EPIGRAPH
BLAISE PASCAL “What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sewer of uncertainty and error, the glory and the scum of the universe.”
PREFACE
xxii “The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.”
xxvi “The Leviathan, a state and judiciary with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, can defuse the temptation of exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge, and circumvent the self-serving biases that make all parties believe they are on the side of the angels.”
1 — A FOREIGN COUNTRY
11 “if there was a Davidic empire stretching from the Euphrates to the Red Sea around the turn of the 1st millennium BCE, no one else at the time seemed to have noticed it.”
11 – 12 “In recent millennia and centuries the Bible has been spin-doctored, allegorized, superseded by less violent texts (the Talmud among Jews and the New Testament among Christians), or discreetly ignored. And that is the point. 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.”
27 TOM JONES’s The Fantasticks “You can get the rape emphatic.
You can get the rape polite.
You can get the rape with Indians:
A very charming sight.
You can get the rape on horseback;
They’ll all say it’s new and gay.
So you see the sort of rape
Depends on what you pay.”
2 — THE PACIFICATION PROCESS
32 “Any organism that has evolved to be violent is a member of a species whose other members, on average, have evolved to be just as violent. If you attack one of your own kind, your adversary may be as strong and pugnacious as you are, and armed with the same weapons and defenses. The likelihood that, in attaching a member of your own species, you will get hurt is a powerful selection pressure that disfavors indiscriminate pouncing or lashing out.”
33 THOMAS HOBBES “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. 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.”
34 “How can intelligent agents extricate themselves from a Hobbesian trap? The most obvious way is through a policy of deterrence: Don’t strike first; be strong enough to survive a first strike; and retaliate against any aggressor in kind.”
34 “Only if you are committed to disprove any suspicion of weakness, to avenge all trespasses and settle all scores, will your policy of deterrence be credible. Thus we have an explanation of the incentive to invade for trifles: a word, a smile, and any other sign of undervalue. Hobbes called it “glory”; more commonly it is called “honor”; the most accurate descriptor is “credibility.”
35 “The Leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than war.”
35 “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” ORLY?
41 “When the first farmers settled down to grow grains and legumes and keep domesticated animals, their numbers exploded and they began to divide their labors, so that some of them lived off the food grown by others. But they didn’t develop complex states and governments right away. They first coalesced into tribes connected by kinship and culture, and the tribes sometimes merged into chiefdoms, which had a centralized leader and a permanent entourage supporting him. Some of the tribes took up pastoralism, wandering with their livestock and trading animal products with sedentary farmers. The Israelites of the Hebrew Bible were tribal pastoralists who developed into chiefdoms around the time of the judges.”
42 “Just as a farmer tries to prevent his animals from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles of raiding and feuding that just shuffle resources or settles scores among them but from his point of view are a dead loss.” !!
46 “our genomes contain genes that appear to be defenses against the prion diseases transmitted by cannibalism.”
47 “One cross-cultural survey found that in 95 percent of societies, people explicitly endorse the idea of taking a life for a life.”
55 “Not only do these harmless, nonviolent, anger-free people murder each other at rates far greater than Americans and 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.”
56 “People in nonstate societies cooperate extensively with their kin and allies, so life for them is far from “solitary,” and only intermittently is it nasty and brutish. Even if they are drawn into raids and battles every few years, that leaves a lot of time for foraging, feasting, singing, storytelling, childrearing, tending to the sick, and the other necessities and pleasures of life.”
57 “Spending your days behind a plow, subsisting on starchy cereal grains, and living cheek by jowl with livestock and thousands of other people can be hazardous to your health. Studies of skeletons by Steckel and his colleagues show that compared to hunter-gatherers, the first city dwellers were anemic, infected, tooth-decayed, and almost two and a half inches shorter.”
57 TACITUS “Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws.”
57 – 58 “The archaeologist Keith Otterbein has shown that societies with more centralized leadership were more likely to kill women in battles (as opposed to abducting them), to keep slaves, and to engage in human sacrifice. The sociologist Steven Spitzer has shown that complex societies are more likely to criminalize victimless activities like sacrilege, sexual deviance, disloyalty, and witchcraft, and to punish offenders by torture, mutilation, enslavement, and execution. And the historian and anthropologist Laura Betzig has shown that complex societies tend to fall under the control of despots: leaders who are guaranteed to get their way in conflicts, who can kill with impunity, and who have large harems of women at their disposal. She found despotism in this sense emerged among the Babylonians, Israelites, Romans, Samoans, Fijians, Khmer, Aztecs, Incas, Natchez (of the lower Mississippi), Ashanti, and other kingdoms throughout Africa.
When it came to violence, then, 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. This gives us the more sinister sense of the word pacification: not just the bringing about of peace but the imposition of absolute control by a coercive government.” !!!
3 — THE CIVILIZING PROCESS
59 SIGMUND FREUD “It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.”
66 – 67 “The knights of feudal Europe were what today we would call warlords. States were ineffectual, and the king was merely the most prominent of the noblemen, with no permanent army and little control over the country. Governance was outsourced to the barons, knights, and other noblemen who controlled fiefs of various sizes, exacting crops and military service from the peasants who lived in them. The knights raided one another’s territories in a Hobbesian dynamic of conquest, preemptive attack, and vengeance […] they did not restrict their killing to other knights.”
71 “Words for peasantry took on a second meaning as words for turpitude: boor (which originally just meant “farmer,” as in the German Bauer and Dutch boer); villain (from the French vilein, a serf or villager); churlish (from English churl, a commoner); vulgar (common, as in the term vulgate); and ignoble, not an aristocrat.”
72 “over a span of several centuries, beginning in the 11th or 12th and maturing in the 17th and 18th, 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 honor—the readiness to take revenge—gave way to a culture of dignity—the readiness to control one’s emotions. These ideals originated in explicit instructions that cultural arbiters gave to aristocrats and noblemen, allowing them to differentiate themselves from the villains and boors. But they were then absorbed into the socialization of younger and younger children until they became second nature. The standards also trickled down from the upper classes to the bourgeoisie that strove to emulate them, and from them to the lower classes, eventually becoming a part of the culture as a whole.”
74 “Europe had five thousand independent political units (mainly baronies and principalities) in the 15th century, five hundred at the time of the Thirty Years’ War in the early 17th, two hundred at the time of Napoleon in the early 19th, and fewer than thirty in 1953.”
75 “Once Leviathan was in charge, the rules of the game changed. A man’s ticket to fortune was no longer being the baddest knight in the area but making a pilgrimage to the king’s court and currying favor with him and his entourage. The court, basically a government bureaucracy, had no use for hotheads and loose cannons, but sought responsible custodians to run its provinces. The nobles had to change their marketing. They had to cultivate their manners, so as not to offend the king’s minions, and their empathy, to understand what they wanted. The manners appropriate for the court came to be called “courtly” manners or “courtesy.” The etiquette guides, with their advice on where to place one’s nasal mucus, originated as manuals for how to behave in the king’s court.” !!!
75 ST AUGUSTINE “Business is in itself an evil”
76 “human cooperation and the social emotions that support it, such as sympathy, trust, gratitude, guilt, and anger, were selected because they allow people to flourish in positive-sum games.” !!
77 “in the late Middle Ages people began to unmire themselves from technological and economic stagnation. Money increasingly replaced barter, aided by the larger national territories in which a currency could be recognized. The building of roads, neglected since Roman times, resumed, allowing the transport of goods to the hinterlands of the country and not just along its coasts and navigable rivers. Horse transport became more efficient with the use of horseshoes that protected hooves from paving stones and yokes that didn’t choke the poor horse when it pulled a heavy load. Wheeled carts, compasses, clocks, spinning wheels, treadle looms, windmills, and water mills were also perfected in the later Middle Ages. And the specialized expertise needed to implement these technologies was cultivated in an expanding stratum of craftsmen. The advances encouraged the division of labor, increased surpluses, and lubricated the machinery of exchange. Life presented people with more positive-sum games and reduced the attractiveness of zero-sum plunder. To take advantage of the opportunities, people had to plan for the future, control their impulses, take other people’s perspectives, and exercise the other social and cognitive skills needed to prosper in social networks.”
78 “an evolutionary dynamic similar to the Civilizing Process drove the major transitions in the history of life. These transitions were the successive emergence of genes, chromosomes, bacteria, cells with nuclei, organisms, sexually reproducing organisms, and animal societies. In each transition, entities with the capacity to be either selfish or cooperative tended toward cooperation when they could be subsumed into a larger whole.”
81 – 82 “in the 14th and 15th centuries an astonishing 26 percent of male aristocrats died from violence—about the same rate that we saw in figure 2-2 as the average for preliterate tribes. The rate fell into the single digits by the turn of the 18th century, and of course today it is essentially zero.”
83 “Most homicides [..] are really instances of capital punishment, with a private citizen as the judge, jury, and executioner.”
84 “many lower-status people—the poor, the uneducated, the unmarried, and members of minority groups—are effectively stateless. Some make a living from illegal activities like drug dealing, gambling, selling stolen goods, and prostitution, so they cannot file lawsuits or call the police to enforce their interests in business disputes. […]
But another reason for their statelessness is that lower-status people and the legal system often live in a condition of mutual hostility. Black and Cooney report that in dealing with low-income African Americans, police “seem to vacillate between indifference and hostility,…reluctant to become involved in their affairs but heavy handed when they do so.” Judges and prosecutors too “tend to be…uninterested in the disputes of low-status people, typically disposing of them quickly and, to the parties involved, with an unsatisfactory penal emphasis.” !!
89 “the relationship between crime and democratization is an inverted U. Established democracies are relatively safe places, as are established autocracies, but emerging democracies and semi-democracies (also called anocracies) are often plagued by violent crime and vulnerable to civil war, which sometimes shade into each other.”
91 “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.”
99 “Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In much of American history, legitimate force was also wielded by posses, vigilantes, lynch mobs, company police, detective agencies, and Pinkertons, and even more often kept as a prerogative of the individual.”
99 “Southerners do not outkill northerners in homicides carried out during robberies, [..] only in those sparked by quarrels.”
104 – 105 “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.”
106 “A famous study that tracked a thousand low-income Boston teenagers for forty-five years discovered that two factors predicted whether a delinquent would go on to avoid a life of crime: getting a stable job, and marrying a woman he cared about and supporting her and her children. The effect of marriage was substantial: three-quarters of the bachelors, but only a third of the husbands, went on to commit more crimes.”
111 “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”
120 “Young pregnant women who opt for abortions get better grades, are less likely to be on welfare, and are more likely to finish school than their counterparts who have miscarriages or carry their pregnancies to term.”
128 “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. Centuries ago our ancestors may have had to squelch all signs of spontaneity and individuality in order to civilize themselves, but now that norms of nonviolence are entrenched, we can let up on particular inhibitions that my be obsolete. In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it’s a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don’t have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.” !!!
4 — THE HUMANITARIAN REVOLUTION
133 “all of the first complex civilizations were absolutist theocracies which punished victimless crimes with torture and mutilation.”
140 “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.”
149 “between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.”
153 EXODUS 21:20-21 “When a slave-owner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. But if the slave survives for a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner’s property.”
154 – 155 “Britain, once among the most exuberant slave-trading nations, outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery throughout the empire in 1833. By the 1840s it was jawboning other countries to end their participation in the slave trade, backed up by economic sanctions and by almost a quarter of the Royal Navy.”
162 MOZI “To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime, to kill ten men is to increase the guilt ten-fold, to kill a hundred men is to increase it a hundred-fold. This the rulers of the earth all recognize, and yet when it comes to the greatest crime—waging war on another state—they praise it!…
If a man on seeing a little black were to say it is black, but on seeing a lot of black were to say it is white, it would be clear that such a man could not distinguish black and white….So those who recognize a small crime as such, but do not recognize the wickedness of the greatest crime of all—the waging of war on another state—but actually praise it—cannot distinguish right and wrong.”
163 “To gain traction, antiwar sentiments have to infect many constituencies at the same time. And they have to be grounded in economic and political institutions, so that the war-averse outlook doesn’t depend on everyone’s deciding to become and stay virtuous.” !!
166 IMMANUEL KANT “For states in their relation to each other, there cannot be any reasonable way out of the lawless condition which entails only war except that they, like individual men, should give up their savage (lawless) freedom, adjust themselves to the constraints of public law, and thus establish a continuously growing state consisting of various nations which will ultimately include all the nations of the world.”
168 “a change in the norms surrounding violence has to precede a change in the nuts and bolts of governance.”
170 “Humans have a revulsion to filth and bodily secretions, and just as people today may avoid a homeless person who reeks of feces and urine, people in earlier centuries may have been more callous to their neighbors because those neighbors were more disgusting. Worse, people easily slip from visceral disgust to moralistic disgust and treat unsanitary things as contemptibly defiled and sordid. […] People force a despised minority to live in squalor, which makes them seem animalistic and subhuman, which encourages the dominant group to mistreat them further, which degrades them still further, removing any remaining tug on the oppressors’ conscience. Perhaps this spiral of dehumanization runs the movie of the Civilizing Process backwards. It reverses the historical sweep toward greater cleanliness and dignity that led, over the centuries, to greater respect for people’s well-being.”
171 “Between 1200 and 1800 measures of economic well-being, such as income, calories per capita, protein per capita, and number of surviving children per woman, showed no upward trend in any European country. Indeed, they were barely above the levels of hunter-gatherer societies. Only when the Industrial Revolution introduced more efficient manufacturing techniques and built an infrastructure of canals and railroads did European economies start to shoot upward and the populace become more affluent.”
182 “Morality [.] 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.” !!
185 “Unspoken norms of civilized behavior, both in everyday interactions and in the conduct of government, may be a prerequisite to implementing certain reforms successfully.”
185 JAMES MADISON “What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”
186 “two extreme visions of human nature—a Tragic vision that is resigned to its flaws, and a Utopian vision that denies it exists—define the great divide between right-wing and left-wing political ideologies. […] a better understanding of human nature in the light of modern science can point the way to an approach to politics that is more sophisticated than either. The human mind is not a blank slate, and no humane political system should be allowed to deify its leaders or remake its citizens. Yet for all its limitations, human nature includes a recursive, open-ended, combinatorial system for reasoning, which can take cognizance of its own limitations. That is why the engine of Enlightenment humanism, 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.”
187 JOHANN HERDER “I am not here to think, but to be, feel, live!…Heart! Warmth! Blood! Humanity! Life!”
4 — THE LONG PEACE
194 “The worst atrocity of all time was the An Lushan Revolt and Civil War, an eight-year rebellion during China’s Tang Dynasty that, according to censuses, resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the empire’s population, a sixth of the world’s population at the time.”
198 JAMES PAYNE “the Associated Press is a more comprehensive source of information about battles around the world than were sixteenth-century monks.”
200 LEWIS RICHARDSON “For indignation is so easy and satisfying a mood that it is apt to prevent one from attending to any facts that oppose it. If the reader should object that I have abandoned ethics for the false doctrine that ‘tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner’ [to understand all is to forgive all], I can reply that it is only a temporary suspense of ethical judgment, made because ‘beaucoup condamner c’est peu comprendre’ [to condemn much is to understand little].”
215 – 216 “What are the odds of going from a small war, say, with 1,000 deaths, to a medium-sized war, with 10,000 deaths? It’s the same as the odds of going from a medium-sized war of 10,000 deaths to a large war of 100,000 deaths, or from a large war of 100,000 deaths to a historically large war of 1 million deaths, or from a historic war to a world war. […]
It is extremely unlikely that the world will see a war that will kill 100 million people, and less likely still that it will have on that will kill a billion. But in an age of nuclear weapons, our terrified imaginations and the mathematics of power-law distributions agree: it is not astronomically unlikely.”
216 “size doesn’t matter[:] The same psychological or game-theoretic dynamics that govern whether quarreling coalitions will threaten, back down, bluff, engage, escalate, fight on, or surrender apply whether the coalitions are street gangs, militias, or armies of great powers. Presumably this is because humans are social animals who aggregate into coalitions, which amalgamate into larger coalitions, and so on. Yet at any scale these coalitions may be sent into battle by a single clique or individual, be it a gang leader, capo, warlord, king, or emperor.” !!!
222 “the global effort to prevent deaths in war should give the highest priority to preventing the largest wars.”
222 “the bell-curve mindset [.] makes extreme values seem astronomically unlikely, so when we come across an extreme event, we reason there must have been extraordinary design behind it.” !!
235 “Historians consider the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 not only to have put out the Wars of Religion but to have established the first version of the modern international order. Europe was now partitioned into sovereign states rather than being a crazy quilt of jurisdictions nominally overseen by the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. This Age of Sovereignty saw the ascendancy of states that were still linked to dynasties and religions but that really hung their prestige on their governments, territories, and commercial empires. It was this gradual consolidation of sovereign states (culminating a process that began well before 1648) that set off the two opposing trends that have emerged from every statistical study of war we have seen: wars were getting less frequent but more damaging.”
235 “As small baronies and duchies coalesced into larger kingdoms, the centralized authorities prevented them from warring with each other for the same reason that they prevented individual citizens from murdering each other (and that farmers prevent their livestock from killing each other): as far as an overlord is concerned, private quarrels within his domain are a dead loss.”
236 CHARLES TILLY “In times of war…, the managers of full-fledged states often commissioned privateers, hired sometime bandits to raid their enemies, and encouraged their regular troops to take booty. In royal service, soldiers and sailors were often expected to provide for themselves by preying on the civilian population: commandeering, raping, looting, taking prizes. When demobilized, they commonly continued the same practices, but without the same royal protection; demobilized ships became pirate vessels, demobilized troops bandits.
It also worked the other way: A king’s best source of armed supporters was sometimes the world of outlaws. Robin Hood’s conversion to royal archer may be a myth, but the myth records a practice. The distinctions between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” users of violence came clear only very slowly, in the process during which the states’ armed forces became relatively unified and permanent.”
239 “Napoleonic France, because it emerged from the French Revolution, became associated in Europe with the French Enlightenment. In fact it is better classified as the first implementation of fascism.”
242 “Another development of the 19th century that would undo Europe’s long interval of peace was romantic militarism: the doctrine that war itself was a salubrious activity, quite apart from its strategic goals. Among liberals and conservatives alike, the notion took hold that war called forth spiritual qualities of heroism, self-sacrifice, and manliness and was needed as a cleansing and invigorating therapy for the effeminacy and materialism of bourgeois society.” !!
285 “The technologies that facilitated trade, such as ships and roads, also facilitated plunder, sometimes among the same itinerants, who followed the rule “If there are more of them, trade; if there are more of us, raid.””
287 “The transparency and intelligibility of a country with a free market economy can reassure its neighbors that it is not going on a war footing, which can defuse a Hobbesian trap and cramp a leader’s freedom to engage in risky bluffing and brinkmanship. And whether or not a leader’s power is constrained by the ballot box, in a market economy it is constrained by stakeholders who control the means of production and who might oppose a disruption of international trade that’s bad for business. These constraints put a brake on a leader’s personal ambition for glory, grandeur, and cosmic justice and on his temptation to respond to a provocation with a reckless escalation.”
291 “Nations become stable democracies only when their political factions tire of murder as the means of assigning power. They engage in commerce only when they put a greater value on mutual prosperity than on unilateral glory. And they join intergovernmental organizations only when they are willing to cede a bit of sovereignty for a bit of mutual benefit. In other words, by signing on to the Kantian variables, nations and their leaders are increasingly acting in such a way that the principle behind their actions can be made universal. Could the Long Peace represent the ascendancy in the international arena of the Categorical Imperative? […]
Norms among the influential constituencies in developed countries may have evolved to incorporate the conviction that war is inherently immoral because of its costs to human well-being, and that it can be justified only on the rare occasions when it is certain to prevent even greater costs to human well-being.”
292 “By the 1970s and 1980s the Soviet Union’s attempt to retain its power by totalitarian control of media and travel was becoming a significant handicap. Not only was it becoming ludicrous for a modern economy to do without photocopiers, fax machines, and personal computers (to say nothing of the nascent Internet), but it was impossible for the country’s rulers to keep scientists and policy wonks from learning about the ideas in the increasingly prosperous West, or to keep the postwar generation from learning about rock music, blue jeans, and other perquisites of personal freedom.”
293 IMMANUEL KANT “Wars, tense and unremitting preparations, and the resultant distress which every state must eventually feel within itself, even in the midst of peace—these are the means by which nature drives nations to make initially imperfect attempts, but finally, after many devastations, upheavals and even complete inner exhaustion of their powers, to take the step which reason could have suggested to them even without so many sad experiences—that of abandoning their lawless state of savagery.”
5 – THE NEW PEACE
295 ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN “Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.”
296 DAVID HUME “The humour of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature, and has an influence even on persons endowed with the profoundest judgment and most extensive learning.”
296 “If we don’t keep an eye on the numbers, the programming policy “If it bleeds it leads” will feed the cognitive shortcut “The more memorable, the more frequent,” and we will end up with what has been called a false sense of insecurity.” !!
303 “East Asia seems to be catching Europe’s distaste for war. Though in the decades after World War II it was the world’s bloodiest region, with ruinous wars in China, Korea, and Indochina, from 1980 to 1993 the number of conflicts and their toll in battle deaths plummeted, and they have remained at historically unprecedented lows ever since.” RLY?
310 – 311 “One might think that if a lot of democracy is a good thing in inhibiting war, then a little democracy is still better than none. But with civil wars it doesn’t work that way. […] 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” such as ethnic civil wars, revolutionary wars, and coups d’état. […]
The vulnerability to civil war of countries in which control of the government is a winner-take-all jackpot is multiplied when the government controls windfalls like oil, gold, diamonds, and strategic minerals. Far from being a blessing, these bonanzas create the so-called resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty and fool’s gold. Countries with an abundance of nonrenewable, easily monopolized resources have slower economic growth, crappier governments, and more violence. As the Venezuelan politician Juan Pérez Alfonzo put it, “Oil is the devil’s excrement.” A country can be accursed by these resources because they concentrate power and wealth in the hands of whoever monopolizes them, typically a governing elite but sometimes a regional warlord. The leader becomes obsessed with fending off rivals for his cash cow and has no incentive to foster the networks of commerce that enrich a society and knit it together in reciprocal obligations. Collier, together with the economist Dambisa Moyo and other policy analysts, has called attention to a related paradox. Foreign aid, so beloved of crusading celebrities, can be another poisoned chalice, because it can enrich and empower the leaders through whom it is funneled rather than building a sustainable economic infrastructure. Expensive contraband like coca, opium, and diamonds is a third curse, because it opens a niche for cutthroat politicians or warlords to secure the illegal enclaves and distribution channels.” !!
311 “most armed conflict in the world today no longer consists of campaigns for territory by professional armies. It consists instead of plunder, intimidation, revenge, and rape by gangs of unemployable young men serving warlords or local politicians, much like the dregs rounded up by medieval barons for their private wars.”
312 “the infamous civil wars and genocides of the 1990s were largely perpetrated by gangs of drugged or drunken hooligans, including those in Bosnia, Colombia, Croatia, East Timor, Kosovo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Zimbabwe, and other countries in the African-Asian conflict crescent.”
314 “In the postcolonial decades civil wars piled up not so much because they broke out at an increasing rate but because they broke out at a higher rate than they ended (2.2 outbreaks a year compared to 1.8 terminations), and thus began to accumulate. By 1999 an average civil war had been going on for fifteen years! That began to change in the late 1990s and 2000s, when civil wars started to fizzle out faster than new ones took their place. They also tended to end in negotiated settlements, without a clear victor, rather than being fought to the bitter end. Formerly these embers would smolder for a couple of years and then flare up again, but now they were more likely to die out for good.”
316 “The problem with nonstate conflicts is that until recently war buffs just weren’t interested in them. No one kept track, so there’s nothing to count, and we cannot plot the trends. Even the United Nations, whose mission is to prevent “the scourge of war,” refuses to keep statistics on intercommunal violence (or on any other form of armed conflict), because its member states don’t want social scientists poking around inside their borders and exposing the violence that their murderous governments cause or their inept governments fail to prevent.” !!!!
317 “Second, nonstate conflicts kill far fewer people than conflicts that involve a government, perhaps a quarter as many.” MY NOTE
319 “What about the report of 5.4 million deaths (90 percent of them from disease and hunger) in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? It also turns out to be inflated. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) got the number by taking an estimate of the prewar death rate that was far too low (because it came from sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, which is better off than the DRC) and subtracting it from an estimate of the rate during the war that was far too high (because it came from areas where the IRC was providing humanitarian assistance, which are just the areas with the highest impact from war). The HSRP, while acknowledging that the indirect death toll in the DRC is high—probably over a million—cautions against accepting estimates of excess deaths from retrospective survey data, since in addition to all of their sampling pitfalls, they require dubious conjectures about what would have happened if a war had not taken place.”
319 “deaths from malnutrition and hunger in the developing world have been dropping steadily over the years”
320 “It’s not easy to see the bright side in the developing world, where the remnants of war continue to cause tremendous misery. The effort to whittle down the numbers that quantify the misery can seem heartless, especially when the numbers serve as propaganda for raising money and attention. But there is a moral imperative in getting the facts right, and not just to maintain credibility. The discovery that fewer people are dying in wars all over the world can thwart cynicism among compassion-fatigued news readers who might otherwise think that poor countries are irredeemable hellholes. And a better understanding of what drove the numbers down can steer us toward doing things that make people better off rather than congratulating ourselves on how altruistic we are.”
321 “modern chemistry and railroads are by no means necessary for high-throughput killing. When the French revolutionaries suppressed a revolt in the Vendée region in 1793, they hit upon the idea of packing prisoners into barges, sinking them below the water’s surface long enough to drown the human cargo, and then floating them up for the next batch.”
322 DEUTERONOMY 28:52-57 “In the desperate straits to which the enemy siege reduces you, you will eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your sons and daughters whom the LORD your God has given you. Even the most refined and gentle of men among you will begrudge food to his own brother, to the wife whom he embraces, and to the last of his remaining children, giving to none of them any of the flesh of his children whom he is eating, because nothing else remains to him, in the desperate straits to which the enemy siege will reduce you in all your towns. She who is the most refined and gentle among you, so gentle and refined that she does not venture to set the sole of her foot on the ground, will begrudge food to the husband whom she embraces, to her own son, and to her own daughter, begrudging even the afterbirth that comes out from between her thighs, and the children that she bears, because she will eat them in secret for lack of anything else, in the desperate straits to which the enemy siege will reduce you in your towns.”
325 “Like all forms of revenge, a retaliatory massacre is pointless once it has to be carried out, but a well-advertised and implacable drive to carry it out, regardless of its costs at the time, may have been programmed into people’s brains by evolution, cultural norms, or both as a way to make the deterrent credible.”
327 “Not only do we apply disgust metaphors to morally devalued peoples, but we tend to morally devalue people who are physically disgusting”
330 “Antipathy toward individual middlemen can easily transfer to antipathy to ethnic groups. The capital necessary to prosper in middlemen occupations consists mainly of expertise rather than land or factories, so it is easily shared among kin and friends, and it is highly portable. For these reasons it’s common for particular ethnic groups to specialize in the middleman niche and to move to whatever communities currently lack them, where they tend to become prosperous minorities—and targets of envy and resentment.”
330 DANIEL CHIROT “Marxist eschatology actually mimicked Christian doctrine. In the beginning, there was a perfect world with no private property, no classes, no exploitation, and no alienation—the Garden of Eden. Then came sin, the discovery of private property, and the creation of exploiters. Humanity was cast from the Garden to suffer inequality and want. Humans then experimented with a series of modes of production, from the slave, to the feudal, to the capitalist mode, always seeking the solution and not finding it. Finally there came a true prophet with a message of salvation, Karl Marx, who preached the truth of Science. He promised redemption but was not heeded, except by his close disciples who carried the truth forward. Eventually, however, the proletariat, the carriers of the true faith, will be converted by the religious elect, the leaders of the party, and join to create a more perfect world. A final, terrible revolution will wipe out capitalism, alienation, exploitation, and inequality. After that, history will end because there will be perfection on earth, and the true believers will have been saved.” !!
334 THEODORE ROOSEVELT “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.”
335 “a perverse sign of progress[:] 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.”
335 “No small part in the new awareness of the horrors of genocide was a willingness of Holocaust survivors to tell their stories. Chalk and Jonassohn note that these memoirs are historically unusual. Survivors of earlier genocides had treated them as humiliating defeats and felt that talking about them would only rub in history’s harsh verdict. With the new humanitarian sensibilities, genocides became crimes against humanity, and survivors were witnesses for the prosecution.”
336 “most governments in recent periods do not commit democides at all, and they prevent a far greater number of deaths than the democidal ones cause, by promoting vaccination, sanitation, traffic safety, and policing.”
337 “three-quarters of all the deaths from all 141 democidal regimes were committed by just four governments, which Rummel calls the dekamegamurderers: the Soviet Union with 62 million, the People’s Republic of China with 35 million, Nazi Germany with 21 million, and 1928–49 nationalist China with 10 million. Another 11 percent of the total were killed by eleven megamurderers, including Imperial Japan with 6 million, Cambodia with 2 million, and Ottoman Turkey with 1.9 million.”
344 – 345 “Compared to the number of deaths from homicide, war, and genocide, the worldwide toll from terrorism is in the noise […]
Other than 9/11, the number of people killed by terrorists on American soil during these thirty-eight years was 340, and the number killed after 9/11—the date that inaugurated the so-called Age of Terror—was 11. […]
In fact, in every year but 1995 and 2001, more Americans were killed by lightning, deer, peanut allergies, bee stings, and “ignition or melting of nightwear” than by terrorist attacks. The number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can increase the risk of dying.” !!
346 “Fallacies in risk perception are known to distort public policy. Money and laws have been directed at keeping additives out of food and chemical residues out of water supplies which pose infinitesimal risks to health, while measures that demonstrably save lives, such as enforcing lower highway speeds, are resisted.”
346 “The terrorists’ ability to gain a large psychological payoff for a small investment in damage was lost on the Department of Homeland Security, which outdid itself in stoking fear and dread, beginning with a mission statement that warned, “Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.””
347 “the definition of a gaffe in Washington [:] “something a politician says that is true””
348 “It’s a little-known fact that most terrorist groups fail, and that all of them die.”
358 SCOTT ATRAN “what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Koran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that they will never live to enjoy…. Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer: . . . fraternal, fastbreaking, thrilling, glorious, and cool. Anyone is welcome to try his hand at slicing off the head of Goliath with a paper cutter.”
361 “The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up.
Also, the world contains a lot of people. The statistics of power-law distributions and the events of the past two centuries agree in telling us that a small number of perpetrators can cause a great deal of damage. 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. But even if he did, we would still need an explanation of why homicide rates fell a hundredfold, why slave markets and debtors’ prisons have vanished, and why the Soviets and Americans did not go to war over Cuba, to say nothing of Canada and Spain over flatfish.”
366 – 367 “Majorities of Muslims in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and Bangladesh told the pollsters that Sharia, the principles behind Islamic law, should be the only source of legislation in their countries, and majorities in most of the countries said it should be at least one of the sources. On the other hand, a majority of Americans believe that the Bible should be one of the sources of legislation, and presumably they don’t mean that people who work on Sunday should be stoned to death. Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.”
376 “terrorists tend to be underemployed lower-middle-class men”
7 – THE RIGHTS REVOLUTIONS
394 “The only defense of [the] hypocrisy [of racial preferences] is that it may be a price worth paying for historically unprecedented levels of racial comity (though it’s in the nature of hypocrisy that one cannot say that either).”
395 – 396 “In any species in which one sex can reproduce at a faster rate than the other, the participation of the slower-reproducing sex will be a scarce resource over which the faster-reproducing sex competes. In mammals and many birds it is the female who reproduces more slowly, because she is committed to a lengthy period of gestation, and for mammals, lactation. Females are the more discriminating sex, and the males treat restrictions on their access to females as an obstacle to be overcome. Harassment, intimidation, and forced copulation are found in many species, including gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees.”
396 – 397 “If a man’s wife has a secret dalliance, he could be investing in another man’s child, which is a form of evolutionary suicide. Any genes that incline him to be indifferent to the risk of cuckoldry will lose out over evolutionary time to genes that incline him to be vigilant. […]
Of course, women as well as men are jealous of their partners, as a biologist would predict from the fact that men invest in their offspring. A man’s infidelity brings the risk that his investment stream will be alienated by another woman and the children he has with her, and this risk gives his partner an incentive to keep him from straying. But the costs of a partner’s infidelity are different for the two sexes, and accordingly a man’s jealousy has been found to be more implacable, violent, and tilted toward sexual (rather than emotional) infidelity. In no society are women and in-laws obsessed with the virginity of grooms.” !!
397 – 398 “Legal scholars who have studied jury proceedings have discovered that jurors must be disabused of the folk theory that women can be negligently liable for their own rapes—a concept not recognized in any contemporary American code of law—or it will creep into their deliberations.”
398 “The same genetic calculus that predicts that men might sometimes be inclined to pressure women into sex, and that the victim’s kin may experience rape as an offense against themselves, also predicts that the woman herself should resist and abhor being raped. It is in the nature of sexual reproduction that a female should evolve to exert control over her sexuality. She should choose the time, the terms, and the partner to ensure that her offspring have the fittest, most generous, and most protective father available, and that the offspring are born at the most propitious time. As always, this reproductive spreadsheet is not something that a woman calculates, either consciously or unconsciously; nor is it a chip in her brain that robotically controls her behavior. It is just the backstory of why certain emotions evolved, in this case, the determination of a woman to control her sexuality, and the agony of violation when it has been forcibly wrested from her.”
398 “Our current moral understanding does not seek to balance the interests of a woman not to be raped, the interests of the men who may wish to rape her, and the interests of the husband and fathers who want to monopolize her sexuality. 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. (The only tradeoff we recognize today is the interests of the accused in a criminal proceeding, since his autonomy is at stake too.)”
399 MARY ASTELL “If absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State how comes it to be so in a Family? or if in a Family why not in a State? since no reason can be alleg’d for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other….
If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves? As they must be if the being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men, be the perfect Condition of Slavery?”
399 “[Susan Brownmiller] wrote at a time when the decivilizing process of the 1960s had made violence a form of romantic rebellion and the sexual revolution had made lasciviousness a sign of cultural sophistication. The two affectations are more congenial to men than to women, and in combination they made rape almost chic.”
402 “in thirty-five years the rate [of rape] has fallen by an astonishing 80 percent, from 250 per 100,000 people over the age of twelve in 1973 to 50 per 100,000 in 2008. In fact, the decline may be even greater than that, because women have almost certainly been more willing to report being raped in recent years, when rape has been recognized as a serious crime, than they were in earlier years, when rape was often hidden and trivialized.”
405 “Rape is not exactly a normal part of male sexuality, but it is made possible by the fact that male desire can be indiscriminate in its choice of a sexual partner and indifferent to the partner’s inner life—indeed, “object” can be a more fitting term than “partner.””
405 “The sexual abyss offers a complementary explanation of the callous treatment of rape victims in traditional legal and moral codes. It may come from more than the ruthless exercise of power by males over females; it may also come from a parochial inability of men to conceive of a mind unlike theirs, a mind that finds the prospect of abrupt, unsolicited sex with a stranger to be repugnant rather than appealing. A society in which men work side by side with women, and are forced to take their interests into account while justifying their own, is a society in which this thick-headed incuriosity is less likely to remain intact.”
406 “the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate.”
410 “Among couples with a controller, the controllers who used violence were almost exclusively men; the spouses who used violence were almost entirely women, presumably defending themselves or their children. When neither partner was a controller, violence erupted only when an argument got out of hand, and in those couples the men were just a shade more prone to using force than the women. The distinction between controllers and squabblers, then, resolves the mystery of the gender-neutral violence statistics. The numbers in violence surveys are dominated by spats between noncontrolling partners, in which the women give as good as they get. But the numbers from shelter admissions, court records, emergency rooms, and police statistics are dominated by couples with a controller, usually the man intimidating the woman, and occasionally a woman defending herself. The asymmetry is even greater with estranged partners, in which it is the men who do most of the stalking, threatening, and harming.”
412 “In the years since the ascendancy of the women’s movement, the chance that a man would be killed by his wife, ex-wife, or girlfriend has fallen sixfold.”
412 “advocacy groups tend to inflate statistics on rates of violence against women and to hide statistics on trends over time.”
416 “The intuition that a mother should treat every offspring as infinitely precious, far from being an implication of the theory of natural selection, is incompatible with it. Selection acts to maximize an organism’s expected lifetime reproductive output, and that requires that it negotiate the tradeoff between investing in a new offspring and conserving its resources for current and future offspring. Mammals are extreme among animals in the amount of time, energy, and food they invest in their young, and humans are extreme among mammals. Pregnancy and birth are only the first chapter in a mother’s investment career, and a mammalian mother faces an expenditure of more calories in suckling the offspring to maturity than she expended in bearing it. Nature generally abhors the sunk-cost fallacy, and so we expect mothers to assess the offspring and the circumstances to decide whether to commit themselves to the additional investment or to conserve their energy for its born or unborn siblings. If a newborn is sickly, or if the situation is unpromising for its survival, they do not throw good money after bad but cut their losses and favor the healthiest in the litter or wait until times get better and they can try again.” !!
417 “The ubiquity and evolutionary intelligibility of infanticide suggest that for all its apparent inhumanity, it is usually not a form of wanton murder but falls into a special category of violence.” !! ORLY?
417 EDWARD TYLER “Infanticide arises from hardness of life rather than hardness of heart.”
417 PLUTARCH “There is nothing so imperfect, so helpless, so naked, so shapeless, so foul, as man observed at birth, to whom alone, one might almost say, Nature has given not even a clean passage to the light; but, defiled with blood and covered with filth, and resembling more one just slain than one just born, he is an object for none to touch or lift up or kiss or embrace except for someone who loves with a natural affection.”
418 “Daly and Wilson, and later the anthropologist Edward Hagen, have proposed that 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. Mothers with postpartum depression often feel emotionally detached from their newborns and may harbor intrusive thoughts of harming them. Mild depression, psychologists have found, often gives people a more accurate appraisal of their life prospects than the rose-tinted view we normally enjoy. The typical rumination of a depressed new mother—how will I cope with this burden?—has been a legitimate question for mothers throughout history who faced the weighty choice between a definite tragedy now and the possibility of an even greater tragedy later. As the situation becomes manageable and the blues dissipate, many women report falling in love with their baby, coming to see it as a uniquely wonderful individual.”
421 “Families that kill their daughters want there to be women around. They just want someone else to raise them. Female infanticide is a kind of social parasitism, a free rider problem, a genealogical tragedy of the commons.”
424 “Any taboo that contravenes powerful inclinations in human nature must be fortified with layers of euphemism and hypocrisy, and it may have little practical effect on the proscribed activity.” !!!
425 “According to one historian, exposure of infants during the Middle Ages “was practiced on a gigantic scale with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with most frigid indifference.” Milner cites birth records showing an average of 5.1 births among wealthy families, 2.9 among the middle class, and 1.8 among the poor, adding, “There was no evidence that the number of pregnancies followed similar lines.” In 1527 a French priest wrote that “the latrines resound with the cries of children who have been plunged into them.””
427 “The vast majority of abortions are carried out well before the milestone of having a functioning brain, and thus are safely conceptualized, according to this understanding of the worth of human life, as fundamentally different from infanticide and other forms of violence.”
427 “rates of abortion are falling throughout the world.”
445 “American parents will not let their children out of their sight. Children are chauffeured, chaperoned, and tethered with cell phones, which, far from reducing parents’ anxiety, only sends them into a tizzy if a child doesn’t answer on the first ring. Making friends in the playground has given way to mother-arranged playdates, a phrase that didn’t exist before the 1980s. Forty years ago two-thirds of children walked or biked to school; today 10 percent do. A generation ago 70 percent of children played outside; today the rate is down to 30 percent.”
446 “The annual number of abductions by strangers has ranged from 200 to 300 in the 1990s to about 100 today, around half of whom are murdered. With 50 million children in the United States, that works out to an annual homicide rate of one in a million (0.1 per hundred thousand, to use our usual metric). That’s about a twentieth of the risk of drowning and a fortieth of the risk of a fatal car accident. The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you’d have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.”
448 “While many legal systems single out male homosexuality for criminalization, no legal system singles out lesbianism, and hate crimes against gay men outnumber hate crimes against gay women by a ratio of almost five to one.”
449 “One ethnographic survey found that in almost 60 percent of preliterate societies, homosexuality was unknown or extremely rare. […]
Among traditional societies that take note of homosexuality in their midst, more than twice as many disapprove of it as tolerate it. […] the cross-wiring between disgust and morality [.] leads people to confuse visceral revulsion with objective sinfulness.”
461 “the [mind has a] tendency to moralize the disgust-purity continuum. The equation holds at both ends of the scale: at one pole, we equate immorality with filth, carnality, hedonism, and dissoluteness; at the other, we equate virtue with purity, chastity, asceticism, and temperance. This cross talk affects our emotions about food. Meat-eating is messy and pleasurable, therefore bad; vegetarianism is clean and abstemious, therefore good.”
466 ERNEST HEMINGWAY “[The matador] must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing. Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you esthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race. Once you accept the rule of death, “Thou shalt not kill” is an easily and naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the godlike attributes, that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing. These things are done in pride and pride, of course, is a Christian sin and a pagan virtue. But it is pride which makes the bull-fight and true enjoyment of killing which makes the great matador.”
469 – 470 “If someone were to count up every animal that has lived on earth in the past fifty years and tally the harmful acts done to them, he or she might argue that no progress has been made in the treatment of animals. The reason is that the Animal Rights Revolution has been partly canceled out by another development, the Broiler Chicken Revolution. The 1928 campaign slogan “A chicken in every pot” reminds us that chicken was once thought of as a luxury. […] it takes two hundred chickens to provide the same amount of meat as a single cow.”
470 – 471 “at any moment there are three times as many lapsed vegetarians as observant ones.”
476 “the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals.”
477 “From 1960 to 2000, the annual number of books published in the United States increased almost fivefold.”
478 “Successful innovators not only stand on the shoulders of giants; they engage in massive intellectual property theft, skimming ideas from a vast watershed of tributaries flowing their way.” !!!
8 – INNER DEMONS
482 “Not a single category of violence has been pinned to a fixed rate over the course of history. Whatever causes violence, it is not a perennial urge like hunger, sex, or the need to sleep.” !!!
483 RICHARD TREMBLAY “The question . . . we’ve been trying to answer for the past 30 years is how do children learn to aggress. [But] that’s the wrong question. The right question is how do they learn not to aggress.”
485 “[Donald] Symons suggests that higher consciousness itself is designed for low-frequency, high-impact events. We seldom muse about daily necessities like grasping, walking, or speaking, let alone pay money to see them dramatized. What grabs our mental spotlight is illicit sex, violent death, and Walter Mittyish leaps of status.”
487 – 488 “Discretion is the better part of valor; compassion has nothing to do with it.
When an opportunity does arise to eliminate a hated opponent with little danger of reprisal, a Darwinian creature will seize on it. […] Much of human violence is cowardly violence: sucker punches, unfair fights, preemptive strikes, predawn raids, mafia hits, drive-by shootings. […]
The instinct behind rampages suggests that the human behavioral repertoire includes scripts for violence that lie quiescent and may be cued by propitious circumstances, rather than building up over time like hunger or thirst.”
495 – 496 “in the attempt to understand harm-doing, the viewpoint of the scientist or scholar overlaps with the viewpoint of the perpetrator. Both take a detached, amoral stance toward the harmful act. Both are contextualizers, always attentive to the complexities of the situation and how they contributed to the causation of the harm. And both believe that the harm is ultimately explicable. The viewpoint of the moralist, in contrast, is the viewpoint of the victim. The harm is treated with reverence and awe. It continues to evoke sadness and anger long after it was perpetrated. And for all the feeble ratiocination we mortals throw at it, it remains a cosmic mystery, a manifestation of the irreducible and inexplicable existence of evil in the universe.” !!
496 “evil in fact is perpetrated by people who are mostly ordinary, and who respond to their circumstances, including provocations by the victim, in ways they feel are reasonable and just.” !!!
496 “The myth of pure evil bedevils our attempt to understand real evil. Because the standpoint of the scientist resembles the standpoint of the perpetrator, while the standpoint of the moralizer resembles the standpoint of the victim, the scientist is bound to be seen as “making excuses” or “blaming the victim,” or as trying to vindicate the amoral doctrine that “to understand all is to forgive all.”” !!
497 “while violence is certainly common in the animal kingdom, to think of it as arising from a single impulse is to see the world through a victim’s eyes. […] But biologists have long noted that the mammalian brain has distinct circuits that underlie very different kinds of aggression.”
511 “Psychopathy may have evolved as a minority strategy that exploits a large population of trusting cooperators.”
512 “It would be better for the species if no one exaggerated, but our brains were not selected for the benefit of the species, and no individual can afford to be the only honest one in a community of self-enhancers.” !!!
514 “In modern conflicts […] where the fog of war is particularly thick and the leadership removed from the facts on the ground, overconfidence can survive longer than it would have in the small-scale battles in which our positive illusions evolved. Another modern danger is that the leadership of nations is likely to go to men who are at the right tail of the distribution of confidence, well into the region of overconfidence.” !!
515 “Contests of dominance are not as ridiculous as they seem. In any zone of anarchy, an agent can protect its interests only by cultivating a reputation for a willingness and an ability to defend itself against depredations. Though this mettle can be demonstrated in retaliation after the fact, it’s better to flaunt it proactively, before any damage is done. To prove that one’s implicit threats are not hot air, it may be necessary to seek theaters in which one’s resolve and retaliatory capacity can be displayed: a way to broadcast the message “Don’t fuck with me.” Everyone has an interest in knowing the relative fighting abilities of the agents in their midst, because all parties have an interest in preempting any fight whose outcome is a foregone conclusion and that would needlessly bloody both fighters if carried out. When the relative prowesses of the members of a community are stable and widely known, we call it a dominance hierarchy. Dominance hierarchies are based on more than brute strength. Since not even the baddest primate can win a fight of one against three, dominance depends on the ability to recruit allies—who, in turn, don’t choose their teammates at random but join up with the stronger and shrewder ones.” !!
519 “Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem.”
523 “Developmental psychologists have shown that preschoolers profess racist attitudes that would appall their liberal parents, and that even babies prefer to interact with people of the same race and accent. […]
in human evolutionary history members of different races were separated by oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges (which is why racial differences evolved in the first place) and seldom met each other face to face. One’s adversaries were villages, clans, and tribes of the same race. What looms large in people’s minds is not race but coalition; it just so happens that nowadays many coalitions (neighborhoods, gangs, countries) coincide with races. Any invidious treatment that people display toward other races can be just as readily elicited by members of other coalitions.”
525 “minority women are far less likely to be the target of racist treatment than minority men.” !!
527 “women are pacifist only in comparison to men of the same time and society.”
530 “Revenge is not confined to political and tribal hotheads but is an easily pushed button in everyone’s brains. The homicidal fantasies to which a large majority of university students confess are almost entirely revenge fantasies.”
531 “When a trustworthy partner got shocked, the participants literally felt their pain: the same part of the insula that lit up when they were shocked lit up when they saw the nice guy (or gal) get shocked. When the double-crosser got shocked, the women could not turn off their empathy: their insula still lit up in sympathy. But the men hardened their hearts: their own insula stayed dark, while their striatum and orbital cortex lit up, a sign of a goal sought and consummated. Indeed, those circuits lit up in proportion to the men’s stated desire for revenge.”
534 “Vengeance is no disease: it is necessary for cooperation, preventing a nice guy from being exploited.” !!
539 “Assuming that malefactors reckon the utility of a misdeed as the probability they will get caught multiplied by the penalty they will incur if they do get caught, then a crime that is hard to detect should get a harsher punishment than one that is easy to detect. For similar reasons, a crime that gets a lot of publicity should be punished more harshly than one that is unpublicized, because the publicized one will leverage the value of the punishment as a general deterrent.”
540 “the sheer presence of government brings rates of violence down only so far—from the hundreds of homicides per 100,000 people per year to the tens. A further drop into the single digits may depend on something hazier, such as people’s acceptance of the legitimacy of the government and social contract.”
540 – 541 “A major predictor of excess revenge turned out to be civic norms: a measure of the degree to which people think it is all right to cheat on their income taxes, claim government benefits to which they are not entitled, and dodge fare-collectors on the subway. (Social scientists believe that civic norms make up a large part of the social capital of a country, which is more important to its prosperity than its physical resources.)” !!
545 – 547 “A damping of the desire for justice is particularly indispensable after civil conflicts, in which the institutions of justice like the police and prison system are not only fragile but may themselves have been among the main perpetrators of the harm. [..^] The common denominator to the success stories [..] was a set of conciliation rituals that implemented a symbolic and incomplete justice rather than perfect justice or none at all. […]
four ingredients of the successful elixir[:]
The first is a round of uncompromised truth-telling and acknowledgment of harm. […]
[Second,] an explicit rewriting of people’s social identities. […]
[Third,]: incomplete justice. Rather than settling every score, a society has to draw a line under past violations and grant massive amnesty while prosecuting only the blatant ringleaders and some of the more depraved foot soldiers. […]
Finally, the belligerents have to signal their commitment to a new relationship with a burst of verbal and nonverbal gestures.”
554 “Most sexual sadists start out wielding the whips and collars as a favor to the more numerous masochists; only gradually do they start to enjoy it.” !!
565 “people not only endorse an opinion they do not hold if they mistakenly believe everyone else holds it, but they falsely condemn someone else who fails to endorse the opinion.”
568 “There is no cure for ideology, because it emerges from many of the cognitive faculties that make us smart.”
9 – BETTER ANGELS
578 “The problem with building a better world through empathy, in the sense of contagion, mimicry, vicarious emotion, or mirror neurons, is that it cannot be counted on to trigger the kind of empathy we want, namely sympathetic concern for others’ well-being. Sympathy is endogenous, an effect rather than a cause of how people relate to one another. Depending on how beholders conceive of a relationship, their response to another person’s pain may be empathic, neutral, or even counterempathic.”
578 – 579 “The overall picture that has emerged from the study of the compassionate brain is that there is no empathy center with empathy neurons, but complex patterns of activation and modulation that depend on perceivers’ interpretation of the straits of another person and the nature of their relationship with the person. A general atlas of empathy might look more or less as follows. The temporoparietal junction and nearby sulcus (groove) in the superior temporal lobe assess another person’s physical and mental state. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the nearby frontal pole (the tip of the frontal lobe) compute the specifics of the situation and one’s overall goals in it. The orbital and ventromedial cortex integrate the results of these computations and modulate the responses of the evolutionarily older, more emotional parts of the brain. The amygdala responds to fearful and distressing stimuli, in conjunction with interpretations from the nearby temporal pole (the tip of the temporal lobe). The insula registers disgust, anger, and vicarious pain. The cingulate cortex helps to switch control among brain systems in response to urgent signals, such as those sent by circuits that are calling for incompatible responses, or those that register physical or emotional pain. And unfortunately for the mirror-neuron theory, the areas of the brain richest in mirror neurons, such as parts of the frontal lobe that plan motor movements (the rearmost portions above the Sylvian fissure) and the parts of the parietal lobes that register the body sense, are mostly uninvolved, except for the parts of the parietal lobes that keep track of whose body is where.
In fact, the brain tissue that is closest to empathy in the sense of compassion is neither a patch of cortex nor a subcortical organ but a system of hormonal plumbing. Oxytocin is a small molecule produced by the hypothalamus which acts on the emotional systems of the brain, including the amygdala and striatum, and which is released by the pituitary gland into the bloodstream, where it can affect the rest of the body. Its original evolutionary function was to turn on the components of motherhood, including giving birth, nursing, and nurturing the young. But the ability of the hormone to reduce the fear of closeness to other creatures lent itself over the course of evolutionary history to being co-opted to supporting other forms of affiliation. They include sexual arousal, heterosexual bonding in monogamous species, marital and companionate love, and sympathy and trust among nonrelatives”
583 “If natural selection favored costly helping of relatives or of potential reciprocation partners because of the long-term benefits to the genes, it did so by endowing the brain with a direct motive to help those beneficiaries, with no thought of its own welfare. The fact that the altruist’s genes may benefit in the long run does not expose the altruist as a hypocrite or undermine her altruistic motives, because the genetic benefit never figures as an explicit goal in her brain.”
589 GEORGE ELIOT “Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. […] Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the grounds of our personal lot.” !!
591 “empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity. Though empathy can be spread outward by taking other people’s perspectives, the increments are small, Batson warns, and they may be ephemeral. To hope that the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature.”
602 “self-control, like a muscle, can become fatigued.”
604 “the exercise of self-control hides a deep difference between men and women. Freed from their own willpower, men are more likely to act as evolutionary psychology predicts.”
609 “the theory of the Civilizing Process[:] The exogenous first domino is a change in law enforcement and opportunities for economic cooperation that objectively tilt the payoffs so that a deferral of gratification, in particular, an avoidance of impulsive violence, pays off in the long run. The knock-on effect is a strengthening of people’s self-control muscles that allow them (among other things) to inhibit their violent impulses, above and beyond what is strictly necessary to avoid being caught and punished. The process could even feed on itself in a positive feedback loop, “positive” in both the engineering and the human-values sense. In a society in which other people control their aggression, a person has less of a need to cultivate a hair trigger for retaliation, which in turn takes a bit of pressure off everyone else, and so on.”
619 “In their manifesto The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, the physicist Gregory Cochran and the anthropologist Henry Harpending reviewed the evidence for recent selection in humans and speculated that it includes changes in temperament and behavior. But none of the selected genes they describe has been implicated in behavior; all are restricted to digestion, disease resistance, and skin pigmentation.”
622 “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 such as wars of conquest, the use of chemical and nuclear weapons, dehumanizing racial stereotypes, casual allusions to rape, and the taking of identifiable human lives.” !!
624 “moral norms across the world cluster around a small number of themes.”
627 “When people adopt the mindset of Communality, they freely share resources within the group, keeping no tabs on who gives or takes how much.”
629 “Each moralized norm is a compartment containing a relational model, one or more social roles (parent, child, teacher, student, husband, wife, supervisor, employee, customer, neighbor, stranger), a context (home, street, school, workplace), and a resource (food, money, land, housing, time, advice, sex, labor). To be a socially competent member of a culture is to have assimilated a large set of these norms.”
631 “three kinds of tradeoffs[:] Routine tradeoffs are those that fall within a single relational model, such as choosing to be with one friend rather than another, or to purchase one car rather than another. Taboo tradeoffs pit a sacred value in one model against a secular value in another, such as selling out a friend, a loved one, an organ, or oneself for barter or cash. Tragic tradeoffs pit sacred values against each other, as in deciding which of two needy transplant patients should receive an organ, or the ultimate tragic tradeoff, Sophie’s choice between the lives of her two children. The art of politics, Tetlock points out, is in large part the ability to reframe taboo tradeoffs as tragic tradeoffs (or, when one is in the opposition, to do the opposite)”
636 – 637 “The progression toward personal freedom raises the question of whether it is morally desirable to trade a measure of socially sanctioned violence for a measure of behavior that many people deem intrinsically wrong, such as blasphemy, homosexuality, drug use, and prostitution. But that’s just the point: right or wrong, retracting the moral sense from its traditional spheres of community, authority, and purity entails a reduction of violence.”
639 “The standard tools of diplomacy wonks, who treat the disputants as rational actors and try to manipulate the costs and benefits of a peace agreement, can backfire. Instead they must treat the disputants as moralistic actors, and manipulate the symbolic framing of the peace agreement, if they want a bit of daylight to open up.”
639 “the allocation of moral intuitions [are shifting] away from community, authority, and purity and toward fairness, autonomy, and rationality”
641 “Beginning in the 1960s, many democracies were traumatized by revisionist histories that unearthed their nations’ shallow roots and exposed their sordid misdeeds. The declines of patriotism, tribalism, and trust in hierarchies are in part a legacy of the new historiography. Many liberal-conservative battles continue to be fought over school curricula and museum exhibits.”
644 “the suggestion that reason is incapable of contending against the brawn of the emotions, a tail that tries to wag the dog […] is an over-interpretation of the laboratory phenomena of moral dumbfounding and other visceral reactions to moral dilemmas.” !!!
645 – 646 “Communal Sharing thinks in all-or-none categories (also called a nominal scale): a person is either in the hallowed group or out of it. The cognitive mindset is that of intuitive biology, with its pure essences and potential contaminants. Authority Ranking uses an ordinal scale: the linear ranking of a dominance hierarchy. Its cognitive gadget is an intuitive physics of space, force, and time: higher-ranking people are deemed bigger, stronger, higher, and first in the series. Equality Matching is measured on a scale of intervals, which allows two quantities to be compared to see which is larger but not entered into proportions. It reckons by concrete procedures such as lining things up, counting them off, or comparing them with a balance scale. Only Market Pricing (and the Rational-Legal mindset of which it is part) allows one to reason in terms of proportionality. The Rational-Legal model requires the nonintuitive tools of symbolic mathematics, such as fractions, percentages, and exponentiation.”
648 “if the members of species have the power to reason with one another, and enough opportunities to exercise that power, sooner or later they will stumble upon the mutual benefits of nonviolence and other forms of reciprocal consideration, and apply them more and more broadly.” !!
650 – 651 “the companies that sell IQ tests periodically renorm the scores. […]
IQ scores increase[] over time. […]
The gains are not small: an average of three IQ points (a fifth of a standard deviation) per decade.
An average teenager today, if he or she could time-travel back to 1950, would have had an IQ of 118. If the teenager went back to 1910, he or she would have had an IQ of 130, besting 98 percent of his or her contemporaries.”
653 “Whatever propels the Flynn Effect [.] is likely to be in people’s cognitive environments, not in their genes, diets, vaccines, or dating pools. […]
The improvements on visual matrices may have been fueled by an increasingly high-tech and symbol-rich environment that forced people to analyze visual patterns and connect them to arbitrary rules. […] today we spontaneously classify the world with the categories of science”
656 “The cognitive skill that is most enhanced in the Flynn Effect, abstraction from the concrete particulars of immediate experience, is precisely the skill that must be exercised to take the perspectives of others and expand the circle of moral consideration.”
660 “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.”
666 “compared to a country that is a standard deviation below the average in primary-school enrollment, a country that is a standard deviation above the average was 73 percent less likely to fight a civil war the following year, holding constant prior wars, per capita income, population, mountainous terrain, oil exports, the degree of democracy and anocracy, and ethnic and religious fractionation.”
10 ON ANGELS’ WINGS
673 “The spears and arrows of pre-state peoples notched up higher proportional body counts than has anything since[,] and the pikemen and cavalry of the Thirty Years’ War did more human damage than the artillery and gas of World War I[.] Though the 16th and 17th centuries saw a military revolution, it was less an arms race than an armies race, in which governments beefed up the size and efficiency of their armed forces. The history of genocide shows that people can be slaughtered as efficiently with primitive weapons as they can with industrial technology”
675 “tight correlations between affluence and nonviolence are hard to find, and some correlations go the other way. Among pre-state peoples, it is often the sedentary tribes living in temperate regions flush with fish and game, such as the Pacific Northwest, that had slaves, castes, and a warrior culture, while the materially modest San and Semai are at the peaceable end of the distribution[.] And it was the glorious ancient empires that had slaves, crucifixions, gladiators, ruthless conquest, and human sacrifice”
677 “Marxism […] helped itself to the worst idea in the Christian Bible, a millennial cataclysm that will bring about a utopia and restore prelapsarian innocence. And it violently rejected the humanism and liberalism of the Enlightenment, which placed the autonomy and flourishing of individuals as the ultimate goal of political systems.”
687 “Social and sexual arrangements that favor the interests of women tend to drain the swamps where violent male-male competition proliferates. One of these arrangements is marriage, in which men commit themselves to investing in the children they sire rather than competing with each other for sexual opportunities. Getting married reduces men’s testosterone and their likelihood of living a life of crime, and we saw that American homicide rates plunged in the marriage-happy 1940s and 1950s, rose in the marriage-delaying 1960s and 1970s, and remain high in African American communities that have particularly low rates of marriage”
688 “when women are given access to contraception and the freedom to marry on their own terms, they have fewer offspring than when the men of their societies force them to be baby factories. And that, in turn, means that their countries’ populations will be less distended by a thick slab of young people at the bottom. […] giving women more control over their reproductive capacity (always the contested territory in the biological battle of the sexes) may be the single most effective way of reducing violence in the dangerous parts of the world today. But this empowerment often must proceed in the teeth of opposition from traditional men who want to preserve their control over female reproduction, and from religious institutions that oppose contraception and abortion.”
693 “nostalgia for a peaceable past is the biggest delusion of all.” !!
695 “Discovering earthly ways in which human beings can flourish, including stratagems to overcome the tragedy of the inherent appeal of aggression, should be purpose enough for anyone. It is a goal that is nobler than joining a celestial choir, melting into a cosmic spirit, or being reincarnated into a higher life-form, because the goal can be justified to any fellow thinker rather than being inculcated to arbitrary factions by charisma, tradition, or force.” !!!!
6 Cain / Abel 25% SILLY
8 Moses / women children “Bible is a Wiki”
17 benevolent hypocrisy
23 ridicule ended duels
35-36 Hobbes / Rousseau / political baggage / peace & harmony mafia
37 chimp genocide
38 concupiscent
39 neotony
42 Montenegrin tribes / Greek dark ages
43 battles / raids
49 FIG 2-2 Seems to count state violence against nonstate peoples as nonstate violence, likewise the number for state violence are averaged out across continents and centuries – what’s the percentage of violent deaths of Cambodians in the last century? Jews? etc. Also compares all violent deaths of non-state vs only war deaths of states
52 LOL But what about Koreans, Iraqis, etc.
53 FIG 2-3 New Guinea grossly overrepresented
67 nailed cat / sports
69 manners
71 gropecunt / shitecrow
71 “illegitimate legitimate”
71 Pinker can be annoying for his blind spot of the violence of the rich
76 modern economics ORLY? (classical economics)
77 commerce ORLY?
81 lower strata
87 limitations in mind HMM
101 Southern insult experiment
109 Baby Boomers / horizontal solidarity informalizing process
110 plummeting of trust
115 retreat of the justice system / civil order ORLY?
116 widespread fatherlessness
124 Broken Windows
132 Saint Pope Paul IV
141 Albigensian genocide
141 Martin Luther
145 cat-burning
271 fails to mention the extent of nuclear tests..
301 Is Iraq War counted in these graphs?
313 on “dependency theorists” — kind of quickly moves past it without considering the supposed success of the developmental policies of “most economists today”
317 MY NOTE — this is based on 6 years of data, and of course is meaningless considering Pinker’s power law