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

by Steven Pinker

In much of the living world, violence is simply the default, something that needs no further explanation.

we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.5

And if he thinks that once attacked you may rationally hold back from retaliation, because at that point it’s too late to do any good, he might exploit that rationality and attack you with impunity.

Before the advent of civilization, when men lived without “a common power to keep them all in awe,” their lives should have been nastier, more brutish, and shorter than when peace was imposed on them by armed authorities, a development I will call the Pacification Process. Hobbes claimed that “savage people in many places in America” lived in a state of violent anarchy,

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who opined that “nothing can be more gentle than [man] in his primitive state …. The example of the savages … seems to confirm that mankind was formed ever to remain in it, … and that all ulterior improvements have been so many steps … towards the decrepitness of the species.”

Many anthropologists believe that if Hobbes was right, war would be inevitable or even desirable; therefore anyone who favors peace must insist that Hobbes was wrong.

more recent and abundant Homo fossils show that the males have been larger than the females for at least two million years, by at least as great a ratio as in modern humans. This reinforces the suspicion that violent competition among men has a long history in our evolutionary lineage.22

Many criminologists believe that the source of the state’s pacifying effect isn’t just its brute coercive power but the trust it commands among the populace.

One is that violence is caused by a deficit of morality and justice. On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators.

The historical Civilizing Process, in other words, did not eliminate violence, but it did relegate it to the socioeconomic margins.

The immediate trigger for self-help justice, then, is anarchy, not herding itself.

Alcohol interferes with synaptic transmission throughout the cerebrum, especially in the prefrontal cortex (see figure 8–3), the region responsible for self-control. An inebriated brain is less inhibited sexually, verbally, and physically, giving us idioms like beer goggles, roaring drunk, and Dutch courage. Many studies have shown that people with a tendency toward violence are more likely to act on it when they are under the influence of alcohol.

The idea that young men are civilized by women and marriage may seem as corny as Kansas in August, but it has become a commonplace of modern criminology.

This so-called culture war, I suspect, is the product of a history in which white America took two different paths to civilization. The North is an extension of Europe and continued the court- and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance.

Elias had written that the demands of self-control and the embedding of the self into webs of interdependence were historically reflected in the development of timekeeping devices and a consciousness of time: “This is why tendencies in the individual so often rebel against social time as represented by his or her super-ego, and why so many people come into conflict with themselves when they wish to be punctual.”

an orderly environment fosters a sense of responsibility not so much by deterrence (since Groningen police rarely penalize litterers) as by the signaling of a social norm: This is the kind of place where people obey the rules.

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split.”

When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them—or worse, who credibly rebut them—they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.