The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

prehistoric remains convey the distinct impression that The Past is a place where a person had a high chance of coming to bodily harm.

Yet for all this reverence, the Bible is one long celebration of violence.

The Israelites assemble at Mount Sinai and hear the Ten Commandments, the great moral code that outlaws engraved images and the coveting of livestock but gives a pass to slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide of neighboring tribes.

Sensibilities toward violence have changed so much that religious people today compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.

The question is why they don’t, given that their beliefs imply that it would serve the greater good. The answer is that people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology. When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration,

When a tendency toward violence evolves, it is always strategic. Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.

A credible deterrence policy can remove a competitor’s incentive to invade for gain, since the cost imposed on him by retaliation would cancel out the

anticipated spoils. And it removes his incentive to invade from fear, because of your commitment not to strike first and, more importantly, because of your reduced incentive to strike first, since deterrence reduces the need for preemption.

Not only do these harmless, nonviolent, anger-free people murder each other at rates far greater than Americans or Europeans do, but the murder rate among the !Kung went down by a third after their territory had been brought under the control of the Botswana government, as the Leviathan theory would predict.73

The problem with invoking inequality to explain changes in violence is that while it correlates with violence across states and countries, it does not correlate with violence over time within a state or country, possibly because the real cause of the differences is not inequality per se but stable features of a state’s governance or culture that affect both inequality and violence.146 (For example, in unequal societies, poor neighborhoods are left without police protection and can become zones of violent anarchy.)

A broader danger of unverifiable beliefs is the temptation to defend them by violent means. People become wedded to their beliefs, because the validity of those beliefs reflects on their competence, commends them as authorities, and rationalizes their mandate to lead. Challenge a person’s beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali was the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. 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.

Hearts and Minds • FTA • How I Won the War • Johnny Got His Gun • King of Hearts • M*A*S*H • Oh! What a Lovely War • Slaughterhouse-Five •“Alice’s Restaurant” • “Blowin’ in the Wind” • “Cruel War” • “Eve of Destruction” • “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” • “Give Peace a Chance” • “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” • “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” • “If I Had a Hammer” • “Imagine” • “It’s a Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall” • “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” • “Machine Gun” • “Masters of War” • “Sky Pilot” • “Three-Five-Zero-Zero” • “Turn! Turn! Turn!” • “Universal Soldier” • “What’s Goin’ On?” • “With God on Our Side” • “War (What Is It Good For?)” • “Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy” • “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

The fallout from atmospheric tests had already contaminated rainfall all over the world with strontium 90, a radioactive isotope resembling calcium that is taken up in the bones and teeth of children (inspiring Malvina Reynolds’s protest song “What Have They Done to the Rain?”).

Many scholars in international relations would snort at the very idea. According to an influential theory tendentiously called “realism,” the absence of a world government consigns nations to a permanent state of Hobbesian anarchy. That means that leaders must act like psychopaths and consider only the national self-interest, unsoftened by sentimental (and suicidal) thoughts of morality.252

Like the Russian peasant considering the color of bears, 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.