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

Steven Pinker (2011)

In a paragraph

Perhaps the most important feature of human history has been massive declines in violence, from hunter-gatherers, through primitive and modern states, and over the last century.  The contributors to this escape from a shockingly brutal past have included the formation of states, cultures of civilized values and self-control, the ideas of the enlightenment and of human rights and the abilities to consider others and to apply reason.

Key points 

• This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not—and I know that most people do not—violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.

• As one becomes aware of the decline of violence, the world begins to look different. The past seems less innocent; the present less sinister. One starts to appreciate the small gifts of coexistence that would have seemed utopian to our ancestors.

• If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one. It is easy to forget how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence.

• The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. Whether or not the Israelites actually engaged in genocide, they certainly thought it was a good idea. 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, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful.

• The Pacification Process. Hobbes said: ‘In the nature of man, 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.’ Hobbes’ Leviathan Theory is that law is better than war. It worked as it ended the sneaky raids that killed stateless people in large numbers.

• The safest place in human history, Western Europe today, has a homicide rate around 1 per 100,000 per year. The rest of the world including the USA are around 10, Medieval Europe around 50, while non-state societies average 500.

• The Civilizing Process, as described by Norbert Elias was court and commerce driven and included the spreading of gentle manners. A culture of honour — the readiness to take revenge — gave way to a culture of dignity — the readiness to control one’s emotions.

• Self-help justice and violence continue for marginalised people such as Afro-Americans and in the culture of the American South. Informality caused de-civilization and crime in the 1960s, but has swung back. We have the luxury of being able to question our civilized norms.

• The Humanitarian Revolution saw an increased valuation of life and happiness rather than souls. Cesare Beccaria: On Crimes and Punishments proposed criminal reform on utilitarian grounds. Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace” proposed democracy, trade and international organisations.

• The Long Peace since 1945. Lewis Fry Richardson’s statistical analysis of war. Are wars escalating, cyclical, random or declining. The enduring moral trend of the century was a violence-averse humanism that originated in the Enlightenment, became overshadowed by counter-Enlightenment ideologies wedded to agents of growing destructive power, and regained momentum in the wake of World War II.

• The most interesting statistic since 1945 is zero. International norms are important such as the post-war territorial-integrity norm and the norm against poison gas that held in WWII. Is it a Democratic Peace, a Liberal Peace or perhaps a McDonald’s Golden Arches peace? The slogan may partly be ‘make money not war.’

.

• After half a millennium of wars of dynasties, wars of religion, wars of sovereignty, wars of nationalism, and wars of ideology, of the many small wars in the spine of the distribution and a few horrendous ones in the tail, the data suggest that perhaps, at last, we’re learning.

• Human Rights endorsed the Enlightenment ideal that the ultimate value in the political realm is the individual human being, repudiating the doctrine that the ultimate value was the nation, people, class, or other collective, or the earlier doctrine that the ultimate value was the monarch, and the people were his or her chattel.

• The New Peace. Among the surprises in the statistics are that some things that sound exciting, like instant independence, natural resources, revolutionary Marxism (when it is effective), and electoral democracy (when it is not) can increase deaths from violence, and some things that sound boring, like effective law enforcement, openness to the world economy, and UN peacekeepers can decrease them.

• The Rights Revolution was achieved with little violence.Women are no longer considered men’s property.  Infanticide and female infanticide, which generally arose biologically from hardness of life rather than hardness of heart, are reducing.  There is more abortion, but modern sensibilities have increasingly conceived moral worth in terms of consciousness.

• Children’s tactics in parent-offspring conflict have led parents in every era to call them little devils. During the ascendancy of Christianity, that intuition was ratified by a religious belief in innate depravity and original sin. The expression ‘beat the devil out of him’ was more than a figure of speech. Children’s status now is as ‘economically worthless, emotionally priceless.’ Bullying is now targeted for elimination. The historical increase in the valuation of children has entered its decadent phase with excess coddling.

• The Rights Revolutions show that a moral way of life often requires a decisive rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard practice. This was achieved with little violence.

• Inner Demons. Predatory violence, dominance, revenge, sadism and ideology.

• Better Angels. Empathy, self-control, moral sense, reason.

• Self-control. Myopic discounting. Walter Mischel found to be a stable trait, correlated with intelligence. Ego depletion. Self-control is modulated by Ulyssean constraints, cognitive reframing, an adjustable internal discount rate, improvements in nutrition, gains from exercise and fashion.

• The world has far too much morality. 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? Alan Fiske.  Four types of relation – Community,  Authority Ranking,   Equality Matching, Rational-legal. 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.

• The Flynn Effect due to post scientific abstract thinking. 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.

• The collective moral sophistication of a hundred years ago was as primitive by modern standards as their mineral spas and patent medicines are by the medical standards of today. Many of their beliefs can be considered not just monstrous but, in a very real sense, stupid. They would not stand up to intellectual scrutiny as being consistent with other values they claimed to hold, and they persisted only because the narrower intellectual spotlight of the day was not routinely shone on them. Statements by the Roosevelts and early Churchill now seem extraordinarily vicious and stupid.

• On Angel’s Wings. The Pacifists Dilemma. In the original human condition obtaining the peaceable top left corner in a Prisoners’ Dilemma was tragically unobtainable.  Violence has fallen because the pay-offs have been changed by the Leviathan, Gentle Commerce, Feminization, the empathic Expanding Circle and the Escalator of Reason.

• 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. Mood not so much of optimism as of gratitude.

• 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. But for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savour, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.

Comments

This is an extraordinarily impressive book.  It is so stylish in its writing, organisation and story-telling, yet covers and integrates such a range and depth of research.  It is not just psychology, but also neuroscience, anthropology, history, political science, economics, statistics, ethics and philosophy. It sustains its high standards throughout and presents with passion a compelling, readable and important story.  What an achievement!

It is really important to appreciate how grim and extensive violence has been, and in some respects until very recently.  I was somewhat aware of this, but had not integrated my understanding.  For example, I was aware that Henry VIII was bad, but did not realise that he represented an improvement on earlier times.  The past was so different not just in how people suffered, but in how they thought, as if they were almost another race. This increases the challenges of understanding history.

Pinker tells a detailed and credible story about how violence has reduced.  Ideas and ways of thinking are as least as important for him as are economic conditions and I think he is right.  If there is an overarching reason for the decline in violence it may be the increasing global information and reasoning skills available to the population and its leaders.

Better Angels is consistent with my recent reading from Singer, Haidt and Greene in seeing good ethics as using reasoning to get past instinctive moralities, and Pinker makes the case for this perspective very eloquently.   But the most important aspect of the book for me is the distinctive perspective on history that is presented –  the brutal actions and ways of thinking from the past and the ways in which violence has over time and more recently come to be reduced.     

NOTES

Preface

This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not—and I know that most people do not—violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.

This is a big book, but it has to be.

Exogenous and endogenous causes.

The Better Angels of Our Nature is a tale of six trends, five inner demons, four better angels, and five historical forces.

Six trends:

Pacification Process.

Civilizing Process.

Humanitarian Revolution.

The Long Peace.

The New Peace.

The Rights Revolutions.

Five inner demons:

Predatory or instrumental violence

Dominance

Revenge

Sadism

Ideology

Four Better Angels:

Empathy

Self-control

Moral sense

Reason

The faculty of reason allows us to extricate ourselves from our parochial vantage points, to reflect on the ways in which we live our lives, to deduce ways in which we could be better off, and to guide the application of the other better angels of our nature.

Five historical forces:

Leviathan

Commerce

Feminization

Cosmopolitanism

The escalator of reason

As one becomes aware of the decline of violence, the world begins to look different. The past seems less innocent; the present less sinister. One starts to appreciate the small gifts of coexistence that would have seemed utopian to our ancestors

With the knowledge that something has driven it down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?”

an underappreciated story waiting to be told.

1. A Foreign Country

If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one. It is easy to forget how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence. Cultural memory pacifies the past, leaving us with pale souvenirs whose bloody origins have been bleached away. A woman donning a cross seldom reflects that this instrument of torture was a common punishment in the ancient world.

Ötzi the Iceman,

Kennewick Man

Lindow Man,

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey

Rather than framing the scourge of warfare as a human problem for humans to solve, they concocted a fantasy of hotheaded gods and attributed their own tragedies to the gods’ jealousies and follies.

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

Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him. With a world population of exactly four, that works out to a homicide rate of 25 percent, which is about a thousand times higher than the equivalent rates in Western countries today.

God instructs Noah in its moral lesson, namely the code of vendetta: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”

Abraham has a nephew, Lot, who settles in Sodom. Because the residents engage in anal sex and comparable sins, God immolates every man, woman, and child in a divine napalm attack. Lot’s wife, for the crime of turning around to look at the inferno, is put to death as well.

Abraham undergoes a test of his moral values when God orders him to take his son Isaac to a mountaintop.

Obedience to divine authority, not reverence for human life, was the cardinal virtue.

When Jacob worries that neighbouring tribes may attack them in revenge, his sons explain that it was worth the risk: “Should our sister be treated like a whore?” Soon afterward they reiterate their commitment to family values by selling their brother Joseph into slavery.

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 neighbouring tribes.

Joshua puts this directive into practice when he invades Canaan and sacks the city of Jericho.

Samson, Saul, David, Solomon

The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament, the ones that Sunday-school children draw with crayons. And they fall into a continuous plotline that stretches for millennia, from Adam and Eve through Noah, the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, the judges, Saul, David, Solomon, and beyond.

The good news, of course, is that most of it never happened. If there was a Davidic empire stretching from the Euphrates to the Red Sea around the turn of the 1^stmillennium BCE, no one else at the time seemed to have noticed it.

Whether or not the Israelites actually engaged in genocide, they certainly thought it was a good idea. The possibility that a woman had a legitimate interest in not being raped or acquired as sexual property did not seem to register in anyone’s mind. The writers of the Bible saw nothing wrong with slavery or with cruel punishments like blinding, stoning, and hacking someone to pieces. Human life held no value in comparison with unthinking obedience to custom and authority.

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 outrage that the story was meant to arouse was not that petty crimes were punishable by crucifixion, but that Jesus was treated like a petty criminal.

Like Jesus, the early Christian saints found a place next to God by being tortured to death in ingenious ways. For more than a millennium, Christian martyrologies described these torments with pornographic relish.

Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, met his end on an X-shaped cross, the source of the diagonal stripes on the Union Jack.

By sanctifying cruelty, early Christianity set a precedent for more than a millennium of systematic torture in Christian Europe.

If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one’s saviour is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favour of his life.  And silencing a person before he can corrupt others or making an example of him to deter the rest, is a responsible public health measure.

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, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful.

If the word saintly deserves a second look, so does the word chivalrous.

Today the British royal family is excoriated for shortcomings ranging from rudeness to infidelity. You’d think people would give them credit for not having had a single relative decapitated, nor a single rival drawn and quartered.

Shakespeare’s tragedies depict a lot of violence.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales,

Punch and Judy

The television programs had 4.8 violent scenes per hour; the nursery rhymes had 52

The career of duelling showcases a puzzling phenomenon we will often encounter: a category of violence can be embedded in a civilization for centuries and then vanish into thin air.

Honora is a bubble that can be inflated by some parts of human nature, such as the drive for prestige and the entrenchment of norms, and popped by others, such as a sense of humour.

Take the decline of martial culture. The older cities in Europe and the United States are dotted with public works that flaunt the nation’s military might. Our war memorials depict not proud commanders on horseback but weeping mothers, weary soldiers, or exhaustive lists of names of the dead.  A memorial to the thousand soldiers who were shot in that war for desertion — men who at the time were despised as contemptible cowards.

Conspicuous pacifism is especially striking in Germany, a nation that was once so connected to martial values that the words Teutonic and Prussian became synonyms for rigid militarism.

In earlier decades a man’s willingness to use his fists in response to an insult was the sign of respectability. Today it is the sign of a boor, a symptom of impulse control disorder, a ticket to anger management therapy.

2. The Pacification Process

Thomas Hobbes and Charles Darwin were nice men whose names became nasty adjectives. No one wants to live in a world that is Hobbesian or Darwinian (not to mention Malthusian, Machiavellian, or Orwellian).

Hobbes: So that in the nature of man, 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.

Survival machines that are best suited for such competition.

The Leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than war. Hobbes’s theory makes a testable prediction about the history of violence.

Rousseau: “nothing can be gentler than [ man] in his primitive state

Jane Goodall. The possibility that the human lineage has been engaged in lethal raiding since the time of its common root with chimpanzees around six million years ago.

Bonobos or pygmy chimps less violent but less on lineage.

The species we belong to, “anatomically modern Homo sapiens,” is said to be 200,000 years old. But “behaviourally modern” humans, with art, ritual, clothing, complex tools, and the ability to live in different ecosystems, probably evolved closer to 75,000 years ago in Africa before setting out to people the rest of the world.

The Neolithic (new stone age) Revolution began around 10,000 years ago with the emergence of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, China, India, West Africa, Mesoamerica, and the Andes.

The historian William Eckhardt, who is often cited for his claim that violence has vastly increased over the course of history,

It is the sneaky raids, not the noisy battles, that kill in large numbers.

In most surveys the most commonly cited motive for warfare is vengeance, which serves as a crude deterrent to potential enemies by raising the anticipated long-term costs of an attack.

That is why they sometimes massacre every last member of a village they raid: they anticipate that any survivors would seek revenge for their slain kinsmen.

The number of deaths per 100,000 people per year is the standard measure of homicide rates,

The safest place in human history, Western Europe at the turn of the 21st century, has a homicide rate in the neighbourhood of 1 per 100,000 per year.

Among modern Western countries, the United States lies at the dangerous end of the range. In the worst years of the 1970s and 1980s, it had a homicide rate of around 10 per 100,000, and its notoriously violent cities, like Detroit, had a rate of around 45 per 100,000. The average annual rate of death in warfare for the nonstate societies is 524 per 100,000,

In the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel: gain (predatory raids), safety (pre-emptive raids), and reputation (retaliatory raids).

Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition from foraging to agriculture: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.”

The first Leviathans solved one problem but created another. People were less likely to become victims of homicide or casualties of war, but they were now under the thumbs of tyrants, clerics, and kleptocrats.

3. The Civilizing Process

Norbert Elias

The graph stunned almost everyone who saw it (including me — as I mentioned in the preface, it was the seed that grew into this book). The discovery confounds every stereotype about the idyllic past and the degenerate present.

Rates of male-on-male violence fluctuate more across different times and places than rates of domestic violence involving women or kin. Macho violence among male acquaintances, in contrast, is fuelled by contests of dominance that are more sensitive to circumstances.

In late medieval times, cutting off someone’s nose was the prototypical act of spite.

The unveiled intensity of this piety, belligerence, or cruelty

The “childishness noticeable in medieval behaviour, with its marked inability to restrain any kind of impulse.”

Europeans increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated the long – term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration. A culture of honour — the readiness to take revenge — gave way to a culture of dignity — the readiness to control one’s emotions.

He claimed only that they toned up a mental faculty that had always been a part of human nature but which the medieval had underused.

King Henry I redefined homicide as an offense against the state. The brilliance of the plan was that the wergild (often the offender’s entire assets, together with additional money rounded up from his family) went to the king instead of to the family of the victim. A man’s ticket to fortune was no longer being the baddest knight in the area.  The court, basically a government bureaucracy, had no use for hotheads and loose cannons. Warriors to courtiers.

A Christian ideology that was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation.

The two triggers of the Civilizing Process — the Leviathan and gentle commerce — are related. The positive-sum cooperation of commerce flourishes best inside a big tent presided over by a Leviathan.

The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call “self-help.”

The most common motives for homicide are moralistic: retaliation after an insult, escalation of a domestic quarrel.

These observations overturn many dogmas about violence. 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.

Many lower-status people — the poor, the uneducated, the unmarried, and members of minority groups – are effectively stateless.

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

The overall homicide rate for the entire world, ignoring the division into countries, was estimated by the WHO in 2000 as 8.8 per 100,000 per year.  Both estimates compare favourably to the triple-digit values for pre-state societies and the double-digit values for medieval Europe.

The governance vacuum left by instant decolonization put the Papuans through a decivilizing process that left them with neither traditional norms nor modern third-party enforcement

A civilizing offensive is a deliberate effort by sectors of a community (often women, elders, or clergy) to tame the Rambos and Raskols and restore civilized life.

Substitute an ethic of forgiveness for the ethic of revenge.

Once an effective government has pacified the populace from the 100 to the 10 range, additional reductions depend on the degree to which people accept the legitimacy of the government, its laws, and the social order.

Communities of lower-income African Americans were effectively stateless, relying on a culture of honour (sometimes called “the code of the streets”) to defend their interests rather calling in the law.

In America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their arms

The South’s reliance on self-help justice.  The Scots-Irish brought their culture of honour with them and kept it alive when they took up herding in the South’s mountainous frontier.

The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to- thirty-year-old men. Not only are males the more competitive sex in most mammalian species, but with Homo sapiens a man’s position in the pecking order is secured by reputation, an investment with a lifelong payout that must be started early in adulthood.

Frontier violence. Liquor. Young men are civilized by women

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 honour that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance.

Decivilization in the 1960s

Of course, to escape the logical circle in which people are said to be violent because they live in a violent culture, it’s necessary to identify an exogenous cause for the cultural change.

After the European Civilizing Process had run its course, it was superseded by an informalizing process.

Instead of values trickling down from the court, they bubbled up from the street, a process that was later called “proletarianization”

A rolling stone. Three icons of the culture:

Do we now have to — gulp — admit they were right? Can we connect the values of 1960s popular culture to the actual rise in violent crimes that accompanied them?

Contraband drugs, in which self-help justice is the only way to enforce property rights.

“Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past.”

The Great Crime Decline of the 1990s was part of a change in sensibilities that can fairly be called a decivilizing process. To start with, some of the goofier ideas of the 1960s had lost their appeal.

The decivilizing process somehow managed to reverse the tide of social dysfunction without turning the cultural clock back

They were more sophisticated than the boomers in their youth, who treated the drivel of rock musicians as serious political philosophy.

Many members of the middle class have become “bourgeois bohemians” who affect the look of people at the fringes of society while living a thoroughly conventional lifestyle.

If our first nature consists of the evolved motives that govern life in a state of nature, and our second nature consists of the ingrained habits of a civilized society, then our third nature consists of a conscious reflection on these habits, in which we evaluate which aspects of a culture’s norms are worth adhering to and which have outlived their usefulness.

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split.” Maybe the time has even come when I can use a knife to push peas onto my fork.

4. The Humanitarian Revolution

If the opening of this chapter has been graphic, it is only to remind you of the realities of the era that the Enlightenment put to an end.

The bloodthirsty-god hypothesis is incorrect.

More affluent and predictable life erodes people’s fatalism and elevates their valuation of other people’s lives.

A great principle of moral advancement, on a par with “Love thy neighbour” and “All men are created equal,” is the one on the bumper sticker: “Shit happens.”

The other pressure is harder to explain but just as forceful: an increased valuation of human life and happiness.

The gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendancy of scepticism and reason.

Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments

It is one of many cases in which institutionalized violence was once seen as indispensable to the functioning of a society, yet once it was abolished, the society managed to get along perfectly well without it.

The history of our treatment of debtors, Payne notes, illustrates the mysterious process in which violence has declined in every sphere of life.

Once raiding and feuding have been brought under control in a society, the greatest opportunity for reducing violence is reducing government violence.

Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace.”

The satirists’ deglorification of war and Kant’s practical ideas on how to reduce it

“No longer was it possible simply and honestly to proclaim like Julius Caesar, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Gradually this was changed to ‘I came, I saw, he attacked me while I was just standing there looking, I won.’ This might be seen as progress.”

As the great thinkers of the Enlightenment predicted, we owe this peace not just to the belittling of war but to the spread of democracy, the expansion of trade and commerce, and the growth of international organizations.

Most people today have no desire to watch a cat burn to death, let alone a man or a woman. What were these people feeling? And why don’t we feel it today?

People in earlier centuries may have been more callous to their neighbours because those neighbours were more disgusting. Worse, people easily slip from visceral disgust to moralistic disgust.

The Reading Revolution.

A global campus increases not only the complexity of ideas but their quality. In hermetic isolation, all kinds of bizarre and toxic ideas can fester. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and exposing a bad idea to the critical glare of other minds provides at least a chance that it will wither and die.

When a large enough community of free, rational agents confers on how a society should run its affairs, steered by logical consistency and feedback from the world, their consensus will veer in certain directions.

The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment humanism. It begins with scepticism.

The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unstayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run.

There is a universal human nature. It encompasses our common pleasures and pains, our common methods of reasoning, and our common vulnerability to folly (not least the desire for revenge).

Human nature may be studied, just as anything else in the world may be.

And our decisions on how to organize our lives can take the facts of human nature into account — including the discounting of our own intuitions when a scientific understanding casts them in doubt.

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.

From the factual knowledge that there is a universal human nature, and the moral principle that no person has grounds for privileging his or her interests over others’, we can deduce a great deal about how we ought to run our affairs. A government is a good thing to have.

If all this sounds banal and obvious, then you are a child of the Enlightenment, and have absorbed its humanist philosophy. As a matter of historical fact, there is nothing banal or obvious about it.

Enlightenment humanism makes no use of scripture, Jesus, ritual, religious law, divine purpose, immortal souls, an afterlife, a messianic age, or a God who responds to individual people. It sweeps aside many secular sources of value as well, if they cannot be shown to be necessary for the enhancement of human flourishing. These include the prestige of the nation, race, or class; fetishized virtues such as manliness, dignity, heroism, glory, and honour; and other mystical forces, quests, destinies, dialectics, and struggles.

An acknowledgment of human nature may have been the chief difference between the American revolutionaries and their French confrères, who had the romantic conviction that they were rendering human limitations obsolete.

Rationality can never be refuted by some flaw or error in the reasoning of the people in a given era. Reason can always stand back, take note of the flaw, and revise its rules so as not to succumb to it the next time.

5. The Long Peace

Arnold Toynbee – expecting war

Lewis Fry Richardson – statistical analysis of war

Wars could be escalating, cyclical, random or declining.  Seems there are no cycles. A big dose of randomness. An escalation, recently reversed, in the destructiveness of war. Declines in every other dimension of war, and thus in interstate war as a whole.

The enduring moral trend of the century was a violence-averse humanism that originated in the Enlightenment, became overshadowed by counter-Enlightenment ideologies wedded to agents of growing destructive power, and regained momentum in the wake of World War II.

To condemn much is to understand little.

Does it never strike you as puzzling that it is wicked to kill one person, but glorious to kill ten thousand?”

What is the most likely day for the next bolt to strike your house? The answer is “tomorrow,” a Poisson processes

Until 1945, the story of war in Europe and among major nations in general was one of fewer but more damaging wars.

Nor is it obvious which county will have the greater amount of overall damage, the one with a lot of little fires, or the one with a few big ones.

War of Attrition. “Pyrrhic victory”.

“We fight on so that our boys shall not have died in vain.” This mindset, known as loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, and throwing good money after bad, is patently irrational, but it is surprisingly pervasive in human decision-making.

If escalations are proportional to past commitments (and a constant proportion of soldiers sent to the battlefield are killed in battle), then losses will increase exponentially as a war drags on, like compound interest. And if wars are attrition games, their durations will also be distributed exponentially.

A set of underlying processes in which size doesn’t matter. Armed coalitions can always get a bit larger, wars can always last a bit longer, and losses can always get a bit heavier, with the same likelihood regardless of how large, long, or heavy they were to start with.

The most damaging kinds of lethal violence (at least from 1820 to 1952) were murders and world wars.

The two world wars killed 77 percent of the people who died in all the wars that took place in a 130-year period

The global effort to prevent deaths in war should give the highest priority to preventing the largest wars.

The great powers participated in about 70 percent of all the wars. Great powers fought each other for less of the time as the centuries proceeded.

Modern Europe began in a Hobbesian state of frequent but small wars. The wars became fewer in number as political units became consolidated into larger states. At the same time the wars that did occur were becoming more lethal, because of a military revolution that created larger and more effective armies. Finally, in different periods European countries veered between totalizing ideologies that subordinated individual people’s interests to a utopian vision and an Enlightenment humanism that elevated those interests as the ultimate value.

Age of Dynasties.  Rulers always face the dilemma of how to reconcile their thirst for everlasting power with an awareness of their own mortality. A natural solution is to designate an offspring, usually a firstborn son, as a successor. But many aspects of the biology of Homo sapiens confound the scheme.

Age of Religions. Until Treaty of Westphalia of 1648

Age of Nationalism.

Age of Ideology.

Battle for influence among four forces — Enlightenment humanism, conservatism, nationalism, and utopian ideologies — which sometimes joined up in temporary coalitions.

Napoleon a combination of French nationalism and utopian ideology.

There were two counter-Enlightenments, which reacted to the French disruptions in opposite ways.  Burkean conservatism and romantic nationalism.

One of the dangers of “self – determination” is that there is really no such thing as a “nation” in the sense of an ethnocultural group that coincides with a patch of real estate.

“Without war, the world would wallow in materialism.”

World War I put an end not just to romantic militarism in the Western mainstream but to the idea that war was in any way desirable or inevitable.

One man was mostly responsible for the world’s greatest cataclysm. Fifty-five million deaths later the world was once again in a position to give peace a chance.

The most interesting statistic since 1945: zero.

Endorsing the Enlightenment ideal that the ultimate value in the political realm is the individual human being, the signatories were repudiating a doctrine that had reigned for more than a century, namely that the ultimate value was the nation, people, culture, Volk, class, or other collectivist (to say nothing of the doctrine of earlier centuries that the ultimate value was the monarch, and the people were his or her chattel).

One paradoxical contributor to the Long Peace was the freezing of national borders. The territorial-integrity norm.

The value placed on human life today is probably higher, and that placed on national prestige (or ‘honour’) probably lower, than in earlier times.

The most consequential discounting of honour in the history of the world was the resolution of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

When Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the Soviet bloc, and then the Soviet Union itself, to go out of existence — what the historian Timothy Garton Ash has called a “breath-taking renunciation of the use of force” and a “luminous example of the importance of the individual in history.”

They won all the battles, but we had the good songs. But in a sense, we did win the battles.

“The Ethical Warrior is a protector of life. Whose life? Self and others. Which others? All others.”

For all the differences between the American “mad cowboys” and the European “surrender monkeys,” the parallel movement of their political culture away from war over the past six decades is more historically significant than their remaining differences.

Astonishingly, though both sides had tons of the stuff, poison gas was never used on the battlefield during World War II.

The psychology behind Global Zero is to extend the taboo on using nuclear weapons to a taboo on possessing them.

The Democratic Peace, Liberal Peace.

Robert Wright, who gave reciprocity pride of place in Nonzero, his treatise on the expansion of cooperation through history, put it this way: “Among the many reasons I think we shouldn’t bomb the Japanese is that they made my minivan.”

The Golden Arches theory: no two countries with a McDonald’s have ever fought in a war.

While the relative contributions of political and economic liberalism are currently mired in regression wonkery, the overarching theory of the Liberal Peace is on solid ground.

“Make money, not war.”

World government seems like a straightforward extension of the logic of the Leviathan.

Kant got it right three out of three times: democracy favours peace, trade favours peace, and membership in intergovernmental organizations favours peace.

Practices that passed from unexceptionable to controversial to immoral to unthinkable to not-thought-about during the Humanitarian Revolution.

Democracies may be better equipped to learn from their catastrophes, because of their openness to information and the accountability of their leaders.

After half a millennium of wars of dynasties, wars of religion, wars of sovereignty, wars of nationalism, and wars of ideology, of the many small wars in the spine of the distribution and a few horrendous ones in the tail, the data suggest that perhaps, at last, we’re learning.

6. The New Peace

War has been called “development in reverse,” and the economist Paul Collier has estimated that a typical civil war costs the afflicted country $ 50 billion.

Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Empire.

Anocracies are “about six times more likely than democracies and two and one-half times as likely as autocracies to experience new outbreaks of societal wars”

Decivilizing anarchy of decolonization, the recent decline may reflect a decivilizing process in which competent governments have begun to protect and serve their citizens rather than preying on them.

Among the surprises in the statistics are that some things that sound exciting, like instant independence, natural resources, revolutionary Marxism (when it is effective), and electoral democracy (when it is not) can increase deaths from violence, and some things that sound boring, like effective law enforcement, openness to the world economy, UN peacekeepers, and Plumps’, can decrease them.

Making sense of killing-by-category, insofar as we can do so at all, must begin with the psychology of categories. Categorization is indispensable to intelligence.

Human sympathy can be turned on or off depending on how another person is categorized. Dehumanized, demonized.

As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, to kill by the millions you need an ideology.

This agrarian utopianism lay behind Hitler’s dual obsessions: his loathing of Jewry, which he associated with commerce and cities, and his deranged plan to depopulate Eastern Europe to provide farmland for German city–dwellers

People tend to be oblivious to the intangible contributions of merchants and moneylenders and view them as bloodsuckers.

Many victims of discrimination, expulsion, riots, and genocide have been social or ethnic groups that specialize in middlemen niches.

Today’s Holocaust deniers at least feel compelled to deny that the Holocaust took place. In earlier centuries the perpetrators of genocide and their sympathizers boasted about it.

In the twentieth century, for the first time, it is the ruled who make the news.

No small part of the decline of genocide is the decline of communism, and thus “the single most important cause of mass killing in the twentieth century appears to be fading into history.”

“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” The trouble is that no omelette has emerged from the slaughter.

Tens of millions of deaths ultimately depended on the decisions of just three individuals. Hitler, Stalin, Mao.

If somewhere among the world’s six billion people there is a zealot who gets his hands on a stray nuclear bomb, he could single-handedly send the statistics through the roof.

Given the presence of weapons of mass destruction in the real world, and religious fanatics willing to wreak untold damage for a higher cause, a lengthy conspiracy producing a horrendous death toll is within the realm of thinkable probabilities.

Khrushchev’s boast “We will bury you,” which turned out to mean “outlive”

No reasonable person would prophesy that the New Peace is going to be a long peace, to say nothing of a perpetual peace. There will certainly be wars and terrorist attacks in the decades to come, possibly large ones. On top of the known unknowns — militant Islamism, nuclear terrorists, environmental degradation — there are surely many unknown unknowns.

7. The Rights Revolutions

The fate of dodgeball is yet another sign of the historical decline of violence.

The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and the other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness.

The Rights Revolutions have another curious legacy. Because they are propelled by an escalating sensitivity to new forms of harm, they erase their own tracks and leave us amnesic about their successes.

The first goal of any rights movement is to protect its beneficiaries from being assaulted or killed.

Rape was seen as an offense not against the woman but against a man — the woman’s father, her husband, or in the case of a slave, her owner. Moral and legal systems all over the world codified rape in similar ways.  The prevalence of rape in human history and the invisibility of the victim in the legal treatment of rape are incomprehensible from the vantage point of contemporary moral sensibilities. Men may also protect their investment by holding the woman strictly liable for any theft or damage of her sexual value. In an upending of the traditional valuation, the woman’s ownership of her body counts for everything, and the interests of all other claimants count for nothing.

We are all feminists now. Western culture’s default point of view has become increasingly unisex. The universalizing of the generic citizen’s vantage point, driven by reason and analogy, was an engine of moral progress during the Humanitarian Revolution of the 18th century, and it resumed that impetus during the Rights Revolutions of the 20th. The man of the house was entitled by law to “chastise” his wife.

“Infanticide arises from hardness of life rather than hardness of heart.”  Postpartum depression and its milder version, the baby blues, are not a hormonal malfunction but the emotional implementation of the decision period for keeping a child.  As traditional Judaism, which grants full legal personhood to a baby only after it has survived thirty days. Female infanticide. Parents also own their sons but not their daughters.

The human life taboos. Rather than leaving it a pious aspiration, societies finally made good on the doctrine that the lives of infants are sacred. Orphanages that were not death camps.

Many opponents of legalized abortion predicted that acceptance of the practice would cheapen human life and put society on a slippery slope toward infanticide. Today we can say with confidence that that has not happened.

Modern sensibilities have increasingly conceived moral worth in terms of consciousness.

Parent-offspring conflict explains why child-rearing is always a battle of wills.

Children’s tactics in parent-offspring conflict have led parents in every era to call them little devils. During the ascendancy of Christianity, that intuition was ratified by a religious belief in innate depravity and original sin. The expression “beat the devil out of him” was more than a figure of speech.

The era from the 1870s to the 1930s saw a “sacralization” of childhood among middle-and upper-class parents in the West. That was when children attained the status, we now grant them: “economically worthless, emotionally priceless.”

Began to replace the superstition and bunkum of old wives with the superstition and bunkum of child-rearing experts.

In one frame of mind, this meddling is a totalitarian imposition of state power into the intimate sphere of the family. But in another, it is part of the historical current toward a recognition of the autonomy of individuals.

In another of those historical gestalt shifts in which a category of violence flips from inevitable to intolerable, bullying has been targeted for elimination.

The historical increase in the valuation of children has entered its decadent phase.

 One ethnographic survey found that in almost 60 percent of preliterate societies, homosexuality was unknown or extremely rare.

Following Bentham, Singer laid out a razor-sharp argument for a full consideration of the interests of animals, while not necessarily granting them “rights.” Speciesism.

In another book, The Expanding Circle, he advanced a theory of moral progress in which human beings were endowed by natural selection with a kernel of empathy toward kin and allies and have gradually extended it to wider and wider circles of living things, from family and village to clan, tribe, nation, species, and all of sentient life. The book you are reading owes much to this insight.

People still like to commune with animals; they would just rather look at them than shoot them.

But for now, the location of the finish line is beside the point. There are many opportunities in which enormous suffering by animals can be reduced at a small cost to humans. Given the recent changes in sensibilities, it is certain that the lives of animals will continue to improve.

As if biology didn’t make things bad enough, the Abrahamic religions ratified some of our worst instincts with laws and beliefs that have encouraged violence for millennia: the demonization of infidels, the ownership of women, the sinfulness of children, the abomination of homosexuality, the dominion over animals and denial to them of souls.

The Rights Revolutions show that a moral way of life often requires a decisive rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard practice. In their place is an ethics that is inspired by empathy and reason and stated in the language of rights. We force ourselves into the shoes (or paws) of other sentient beings and consider their interests, starting with their interest in not being hurt or killed,

Each has been associated with liberal movements, and each is currently distributed along a gradient that runs, more or less, from Western Europe to the blue American states to the red American states to the democracies of Latin America and Asia and then to the more authoritarian countries, with Africa and most of the Islamic world pulling up the rear.

Today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals.

If I were to put my money on the single most important exogenous cause of the Rights Revolutions, it would be the technologies that made ideas and people increasingly mobile.

These are the days of miracle and wonder.

Scholars who have puzzled over the trajectory of material progress in different parts of the world, such as the economist Thomas Sowell in his Culture trilogy and the physiologist Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, have concluded that the key to material success is being situated in a large catchment area of innovations.

Individuals or civilizations that are situated in a vast informational catchment area can compile a moral know-how that is more sustainable and expandable than even the most righteous prophet could devise in isolation.

In his 1958 essay “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” Martin Luther King recounted the intellectual threads that he wove into his political philosophy.

By the standards of history, a striking feature of the late-20th-century Rights Revolutions is how little violence they employed or even provoked.

They had only to nudge a populace that had become receptive to an ethic based on the rights of individuals and were increasingly repelled by violence in any form.

One of Martin Luther King’s most famous quotations was adapted from an 1852 essay by the abolitionist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker:  ‘I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.’

8. Inner Demons

Human nature accommodates motives that impel us to violence, like predation, dominance, and vengeance, but also motives that — under the right circumstances — impel us toward peace, like compassion, fairness, self-control, and reason.

The small number of premeditated murders that are actually carried out must be the cusp of a colossal iceberg of homicidal desires submerged in a sea of inhibitions.

In evolutionary history, violence was not so improbable that people could afford not to understand how it works.

Like adultery, violence may be improbable, but when an opportunity arises, the potential consequences for Darwinian fitness are gargantuan.

The Rage circuits.  The instinct behind rampages suggests that the human behavioural repertoire includes scripts for violence that lie quiescent and may be cured by propitious circumstances, rather than building up over time like hunger or thirst.

Did the self-servers really, deep down, believe that they were acting fairly? Or did the conscious spin doctor in their brains just say that, while the unconscious reality-checker registered the truth?

It’s not just that there are two sides to every dispute. It’s that each side sincerely believes its version of the story, and each side has assembled a historical narrative and database of facts consistent with its sincere belief.

The myth of pure evil bedevils our attempt to understand real evil. “The banality of evil”

Though the florid sadism of serial killers is historically rare, the sadism of inquisitors, rampages, public execution spectators, blood sport fans, and Colosseum audiences is not.

The fact that sadism is an acquired taste is both frightening and hopeful.

Individual people have no shortage of selfish motives for violence. But the really big body counts in history pile up when a large number of people carry out a motive that transcends any one of them: an ideology.  It allows any number of eggs to be broken to make the utopian omelette.

Means-ends reasoning becomes dangerous when the means to a glorious end include harming human beings. The design of the mind can encourage the train of theorization to go in that direction because of our drives for dominance and revenge, our habit of essentializing other groups, particularly as demons or vermin, our elastic circle of sympathy, and the self-serving biases that exaggerate our wisdom and virtue. An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand sceptical scrutiny. Let these ingredients brew in the mind of a narcissist with a lack of empathy, a need for admiration, and fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, and goodness, and the result can be a drive to implement a belief system that results in the deaths of millions.

How a toxic ideology can spread from a small number of narcissistic zealots to an entire population

One component of the human moral sense, amplified in many cultures, is the elevation of conformity and obedience to praiseworthy virtues.

Pluralistic ignorance is a house of cards. As the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes makes clear,

Unsupportable ideologies can levitate in mid-air by vicious circles of punishment of those who fail to punish.

Solzhenitsyn recounted a party conference in Moscow that ended with a tribute to Stalin . Everyone stood and clapped wildly for three minutes , then four , then five … and then no one dared to be the first to stop . After eleven minutes of increasingly stinging palms , a factory director on the platform finally sat down , followed by the rest of the grateful assembly . He was arrested that evening and sent to the gulag for ten years .

Cognitive dissonance reduction.

Euphemisms

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. 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.

9. Better Angels

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.  Can refer to mind-reading, projection, perspective-taking or sympathy. Mirror neurons overrated, opxytocin less so.

More empathic people are also more guilt-prone (particularly women, who excel at both emotions).  Sympathy and operate within a circle of communal relationships.

The trade-off 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.

Self-control. 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.  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.

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), proposed that 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?

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, like a muscle, can become fatigued. Ego depletion experiments.

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 and habits of self-control.

A 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.

A society might boost their self-control is by improving their nutrition, sobriety, and health. People’s blood glucose level plummets as their ego are 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 overindulgence.

Recent biological evolution?

Morality. 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 misdemeanours, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest.

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?

Distinguish morality as part of normative ethics from the psychological study of the human moral sense.

A distinct mode of thinking about an action. Distinct from disagreeable, unfashionable and imprudent.  Universalized.  Actionable. Punishable. Obligated.

Morality applied to murder is generally helpful.  Applied to homosexuality is a source of evil.

Lawrence Kohlberg six-stage

Richard Schwader.  Autonomy.  Community.  Divinity.

Jonathan Haidt

Alan Fiske.  Four types of relation.  Community.  Authority Ranking.  Equality Matching.  Market, institutions, rational-legal. Norms based on a relationship, social roles, context and resource. Not appropriate to pay friend for dinner.  Rough matching with friend, but precise obligations in restaurant.

Marriages used to be Authority.  Now often Community.  Equality may be fairer on overworked wife.

What in our psychology allows the joke to be mightier than the sword?  Switch of frame to show established position absurd.  “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:  a freedom of individuals from tribal and authoritarian force, and a tolerance of personal choices as long as they do not infringe on the autonomy and well-being of others.

Many ostensibly sacred values are really pseudo-sacred and may be compromised if a taboo trade-off is cleverly reframed.

The moral trend away from community, authority, and purity is 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.

Huckleberry Finn is perhaps the finest portrayal of the vulnerability of the human moral sense to competing convictions, most of which are morally wrong.

Reason. Defending reason. US Presidents’ successes correlate with IQ [?].  Nazism pseudoscience.

Evidence of reason being applied despite limits of rational tail. Greene showing reasoning hubs.  Moral progress due to reason. Hume accepts that reason instrumentally required and can be combined with our goodwill.

A debunking of hogwash—such as the ideas that gods demand sacrifices, witches cast spells, heretics go to hell, Jew’s poison wells, animals are insensate, children are possessed, Africans are brutish, and kings’ rule by divine right—is bound to undermine many rationales for violence.

A second pacifying effect of exercising the faculty of reason is that it goes hand in hand with self-control.

Supressing base instincts such as black phobia.

Can think proportionately.  Some morality is black and white.

The assumptions of self-interest and sociality combine with reason to lay out a morality in which nonviolence is a goal. With these assumptions we can answer Hume’s point that rationality is merely a means to an end, and that the end depends on the thinker’s passions.

One would expect that as collective rationality is honed over the ages, it will progressively whittle away at the short-sighted and hot-blooded impulses toward violence.

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 a seeming eternity, then lurches up to the next floor.  Perhaps the escalator is powered not just by the sporadic appearance of outstanding thinkers but by a rise in the quality of everyone’s thinking.

The Flynn Effect.  If we take the Flynn Effect at face value, a typical person today is smarter than 98 percent of the people in the good old days of 1910.

General intelligence g, all skills correlated

Improvements from cognitive environment, showing in matrices and similarities tests, less maths, language and memory.

Postscientific thinking. Shorthand abstractions. 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.

Whether our recent ancestors can really be considered morally retarded. The answer, I am prepared to argue, is yes. The collective moral sophistication of the culture in which they lived was as primitive by modern standards as their mineral spas and patent medicines are by the medical standards of today. Many of their beliefs can be considered not just monstrous but, in a very real sense, stupid. They would not stand up to intellectual scrutiny as being consistent with other values they claimed to hold, and they persisted only because the narrower intellectual spotlight of the day was not routinely shone on them.

Theodore Roosevelt eliminates native Americans, Woodrow Wilson a racist.  FDR internment of Japs.  Young Churchill ‘a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous people.’

Moral stupidity was not confined to the policies of leaders; it was written into the law of the land.

Many literary intellectuals (including Yeats, Shaw, Flaubert, Wells, Lawrence, Woolf, Bell, and Eliot) expressed a contempt for the masses that bordered on the genocidal.

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.

Seven links, varying in directness, between reasoning ability and peaceable values. Intelligence and Violent Crime. Intelligence and Cooperation. Intelligence and Economic Literacy. Education, Intellectual Proficiency, and Democracy. Education and Civil War. Sophistication of Political Discourse.

People whose language is less integratively complex, on average, are more likely to react to frustration with violence.

Once a society has a degree of civilization in place, it is reason that offers the greatest hope for further reducing violence.

Reason is up to these demands because it is an open-ended combinatorial system, an engine for generating an unlimited number of new ideas. Once it is programmed with a basic self-interest and an ability to communicate with others, its own logic will impel it, in the fullness of time, to respect the interests of ever-increasing numbers of others. It is reason too that can always take note of the shortcomings of previous exercises of reasoning, and update and improve itself in response.

Adam Smith.  We may not be moved by a Chinese disaster, but reason would compel us to help. ‘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 whatever relates to ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator.’

10 On Angels’ Wings

My mood is one not so much of optimism as of gratitude.

Have weapons, resources, poverty or religion been the problem?

Weaponry 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 fuelled not by resources but by ideologies.

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.

Much of religion has been 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 Pacificist’s Dilemma.  The historical reducers of violence 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 Leviathan.  Penalties for aggression.

Gentle Commerce.  Rewards for peace.

Feminization. In female perspective peace more appealing.  Greater costs and less benefits from aggression. Discount glory and humiliation.

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. A perfect fusion of interests resolves dilemma but nirvana.

The Escalator of Reason. From an Olympian super rational viewpoint rather than just taking other’s vantage points as own.

As humans have honed the institutions of knowledge and reason, and purged superstitions and inconsistencies from their systems of belief, certain conclusions were bound to follow, just as when one masters the laws of arithmetic certain sums and products are bound to follow. And in many cases the conclusions are ones that led people to commit fewer acts of violence.

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. These changes include not just legal prohibitions against acts of violence but institutions that are engineered to reduce the temptations of violence.

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.

Though our escape from destructive contests is not a cosmic purpose, it is a human purpose.

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.

Deepening horror in coming 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 savour, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.