The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity

by Steven Pinker

There is no cure for ideology, because it emerges from many of the cognitive faculties that make us smart. We envision long, abstract chains of causation. We acquire knowledge from other people. We coordinate our behavior with them, sometimes by adhering to common norms. We work in teams, accomplishing feats we could not accomplish on our own. We entertain abstractions, without lingering over every concrete detail. We construe an action in multiple ways, differing in means and ends, goals and by-products.

much of the decline in violence seems to have come from changes in the times.

The alternative to the myth of pure evil is that most of the harm that people visit on one another comes from motives that are found in every normal person. And the corollary is that much of the decline of violence comes from people exercising these motives less often,

Increasingly we see our affairs from two vantage points: from inside our skulls, where the things we experience just are, and from a scientist’s-eye view, where the things

we experience consist of patterns of activity in an evolved brain, with all its illusions and fallacies.

It seems to me that a small number of quirks in our cognitive and emotional makeup give rise to a substantial proportion of avoidable human misery.298 It also seems to me that a shared inkling of these quirks has made some dents in the toll of violence and has the potential to chip away at much more. Each of our five inner demons comes with a design feature that we have begun to notice and would be wise to acknowledge further. People, especially men, are overconfident in their prospects for success; when they fight each other, the outcome is likely to be bloodier than any of them thought. People, especially men, strive for dominance for themselves and their groups; when contests of dominance are joined, they are unlikely to sort the parties by merit and are likely to be a net loss for everyone. People seek revenge by an accounting that exaggerates their innocence and their adversary’s malice; when two sides seek perfect justice, they condemn themselves and their heirs to strife. People can not only overcome their revulsion to hands-on violence but acquire a taste for it; if they indulge it in private, or in cahoots with their peers, they can become sadists. And people can avow a belief they don’t hold because they think everyone else avows it; such beliefs can sweep through a closed

society and bring it under the spell of a collective delusion.

empathy today is becoming what love was in the 1960s—a sentimental ideal, extolled in catchphrases

The decline of violence may owe something to an expansion of empathy, but it also owes much to harder-boiled faculties like prudence, reason, fairness, self-control, norms and taboos, and conceptions of human rights.

This chapter is about the better angels of our nature: the psychological faculties that steer us away from violence, and whose increased engagement over time can be credited for declines in violence. Empathy is one of these faculties, but it is not the only one.

I will resist the temptation to please the crowd with too happy an ending. The parts of the brain that restrain our darker impulses were also standard equipment in our ancestors who kept slaves, burned witches, and beat children, so they clearly don’t make people good by default.

The word empathy is barely a century old.

projection—the

perspective-taking,

Mind-reading, theory of mind, mentalizing, or empathic accuracy

distress

Emotions can be contagious.

sympathetic concern,

Oxytocin

cuteness.

More empathic people are also more guilt-prone (particularly women, who excel at both emotions),

Sympathy and guilt, they note, operate within a circle of communal relationships.40 They are less likely to be felt in exchange or equality-matching relationships,

perspective-sympathy hypothesis.

the sympathy-altruism hypothesis

a sleeper effect.

The tradeoff between empathy and fairness

The other problem with empathy is that it is too parochial

Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity.

What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—

Ever since Adam and Eve ate the apple, Odysseus had himself tied to the mast, the grasshopper sang while the ant stored food, and Saint Augustine prayed “Lord make me chaste—but not yet,” individuals have struggled with self-control. In modern societies the virtue is all the more vital, because now that we have tamed the blights of nature most of our scourges are self-inflicted.

Self-indulgence becomes irrational only when we discount the future too steeply—when

There is an optimum rate of discounting the future

What is not rational is to eat and drink as if there’s no tomorrow when there really is a tomorrow.

what looks like a lack of self-control in the modern world may consist of using a discounting rate that was wired into our nervous systems in the iffy world of our pre-state ancestors,

the preference flips with imminence in time, a phenomenon called myopic discounting.

hyperbolic discounting rather than the more rational exponential discounting.

myopic discounting arises from a handoff between two systems inside the skull, one for rewards that are imminent, another for rewards that are far in the future or entirely hypothetical.

Walter Mischel, who conducted classic studies of myopic discounting in children (the kids are given the agonizing choice between one marshmallow now and two marshmallows in fifteen minutes),

the desire for instant gratification comes from a “hot system” in the brain, whereas the patience to wait comes from a “cool system.”

Can we explain self-control as a tug of war between the limbic system and the frontal lobes?

Aside from intelligence, no other trait augurs as well for a healthy and successful life.

the more self-control people have, the better their lives are.

The trajectory of crime in adolescence and young adulthood is related to an increase in self-control,

SELF-CONTROL IS PHYSICAL EFFORT

self-control, like a muscle, can become fatigued.

ego depletion).

According to the theory of the Civilizing Process, a dearth of self-control in medieval Europe underlay many forms of dissoluteness, including slovenliness, petulance, licentiousness, uncouthness, steep discounting of the future, and most important, violence.

Techniques in which the present self handicaps the future self are sometimes called Odyssean

rational adjustment of one’s discounting rate in response to the uncertainty of the environment could create a vicious circle, since your own recklessness then figures into the discounting rate of everyone else. The Matthew Effect, in which everything seems to go right in some societies and wrong in others, could be a consequence of environmental uncertainty and psychological recklessness feeding on each other.

society might boost their self-control is by improving their nutrition, sobriety, and health.