced brilliant nonfiction writing as well. Here are some good books on bad behavior, written with insight, wit, and panache:
Brownmiller, S. (1975). Against our will: Men, women, and rape.
Courtwright, D. T. (1996). Violent land: Single men and social disorder from the frontier to the inner city.
Chagnon, N. A. (1997). Yanomamö (5th ed.)
Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1988). Homicide.
Goldstein, J. S. (2011). Winning the war on war: The decline in armed conflict worldwide.
Gottschall, J. (2008). The rape of troy: Evolution, violence, and the world of Homer.
Keeley, L. H. (1996). War before civilization: The myth of the peaceful savage.
McCullough, M. E. (2008). Beyond revenge: the evolution of the forgiveness instinct.
Payne, J. L. (2004). A history of force: Exploring the worldwide movement against habits of coercion, bloodshed, and mayhem.
Richardson, L. F. (1960). Statistics of deadly quarrels.
Rummel, R. J. (1994). Death by government.
Mueller, J. (1989). Retreat from doomsday: The obsolescence of major war.
Schechter, H. (2005). Savage Pastimes: A history of violent entertainment.
Valentino, B. (2004). Final solutions: Mass killing and genocide in the 20th century.
White, M. (2011). The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities.
Sam Harris's Blog
- Sam Harris's profile
- 8949 followers
