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January 1 - January 1, 2020
people’s blood glucose level plummets as their ego is depleted by an attention-consuming or a willpower-demanding task.
In addition to being modulated by Ulyssean constraints, cognitive reframing, an adjustable internal discount rate, improvements in nutrition, and the equivalent of muscle gain with exercise, self-control might be at the mercy of whims in fashion.
during the centuries in which homicide plummeted in England, the effective interest rate also plummeted, from more than 10 percent to around 2 percent.
Friedrich Nietzsche distinguished between Apollonian and Dionysian cultures, named after the Greek gods of light and wine,
The citizens of countries with more of a long-term orientation commit fewer homicides, as do the citizens of countries that emphasize restraint over indulgence.
The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest.
think motivation is overrated. You show me some lazy prick who’s lying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis, and I’ll show you someone who’s not causing any fucking trouble!”
The mentality of taboo, like the mentality of morality of which it is part, also can pull in either direction. It can turn religious or sexual nonconformity into an outrage that calls for ghastly punishment, but it can also prevent the mind from sliding into dangerous territory
How can we make sense of this crazy angel—the part of human nature that would seem to have the strongest claim to be the source of our goodness, but that in practice can be more diabolical than our worst inner demon?
What in our psychology allows the joke to be mightier than the sword?
“Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; Communism is the exact opposite.”
a retrenchment of the moral sense to smaller territories leaves fewer transgressions for which people may legitimately be punished. There is a bedrock of morality based on autonomy and fairness on which everyone, traditional and modern, liberal and conservative, agrees.
retracting the moral sense from its traditional spheres of community, authority, and purity entails a reduction of violence. And that retraction is precisely the agenda of classical liberalism:
many ostensibly sacred values are really pseudo-sacred and may be compromised if a taboo tradeoff is cleverly reframed.
the moral trend away from community, authority, and purity is indeed an effect of mobility and cosmopolitanism.
Another subverter of community, authority, and purity is the objective study of history.
many democracies were traumatized by revisionist histories that unearthed their nations’ shallow roots and exposed their sordid misdeeds.
It is perhaps the finest portrayal of the vulnerability of the human moral sense to competing convictions, most of which are morally wrong.
The only problem with Singer’s metaphor is that the history of moral concern looks less like an escalator than an elevator that gets stuck on a floor for
current IQ tests tap abstract, formal reasoning: the ability to detach oneself from parochial knowledge of one’s own little world and explore the implications of postulates in purely hypothetical worlds.
Flynn’s father was stuck in a concrete, prescientific mode of thinking. He refused to enter a hypothetical world and explore its consequences, which is one of the ways people can rethink their moral commitments, including their tribalism and racism.
Moral stupidity was not confined to the policies of leaders; it was written into the law of the land.
The kind of reasoning relevant to moral progress is not general intelligence in the sense of raw brainpower, but the cultivation of abstract reasoning, the aspect of intelligence that has been pulled upward by the Flynn Effect.
The kind of reason that expands moral sensibilities comes not from grand intellectual “systems” but from the exercise of logic, clarity, objectivity, and proportionality. These habits of mind are distributed unevenly across the population at any time, but the Flynn Effect lifts all the boats, and so we might expect to see a tide of mini- and micro-enlightenments across elites and ordinary citizens alike.
People whose language is less integratively complex, on average, are more likely to react to frustration with violence
It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration. It is from him only that we learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of
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my mood is one not so much of optimism as of gratitude.
will look for common threads in the Pacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Rights Revolutions. Each should represent a way in which predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, or ideology has been overpowered by self-control, empathy, morality, or reason.
Weaponry, in other words, appears to be largely endogenous to the historical dynamics that result in large declines in violence.
When people are rapacious or terrified, they develop the weapons they need; when cooler heads prevail, the weapons rust in peace.
The most destructive eruptions of the past half millennium were fueled not by resources but by ideologies, such as religion, revolution, nationalism, fascism, and communism
homicides are driven by moralistic motives like payback for insults and infidelity rather than by material motives such as cash or food.
We are believing, moralizing animals, and a lot of our violence comes from destructive ideologies rather than not enough wealth.
But subtler accommodations instigated by breakaway denominations, reform movements, ecumenical councils, and other liberalizing forces have allowed other religions to be swept along by the humanistic tide. It is when fundamentalist forces stand athwart those currents and impose tribal, authoritarian, and puritanical constraints that religion becomes a force for violence.
THE PACIFIST’S DILEMMA
All of this means that even the most steely-eyed utilitarian calculus, in which a disinterested observer tots up the total happiness and unhappiness, will deem violence undesirable, because it creates more unhappiness in its victims than happiness in its perpetrators, and lowers the aggregate amount of happiness in the world.
And here is the key to identifying a common thread that might tie together the historical reducers of violence. Each should change the payoff structure of the Pacifist’s Dilemma—the numbers in the checkerboard—in a way that attracts the two sides into the upper left cell, the one that gives them the mutual benefits of peace.
the postwar transformation of the mission of the European state, from military prowess to cradle-to-grave nurturance, is almost a caricature of traditional gender roles.
the expanding circle (as I have been using the term) and the escalator of reason are conceptually distinct
The first involves occupying another person’s vantage point and imagining his or her emotions as if they were one’s own. The second involves ascending to an Olympian, superrational vantage point—the perspective of eternity, the view from nowhere—and considering one’s own interests and another person’s as equivalent.
The escalator of reason has an additional exogenous source: the nature of reality, with its logical relationships and empirical facts that are independent of the psychological makeup of the thinkers who attempt to grasp them. As humans have honed the institutions of knowledge and reason, and purged superstitions and inconsistencies from their systems of belief, certain conclusions were bound t...
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the limited reach of empathy, with its affinity for people like us and people close to us, suggests that empathy needs the universalizing boost of reason to bring about changes in policies and norms that actually reduce violence in the world
A humanistic value system, which privileges human flourishing as the ultimate good, is a product of reason because it can be justified: it can be mutually agreed upon by any community of thinkers who value their own interests and are engaged in reasoned negotiation, whereas communal and authoritarian values are parochial to a tribe or hierarchy
The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.
nostalgia for a peaceable past is the biggest delusion of all.
Our species was born into the dilemma because our ultimate interests are distinct, because our vulnerable bodies make us sitting ducks for exploitation, and because the enticements to being the exploiter rather than the exploited will sentence all sides to punishing conflict. Unilateral pacifism is a losing strategy, and joint peace is out of everyone’s reach. These maddening contingencies are inherent in the mathematical structure of the payoffs, and in that sense they are in the nature of reality.
Human nature, as evolution left it, is not up to the challenge of getting us into the blessedly peaceful cell in the upper left corner of the matrix. Motives like greed, fear, dominance, and lust keep drawing us toward aggression.
In writing this book I have adopted a voice that is analytic, and at times irreverent, because I believe the topic has inspired too much piety and not enough understanding. But at no point have I been unaware of the reality behind the numbers. To review the history of violence is to be repeatedly astounded by the cruelty and waste of it all, and at times to be overcome with anger, disgust, and immeasurable sadness.
with deepening horror as it comes to realize just how much suffering has been inflicted by the naked ape upon its own kind.
For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.
