" It was
followed
by a world war and a holocaust, because his adversary did not agree that war is good for absolutely nothing.
Steven-Pinker-The-Blank-Slate 1
?
?
?
?
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twice before aggressing.
74
The law of retaliation requires that the vengeance have a moralistic pretext to distinguish it from a raw assault. The avenger must have been provoked by a prior act of aggression or other injustice. Studies of feuds, wars, and ethnic violence show that the perpetrators are almost always inflamed by some grievance against their targets. 75 The danger inherent in this psychology is obvious: two sides may disagree over whether an initial act of violence was justified (perhaps as an act of self-defense, the recovery of ill-gotten gains, or retribution for an earlier offense) or was an act of unprovoked aggression. One side may count an even number of reprisals and feel that the scales of justice have been balanced, while the other side counts an odd number and feels that they still have a score to settle. 76 Self- deception may embolden each side's belief in the rectitude of its cause and make reconciliation almost impossible.
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Also necessary for vengeance to work as a deterrent is that the willingness to pursue it be made public, because the whole point of deterrence is to give would-be attackers second thoughts beforehand. And this brings us to Hobbes's final reason for quarrel.
~
Thirdly, glory -- though a more accurate word would be "honor. " Hobbes's observation that men fight over "a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue" is as true now as it was in the seventeenth century. For as long as urban crime statistics have been recorded, the most frequent cause of homicide has been "argument" -- what police blotters classify as "altercation of relatively trivial origin; insult, curse, jostling, etc. "77 A Dallas homicide detective recalls, "Murders result from little ol' arguments over nothing at all. Tempers flare. A fight starts, and somebody gets stabbed or shot. I've worked on cases where the principals had been arguing over a 10 cent record on a juke box, or over a one dollar gambling debt from a dice game. "78
Wars between nation-states are often fought over national honor, even when the material stakes are small. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, most Americans had become disenchanted over their country's involvement in the war in Vietnam, which they thought was immoral or unwinnable or both. But rather than agreeing to withdraw American forces unconditionally, as the peace movement had advocated, a majority supported Richard Nixon and his slogan "Peace with Honor. " In practice this turned into a slow withdrawal of American troops that prolonged the military presence until 1973 at a cost of twenty thousand American lives and the lives of many more Vietnamese -- and with the same outcome, defeat of the South Vietnamese government. A defense of national honor was behind other recent wars, such as the British retaking of the Falkland Islands in 1982 and the American invasion of Grenada in 1983. A ruinous 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras began with a disputed game between their national soccer teams.
Because of the logic of deterrence, fights over personal or national honor are not as idiotic as they seem. In a hostile milieu, people and countries must advertise their willingness to retaliate against anyone who would profit at their expense, and that means maintaining a reputation for avenging any slight or trespass, no matter how small. They must make it known that, in the words of the Jim Croce song, "You don't tug on Superman's cape; you don't spit into the wind; you don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger; and you don't mess around with Jim. "
The mentality is foreign to those of us who can get Leviathan to show up by dialing 911, but that option is not always available. It was not available to people in pre-state societies, or on the frontier in the Appalachians or the Wild West, or in the remote highlands of Scotland, the Balkans, or Indochina. It is not available to people who are unwilling to bring in the police because of the {327} nature of their work, such as Prohibition rum-runners, inner-city drug dealers, and Mafia wise guys. And it is not available to nation-states in their dealings with one another. Daly and Wilson comment on the mentality that applies in all these arenas:
In chronically feuding and warring societies, an essential manly virtue is the capacity for violence; head-hunting and coup counting may then become prestigious, and the commission of a homicide may even be an obligatory rite of passage. To turn the other cheek is not saintly but stupid. Or contemptibly weak. 79
So the social constructionists I cited earlier are not wrong in pointing to a culture of combative masculinity as a major cause of violence. But they are wrong in thinking that it is peculiarly American, that it is caused by separation from one's mother or an unwillingness to express one's emotions, and that it is an arbitrary social construction that can be "deconstructed" by verbal commentary. And fans of the public health approach are correct that rates of violence vary with social conditions, but they are wrong in thinking that violence is a pathology in anything like the medical sense. Cultures of honor spring up all over the world because they amplify universal human emotions like pride, anger, revenge, and the love of kith and kin, and because they appear at the time to be sensible responses to local
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? conditions. 80 Indeed, the emotions themselves are thoroughly familiar even when they don't erupt in violence, such as in road rage, office politics, political mudslinging, academic backstabbing, and email flame wars.
In Culture of Honor, the social psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen show that violent cultures arise in societies that are beyond the reach of the law and in which precious assets are easily stolen. 81 Societies that herd animals meet both conditions. Herders tend to live in territories that are unsuitable for growing crops and thus far from the centers of government. And their major asset, livestock, is easier to steal than the major asset of farmers, land. In herding societies a man can be stripped of his wealth (and of his ability to acquire wealth) in an eyeblink. Men in that milieu cultivate a hair trigger for violent retaliation, not just against rustlers, but against anyone who would test their resolve by signs of disrespect that could reveal them to be easy pickings for rustlers. Scottish highlanders, Appalachian mountain men, Western cowboys, Masai warriors, Sioux Indians, Druze and Bedouin tribesmen, Balkan clansmen, and Indochinese Montagnards are familiar examples.
A man's honor is a kind of "social reality" in John Searle's sense: it exists because everyone agrees it exists, but it is no less real for that, since it resides in a shared granting of power. When the lifestyle of a people changes, their culture of honor can stay with them for a long time, because it is difficult for {328} anyone to be the first to renounce the culture. The very act of renouncing it can be a concession of weakness and low status even when the sheep and mountains are a distant memory.
The American South has long had higher rates of violence than the North, including a tradition of dueling among "men of honor" such as Andrew Jackson. Nisbett and Cohen note that much of the South was originally settled by Scottish and Irish herdsman, whereas the North was settled by English farmers. Also, for much of its history the mountainous frontier of the South was beyond the reach of the law. The resulting Southern culture of honor is, remarkably, alive at the turn of the twenty-first century in laws and social attitudes. Southern states place fewer restrictions on gun ownership, allow people to shoot an assailant or burglar without having to retreat first, are tolerant of spanking by parents and corporal punishment by schools, are more hawkish on issues of national defense, and execute more of their criminals. 82
These attitudes do not float in a cloud called "culture" but are visible in the psychology of individual Southerners. Nisbett and Cohen advertised a fake psychology experiment at the liberal University of Michigan. To get to the lab, respondents had to squeeze by a stooge who was filing papers in a hallway. As a respondent brushed past him, the stooge slammed the drawer shut and muttered, "Asshole. " Students from Northern states laughed him off, but students from Southern states were visibly upset. The Southerners had elevated levels of testosterone and cortisol (a stress hormone) and reported lower levels of self-esteem. They compensated by giving a firmer handshake and acting more dominant toward the experimenter, and on the way out of the lab they refused to back down when another stooge approached in a narrow hallway and one of the two had to step aside. It's not that Southerners walk around chronically fuming: a control group who had not been insulted were as cool and collected as the Northerners. And Southerners do not approve of violence in the abstract, only of violence provoked by an insult or trespass.
African American inner-city neighborhoods are among the more conspicuously violent environments in Western democracies, and they too have an entrenched culture of honor. In his insightful essay "The Code of the Streets," the sociologist Elijah Anderson describes the young men's obsession with respect, their cultivation of a reputation for toughness, their willingness to engage in violent retaliation for any slight, and their universal acknowledgment of the rules of this code. 83 Were it not for giveaways in their dialect, such as "If someone disses you, you got to straighten them out," Anderson's description of the code would be indistinguishable from accounts of the culture of honor among white Southerners.
Inner-city African Americans were never goatherds, so why did they develop a culture of honor? One possibility is that they brought it with them from {329} the South when they migrated to large cities after the two world wars -- a nice irony for Southern racists who would blame inner-city violence on something distinctively African American. Another factor is that the young men's wealth is easily stealable, since it is often in the form of cash or drugs. A third is that the ghettos are a kind of frontier in which police protection is unreliable -- the gangsta rap group Public Enemy has a recording called "911 Is a Joke. " A fourth is that poor people, especially young men, cannot take pride in a prestigious job, a nice house, or professional accomplishments, and this may be doubly true for African Americans after centuries of slavery and discrimination. Their reputation on the streets is their only claim to status. Finally, Anderson points out that the code of the streets is self-perpetuating. A majority of African American families in the inner city subscribe to peaceable middle-class values they refer to as "decent. "84 But that is not enough to end the culture of honor:
Everybody knows that if the rules are violated, there are penalties. Knowledge of the code is thus largely defensive; it is literally necessary for operating in public. Therefore, even though families with a decency orientation are usually opposed to the values of the code, they often reluctantly encourage
? ? ? ? ? ? ? their children's familiarity with it to enable them to negotiate the inner-city environment. 85
? Studies of the dynamics of ghetto violence are consistent with Anderson's analysis. The jump in American urban crime rates between 1985 and 1993 can be tied in part to the appearance of crack cocaine and the underground economy it spawned. As the economist Jeff Grogger points out, "Violence is a way to enforce property rights in the absence of legal recourse. "86 The emergence of violence within the new drug economy then set off the expected Hobbesian trap. As the criminologist Jeffrey Fagan noted, gun use spread contagiously as "young people who otherwise wouldn't carry guns felt that they had to in order to avoid being victimized by their armed peers. "87 And as we saw in the chapter on politics, conspicuous economic inequality is a good predictor of violence (better than poverty itself), presumably because men deprived of legitimate means of acquiring status compete for status on the streets instead. 88 It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers. 89
~
Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a "pathology" except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms.
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But Hobbes is famous for presenting not just the causes of violence but a means of preventing it: "a common power to keep them all in awe. " His commonwealth was a means of implementing the principle "that a man be willing, when others are so too . . . to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself. "90 People vest authority in a sovereign person or assembly who can use the collective force of the contractors to hold each one to the agreement, because "covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all. "91
A governing body that has been granted a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence can neutralize each of Hobbes's reasons for quarrel. By inflicting penalties on aggressors, the governing body eliminates the profitability of invading for gain. That in turn defuses the Hobbesian trap in which mutually distrustful peoples are each tempted to inflict a preemptive strike to avoid being invaded for gain. And a system of laws that defines infractions and penalties and metes them out disinterestedly can obviate the need for a hair trigger for retaliation and the accompanying culture of honor. People can rest assured that someone else will impose disincentives on their enemies, making it unnecessary for them to maintain a belligerent stance to prove they are not punching bags. And having a third party measure the infractions and the punishments circumvents the hazard of self-deception, which ordinarily convinces those on each side that they have suffered the greater number of offenses. These advantages of third-party intercession can also come from nongovernmental methods of conflict resolution, in which mediators try to help the hostile parties negotiate an agreement or arbitrators render a verdict but cannot enforce it. 92 The problem with these toothless measures is that the parties can always walk away when the outcome doesn't come out the way they want. Adjudication by an armed authority appears to be the most effective general violence-reduction technique ever invented. Though we debate whether tweaks in criminal policy, such as executing murderers versus locking them up for life, can reduce violence by a few percentage points, there can be no debate on the massive effects of having a criminal justice system as opposed to living in anarchy. The shockingly high homicide rates of pre-state societies, with 10 to 60 percent of the men dying at the hands of other men, provide one kind of evidence. 93 Another is the emergence of a violent culture of honor in just about any corner of the world that is beyond the reach of the law. 94 Many historians argue that people acquiesced to centralized authorities during the Middle Ages and other periods to relieve themselves of the burden of having to retaliate against those who would harm them and their kin. 95 And the growth of those authorities may explain the hundredfold decline in homicide rates in European societies since the Middle Ages. 96 The United States saw a dramatic reduction in urban crime rates from the first half of the nineteenth
{331} century to the second half, which coincided with the formation of professional police forces in the cities. 97 The causes of the decline in American crime in the 1990s are controversial and probably multifarious, but many criminologists trace it in part to more intensive community policing and higher incarceration rates of violent criminals. 98
The inverse is true as well. When law enforcement vanishes, all manner of violence breaks out: looting, settling old scores, ethnic cleansing, and petty warfare among gangs, warlords, and mafias. This was obvious in the remnants of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and parts of Africa in the 1990s, but can also happen in countries with a long tradition of civility. As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a. m. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 a. m. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. 99 This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).
The generalization that anarchy in the sense of a lack of government leads to anarchy in the sense of violent chaos may seem banal, but it is often overlooked in today's still-romantic climate. Government in general is anathema to many conservatives, and the police and prison system are anathema to many liberals. Many people on the left, citing uncertainty about the deterrent value of capital punishment compared to life imprisonment, maintain that deterrence is not effective in general. And many oppose more effective policing of inner-city neighborhoods, even though it may be the most effective way for their decent inhabitants to abjure the code of the streets. Certainly we must combat the racial inequities that put too many African American men in prison, but as the legal scholar Randall Kennedy has argued, we must also combat the racial inequities that leave too many African Americans exposed to criminals. 100 Many on the right oppose decriminalizing drugs, prostitution, and gambling without factoring in the costs of the zones of anarchy that, by their own free-market logic, are inevitably spawned by prohibition policies. When demand for a commodity is high, suppliers will materialize, and if they cannot protect their property rights by calling the police, they will do so with {332} a violent culture of honor. (This is distinct from the moral argument that our current drug policies incarcerate multitudes of nonviolent people. ) Schoolchildren are currently fed the disinformation that Native Americans and other peoples in pre-state societies were inherently peaceable, leaving them uncomprehending, indeed contemptuous, of one of our species' greatest inventions, democratic government and the rule of law.
Where Hobbes fell short was in dealing with the problem of policing the police. In his view, civil war was such a calamity that any government -- monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy -- was preferable to it. He did not seem to appreciate that in practice a leviathan would not be an otherworldly sea monster but a human being or group of them, complete with the deadly sins of greed, mistrust, and honor. (As we saw in the preceding chapter, this became the obsession of the heirs of Hobbes who framed the American Constitution. ) Armed men are always a menace, so police who are not under tight democratic control can be a far worse calamity than the crime and feuding that go on without them. In the twentieth century, according to the political scientist R. J. Rummel in Death by Government, 170 million people were killed by their own governments. Nor is murder-by-government a relic of the tyrannies of the middle of the century. The World Conflict List for the year 2000 reported:
The stupidest conflict in this year's count is Cameroon. Early in the year, Cameroon was experiencing widespread problems with violent crime. The government responded to this crisis by creating and arming militias and paramilitary groups to stamp out the crime extrajudicially. Now, while violent crime has fallen, the militias and paramilitaries have created far more chaos and death than crime ever would have. Indeed, as the year wore on mass graves were discovered that were tied to the paramilitary groups. 101
The pattern is familiar from other regions of the world (including our own) and shows that civil libertarians' concern about abusive police practices is an indispensable counterweight to the monopoly on violence we grant the state.
~
Democratic leviathans have proven to be an effective antiviolence measure, but they leave much to be desired. Because they fight violence with violence or the threat of violence, they can be a danger themselves. And it would be far better if we could find a way to get people to abjure violence to begin with rather than punishing them after the fact. Worst of all, no one has yet figured out how to set up a worldwide democratic leviathan that would penalize the aggressive competition, defuse the Hobbesian traps, and eliminate the cultures of honor that hold between the most dangerous perpetrators of violence of all, nation-states. As Kant noted, "The depravity of human nature {333} is displayed without disguise in the unrestricted relations which obtain between the various nations. "102 The great question is how to get people and nations to repudiate violence from the start, preempting escalations of hostility before they can take off.
In the 1960s it all seemed so simple. War is unhealthy for children and other living things. What if they gave a war and nobody came? War: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! The problem with these sentiments is that the other
? ? ? ? ? ? side has to feel the same way at the same time. In 1939 Neville Chamberlain offered his own antiwar slogan, "Peace in our time.
" It was followed by a world war and a holocaust, because his adversary did not agree that war is good for absolutely nothing. Chamberlain's successor, Churchill, explained why peace is not a simple matter of unilateral pacifism: "Nothing is worse than war? Dishonor is worse than war. Slavery is worse than war. " A popular bumper sticker captures a related sentiment: if you want peace, work for justice. The problem is that what one side sees as honor and justice the other side may see as dishonor and injustice. Also, "honor" can be a laudable willingness to defend life and liberty, but it can also be a reckless refusal to de-escalate.
Sometimes all sides really do see that they would be better off beating their swords into plowshares. Scholars such as John Keegan and Donald Horowitz have noted a general decline in the taste for violence as a means of settling disputes within most Western democracies in the last half-century. 103 Civil wars, corporal and capital punishment, deadly ethnic riots, and foreign wars requiring face-to-face killing have declined or vanished. And as I have mentioned, though some decades in recent centuries have been more violent than others, the overall trend in crime has been downward.
One possible reason is the cosmopolitan forces that work to expand people's moral circle. Another may be the long- term effects of living with a leviathan. Today's civility in Europe, after all, followed centuries of beheadings and public hangings and exiles to penal colonies. And Canada may be more peaceable than its neighbor in part because its government outraced its people to the land. Unlike the United States, where settlers fanned out over a vast two- dimensional landscape with innumerable nooks and crannies, the habitable portion of Canada is a one-dimensional ribbon along the American border without remote frontiers and enclaves in which cultures of honor could fester. According to the Canadian studies scholar Desmond Morton, "Our west expanded in an orderly, peaceful fashion, with the police arriving before the settlers. "104
But people can become less truculent without the external incentives of dollars and cents or governmental brute force. People all over the world have reflected on the futility of violence (at least when they are evenly enough matched with their adversaries that no one can prevail). A New Guinean {334} native laments, "War is bad and nobody likes it. Sweet potatoes disappear, pigs disappear, fields deteriorate, and many relatives and friends get killed. But one cannot help it. "105 Chagnon reports that some Yanomamo? men reflect on the futility of their feuds and a few make it known that they will have nothing to do with raiding. 106 In such cases it can become clear that both sides would come out ahead by splitting the differences between them rather than continuing to fight over them. During the trench warfare of World War I, weary British and German soldiers would probe each other's hostile intent with momentary respites in shelling. If the other side responded with a respite in kind, long periods of unofficial peace broke out beneath the notice of their bellicose commanders. 107 As a British soldier said, "We don't want to kill you, and you don't want to kill us, so why shoot? "108
The most consequential episode in which belligerents sought a way to release their deadly embrace was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the United States discovered Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and demanded that they be removed. Khrushchev and Kennedy were both reminded of the human costs of the nuclear brink they were approaching, Khrushchev by memories of two world wars fought on his soil, Kennedy by a graphic briefing of the aftermath of an atomic bomb. And each understood they were in a Hobbesian trap. Kennedy had just read The Guns of August and saw how the leaders of great nations could blunder into a pointless war. Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy:
You and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter this knot will become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the knot will have to be cut. 109
By identifying the trap, they could formulate a shared goal of escaping it. In the teeth of opposition from many of their advisers and large sectors of their publics, both made concessions that averted a catastrophe.
The problem with violence, then, is that the advantages of deploying it or renouncing it depend on what the other side does. Such scenarios are the province of game theory, and game theorists have shown that the best decision for each player individually is sometimes the worst decision for both collectively. The most famous example is the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which partners in crime are held in separate cells. Each is promised freedom if he is the first to implicate his partner (who then will get a harsh sentence), a light sentence if neither implicates the other, and a moderate sentence if each implicates the other. The optimal strategy for each prisoner is to defect from their partnership, but when both do so they end up with a worse outcome than if each stayed loyal. Yet neither can stay loyal out of fear that his partner might defect {335} and leave him with the worst outcome of all. The Prisoner's Dilemma is similar to the pacifist's dilemma: what is good for one (belligerence) is bad for both, but what is good for both (pacifism) is unattainable when neither can be sure the other is opting for it.
The only way to win a Prisoner's Dilemma is to change the rules or find a way out of the game. The World War I
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? soldiers changed the rules in a way that has been much discussed in evolutionary psychology: play it repeatedly and apply a strategy of reciprocity, remembering the other player's last action and repaying him in kind. 110 But in many
antagonistic encounters that is not an option, because when the other player defects he can destroy you -- or, in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis, destroy the world. In that case the players had to recognize they were in a futile game and mutually decide to get out of it.
Glover draws an important conclusion about how the cognitive component of human nature might allow us to reduce violence even when it appears to be a rational strategy at the time:
Sometimes, apparently rational self-interested strategies turn out (as in the prisoners' dilemma . . . ) to be self-defeating. This may look like a defeat for rationality, but it is not. Rationality is saved by its own open-endedness. If a strategy of following accepted rules of rationality is sometimes self- defeating, this is not the end. We revise the rules to take account of this, so producing a higher-order rational strategy. This in turn may fail, but again we go up a level. At whatever level we fail, there is always the process of standing back and going up a further level. 111
The process of "standing back and going up a further level" might be necessary to overcome the emotional impediments to peace as well as the intellectual ones. Diplomatic peacemakers try to hurry along the epiphanies that prompt adversaries to extricate themselves from a deadly game. They try to blunt competition by carefully fashioning compromises over the disputed resources. They try to defuse Hobbesian traps via "confidence-building measures" such as making military activities transparent and bringing in third parties as guarantors. And they try to bring the two sides into each other's moral circles by facilitating trade, cultural exchanges, and people-to-people activities.
This is fine as far as it goes, but the diplomats are sometimes frustrated that at the end of the day the two sides seem to hate each other as much as they did at the beginning. They continue to demonize their opponents, warp the facts, and denounce the conciliators on their own side as traitors. Milton J. Wilkinson, a diplomat who failed to get the Greeks and Turks to bury the hatchet over Cyprus, suggests that peacemakers must understand the emotional faculties of adversaries and not just neutralize the current rational {336} incentives. The best-laid plans of peacemakers are often derailed by the adversaries' ethnocentrism, sense of honor, moralization, and self-deception. 112 These mindsets evolved to deal with hostilities in the ancestral past, and we must bring them into the open if we are to work around them in the present.
An emphasis on the open-endedness of human rationality resonates with the finding from cognitive science that the mind is a combinatorial, recursive system. 113 Not only do we have thoughts, but we have thoughts about our thoughts, and thoughts about our thoughts about our thoughts. The advances in human conflict resolution we have encountered in this chapter -- submitting to the rule of law, figuring out a way for both sides to back down without losing face, acknowledging the possibility of one's own self-deception, accepting the equivalence of one's own interests and other people's -- depend on this ability.
Many intellectuals have averted their gaze from the evolutionary logic of violence, fearing that acknowledging it is tantamount to accepting it or even to approving it. Instead they have pursued the comforting delusion of the Noble Savage, in which violence is an arbitrary product of learning or a pathogen that bores into us from the outside. But denying the logic of violence makes it easy to forget how readily violence can flare up, and ignoring the parts of the mind that ignite violence makes it easy to overlook the parts that can extinguish it. With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.
<< {337} >> Chapter 18
Gender
Now that its namesake year has come and gone, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey provides an opportunity to measure imagination against reality. Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 sci-fi classic traced out the destiny of our species from ape-men on the savanna to a transcendence of time, space, and bodies that we can only dimly comprehend. Clarke and the director, Stanley Kubrick, contrived a radical vision of life in the third millennium, and in some ways it has come to pass. A permanent space station is being built, and voice mail and the Internet are a routine part of our lives. In other regards Clarke and Kubrick were overoptimistic about the march of progress. We still don't have suspended animation, missions to Jupiter, or computers that read lips and plot mutinies. And in still other regards they missed the boat completely. In their vision of the year 2001, people recorded their words on typewriters; Clarke and Kubrick did not anticipate word processors or laptop computers. And in their depiction of the new millennium, the American
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? women were "girl assistants": secretaries, receptionists, and flight attendants.
That these visionaries did not anticipate the revolution in women's status of the 1970s is a pointed reminder of how quickly social arrangements can change. It was not so long ago that women were seen as fit only to be housewives, mothers, and sexual partners, were discouraged from entering the professions because they would be taking the place of a man, and were routinely subjected to discrimination, condescension, and sexual extortion. The ongoing liberation of women after millennia of oppression is one of the great moral achievements of our species, and I consider myself fortunate to have lived through some of its major victories.
The change in the status of women has several causes. One is the inexorable logic of the expanding moral circle, which led also to the abolition of despotism, slavery, feudalism, and racial segregation. 1 In the midst of the Enlightenment, the early feminist Mary Astell (1688-1731) wrote: {338}
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? 2
Another cause is the technological and economic progress that made it possible for couples to have sex and raise children without a pitiless division of labor in which a mother had to devote every waking moment to keeping the children alive. Clean water, sanitation, and modern medicine lowered infant mortality and reduced the desire for large broods of children. Baby bottles and pasteurized cow's milk, and then breast pumps and freezers, made it possible to feed babies without their mothers being chained to them around the clock. Mass production made it cheaper to buy things than to make them by hand, and plumbing, electricity, and appliances reduced the domestic workload even more. The increased value of brains over brawn in the economy, the extension of the human lifespan (with the prospect of decades of life after childrearing), and the affordability of extended education changed the values of women's options in life. Contraception, amniocentesis, ultrasound, and reproductive technologies made it possible for women to defer childbearing to the optimal points in their lives.
And of course the other major cause of women's progress is feminism: the political, literary, and academic movements that channeled these advances into tangible changes in policies and attitudes. The first wave of feminism, bookended in the United States by the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920, gave women the right to vote, to serve as jurors, to hold property in marriage, to divorce, and to receive an education. The second wave, flowering in the 1970s, brought women into the professions, changed the division of labor in the home, exposed sexist biases in business, government, and other institutions, and threw a spotlight on women's interests in all walks of life. The recent progress in women's rights has not drained feminism of its raison d'etre. In much of the Third World, women's position has not improved since the Middle Ages, and in our own society women are still subjected to discrimination, harassment, and violence. Feminism is widely seen as being opposed to the sciences of human nature. Many of those scientists believe that the minds of the two sexes differ at birth, and feminists have pointed out that such beliefs have long been used to justify the unequal treatment of women. Women were thought to be designed for childrearing and home life and to be incapable of the reason necessary for {339} politics and the professions. Men were believed to harbor irresistible urges that made them harass and rape women, and that belief served to excuse the perpetrators and to license fathers and husbands to control women in the guise of protecting them. Therefore, it might seem, the theories that are most friendly to women are the Blank Slate -- if nothing is innate, differences between the sexes cannot be innate -- and the Noble Savage -- if we harbor no ignoble urges, sexual exploitation can be eliminated by changing our institutions.
The belief that feminism requires a blank slate and a noble savage has become a powerful impetus for spreading disinformation. A 1994 headline in the New York Times science section, for example, proclaimed, "Sexes Equal on South Sea Isle. "3 It was based on the work of the anthropologist Maria Lepowsky, who (perhaps channeling the ghost of Margaret Mead) said that gender relations on the island of Vanatinai prove that "the subjugation of women by men is not a human universal, and it is not inevitable. " Only late in the story do we learn what this supposed "equality" amounts to: that men must do bride service to pay for wives, that warfare had been waged exclusively by men (who raided neighboring islands for brides), that women spend more time caring for children and sweeping up pig excrement, and that men spend more time building their reputations and hunting wild boar (which is accorded more prestige by both sexes). A similar disconnect between headline and fact appeared in a 1998 Boston Globe story entitled "Girls Appear to Be Closing Aggression Gap with Boys. " How much have they "closed this gap"? According to the story, they now commit murder at one-tenth the rate of boys. 4 And in a 1998 op-ed, the co-producer of Ms.
? ? ? ? ? ? magazine's "Take Our Daughters to Work Day" explained recent high school shootings with the remarkable assertion that boys in America "are being trained by their parents, other adults, and our culture and media to harass, assault, rape, and murder girls. "5
On the other side, some conservatives are confirming feminists' worst fears by invoking dubious sex differences to condemn the choices of women. In a Wall Street Journal editorial, the political scientist Harvey Mansfield wrote that "the protective element of manliness is endangered by women having equal access to jobs outside the home. "6 A book by E Carolyn Graglia called Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism theorized that women's maternal and sexual instincts are being distorted by the assertiveness and analytical mind demanded by a career. The journalists Wendy Shalit and Danielle Crittenden recently advised women to marry young, postpone their careers, and care for children in traditional marriages, even though they could not have written their books if they had followed their own advice. 7 Leon Kass has taken it upon himself to inform young women what they want: "For the first time in human history, mature women by the tens of thousands live the entire decade of their twenties -- their most fertile years -- neither in the homes of their {340} fathers nor in the homes of their husbands; unprotected, lonely, and out of sync with their inborn nature. Some women positively welcome this state of affairs, but most do not. "8
There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the principles of feminism and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical. To repeat: equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group. In the case of gender, the barely defeated Equal Rights Amendment put it succinctly: "Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex. " If we recognize this principle, no one has to spin myths about the indistinguishability of the sexes to justify equality. Nor should anyone invoke sex differences to justify discriminatory policies or to hector women into doing what they don't want to do.
In any case, what we do know about the sexes does not call for any action that would penalize or constrain one sex or the other. Many psychological traits relevant to the public sphere, such as general intelligence, are the same on average for men and women, and virtually all psychological traits may be found in varying degrees among the members of each sex. No sex difference yet discovered applies to every last man compared with every last woman, so generalizations about a sex will always be untrue of many individuals. And notions like "proper role" and "natural place" are scientifically meaningless and give no grounds for restricting freedom.
Despite these principles, many feminists vehemently attack research on sexuality and sex differences. The politics of gender is a major reason that the application of evolution, genetics, and neuroscience to the human mind is bitterly resisted in modern intellectual life. But unlike other human divisions such as race and ethnicity, where any biological differences are minor at most and scientifically uninteresting, gender cannot possibly be ignored in the science of human beings. The sexes are as old as complex life and are a fundamental topic in evolutionary biology, genetics, and behavioral ecology. To disregard them in the case of our own species would be to make a hash of our understanding of our place in the cosmos. And of course differences between men and women affect every aspect of our lives. We all have a mother and a father, are attracted to members of the opposite sex (or notice our contrast with the people who are), and are never unaware of the sex of our siblings, children, and friends. To ignore gender would be to ignore a major part of the human condition.
The goal of this chapter is to clarify the relation between the biology of human nature and current controversies on the sexes, including the two most incendiary, the gender gap and sexual assault. With both of these hot buttons, I will argue against the conventional wisdom associated with certain people who claim to speak on behalf of feminism. That may create an illusion that the {341} arguments go against feminism in general, or even against the interests of women. They don't in the least, and I must begin by showing why.
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Feminism is often derided because of the arguments of its lunatic fringe -- for example, that all intercourse is rape, that all women should be lesbians, or that only 10 percent of the population should be allowed to be male. 9 Feminists reply that proponents of women's rights do not speak with one voice, and that feminist thought comprises many positions, which have to be evaluated independently. 10 That is completely legitimate, but it cuts both ways. To criticize a particular feminist proposal is not to attack feminism in general.
Anyone familiar with academia knows that it breeds ideological cults that are prone to dogma and resistant to criticism. Many women believe that this has now happened to feminism. In her book Who Stole Feminism? the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers draws a useful distinction between two schools of thought. 11 Equity feminism opposes sex discrimination and other forms of unfairness to women. It is part of the classical liberal and humanistic tradition that grew out of the Enlightenment, and it guided the first wave of feminism and launched the second wave.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Gender feminism holds that women continue to be enslaved by a pervasive system of male dominance, the gender system, in which "bi-sexual infants are transformed into male and female gender personalities, the one destined to command, the other to obey. "12 It is opposed to the classical liberal tradition and allied instead with Marxism, postmodernism, social constructionism, and radical science. It has became the credo of some women's studies programs, feminist organizations, and spokespeople for the women's movement.
Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature. The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety. The second is that humans possess a single social motive -- power -- and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups -- in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender.
In embracing these doctrines, the genderists are handcuffing feminism to railroad tracks on which a train is bearing down. As we shall see, neuroscience, genetics, psychology, and ethnography are documenting sex differences that almost certainly originate in human biology.
The law of retaliation requires that the vengeance have a moralistic pretext to distinguish it from a raw assault. The avenger must have been provoked by a prior act of aggression or other injustice. Studies of feuds, wars, and ethnic violence show that the perpetrators are almost always inflamed by some grievance against their targets. 75 The danger inherent in this psychology is obvious: two sides may disagree over whether an initial act of violence was justified (perhaps as an act of self-defense, the recovery of ill-gotten gains, or retribution for an earlier offense) or was an act of unprovoked aggression. One side may count an even number of reprisals and feel that the scales of justice have been balanced, while the other side counts an odd number and feels that they still have a score to settle. 76 Self- deception may embolden each side's belief in the rectitude of its cause and make reconciliation almost impossible.
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Also necessary for vengeance to work as a deterrent is that the willingness to pursue it be made public, because the whole point of deterrence is to give would-be attackers second thoughts beforehand. And this brings us to Hobbes's final reason for quarrel.
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Thirdly, glory -- though a more accurate word would be "honor. " Hobbes's observation that men fight over "a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue" is as true now as it was in the seventeenth century. For as long as urban crime statistics have been recorded, the most frequent cause of homicide has been "argument" -- what police blotters classify as "altercation of relatively trivial origin; insult, curse, jostling, etc. "77 A Dallas homicide detective recalls, "Murders result from little ol' arguments over nothing at all. Tempers flare. A fight starts, and somebody gets stabbed or shot. I've worked on cases where the principals had been arguing over a 10 cent record on a juke box, or over a one dollar gambling debt from a dice game. "78
Wars between nation-states are often fought over national honor, even when the material stakes are small. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, most Americans had become disenchanted over their country's involvement in the war in Vietnam, which they thought was immoral or unwinnable or both. But rather than agreeing to withdraw American forces unconditionally, as the peace movement had advocated, a majority supported Richard Nixon and his slogan "Peace with Honor. " In practice this turned into a slow withdrawal of American troops that prolonged the military presence until 1973 at a cost of twenty thousand American lives and the lives of many more Vietnamese -- and with the same outcome, defeat of the South Vietnamese government. A defense of national honor was behind other recent wars, such as the British retaking of the Falkland Islands in 1982 and the American invasion of Grenada in 1983. A ruinous 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras began with a disputed game between their national soccer teams.
Because of the logic of deterrence, fights over personal or national honor are not as idiotic as they seem. In a hostile milieu, people and countries must advertise their willingness to retaliate against anyone who would profit at their expense, and that means maintaining a reputation for avenging any slight or trespass, no matter how small. They must make it known that, in the words of the Jim Croce song, "You don't tug on Superman's cape; you don't spit into the wind; you don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger; and you don't mess around with Jim. "
The mentality is foreign to those of us who can get Leviathan to show up by dialing 911, but that option is not always available. It was not available to people in pre-state societies, or on the frontier in the Appalachians or the Wild West, or in the remote highlands of Scotland, the Balkans, or Indochina. It is not available to people who are unwilling to bring in the police because of the {327} nature of their work, such as Prohibition rum-runners, inner-city drug dealers, and Mafia wise guys. And it is not available to nation-states in their dealings with one another. Daly and Wilson comment on the mentality that applies in all these arenas:
In chronically feuding and warring societies, an essential manly virtue is the capacity for violence; head-hunting and coup counting may then become prestigious, and the commission of a homicide may even be an obligatory rite of passage. To turn the other cheek is not saintly but stupid. Or contemptibly weak. 79
So the social constructionists I cited earlier are not wrong in pointing to a culture of combative masculinity as a major cause of violence. But they are wrong in thinking that it is peculiarly American, that it is caused by separation from one's mother or an unwillingness to express one's emotions, and that it is an arbitrary social construction that can be "deconstructed" by verbal commentary. And fans of the public health approach are correct that rates of violence vary with social conditions, but they are wrong in thinking that violence is a pathology in anything like the medical sense. Cultures of honor spring up all over the world because they amplify universal human emotions like pride, anger, revenge, and the love of kith and kin, and because they appear at the time to be sensible responses to local
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? conditions. 80 Indeed, the emotions themselves are thoroughly familiar even when they don't erupt in violence, such as in road rage, office politics, political mudslinging, academic backstabbing, and email flame wars.
In Culture of Honor, the social psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen show that violent cultures arise in societies that are beyond the reach of the law and in which precious assets are easily stolen. 81 Societies that herd animals meet both conditions. Herders tend to live in territories that are unsuitable for growing crops and thus far from the centers of government. And their major asset, livestock, is easier to steal than the major asset of farmers, land. In herding societies a man can be stripped of his wealth (and of his ability to acquire wealth) in an eyeblink. Men in that milieu cultivate a hair trigger for violent retaliation, not just against rustlers, but against anyone who would test their resolve by signs of disrespect that could reveal them to be easy pickings for rustlers. Scottish highlanders, Appalachian mountain men, Western cowboys, Masai warriors, Sioux Indians, Druze and Bedouin tribesmen, Balkan clansmen, and Indochinese Montagnards are familiar examples.
A man's honor is a kind of "social reality" in John Searle's sense: it exists because everyone agrees it exists, but it is no less real for that, since it resides in a shared granting of power. When the lifestyle of a people changes, their culture of honor can stay with them for a long time, because it is difficult for {328} anyone to be the first to renounce the culture. The very act of renouncing it can be a concession of weakness and low status even when the sheep and mountains are a distant memory.
The American South has long had higher rates of violence than the North, including a tradition of dueling among "men of honor" such as Andrew Jackson. Nisbett and Cohen note that much of the South was originally settled by Scottish and Irish herdsman, whereas the North was settled by English farmers. Also, for much of its history the mountainous frontier of the South was beyond the reach of the law. The resulting Southern culture of honor is, remarkably, alive at the turn of the twenty-first century in laws and social attitudes. Southern states place fewer restrictions on gun ownership, allow people to shoot an assailant or burglar without having to retreat first, are tolerant of spanking by parents and corporal punishment by schools, are more hawkish on issues of national defense, and execute more of their criminals. 82
These attitudes do not float in a cloud called "culture" but are visible in the psychology of individual Southerners. Nisbett and Cohen advertised a fake psychology experiment at the liberal University of Michigan. To get to the lab, respondents had to squeeze by a stooge who was filing papers in a hallway. As a respondent brushed past him, the stooge slammed the drawer shut and muttered, "Asshole. " Students from Northern states laughed him off, but students from Southern states were visibly upset. The Southerners had elevated levels of testosterone and cortisol (a stress hormone) and reported lower levels of self-esteem. They compensated by giving a firmer handshake and acting more dominant toward the experimenter, and on the way out of the lab they refused to back down when another stooge approached in a narrow hallway and one of the two had to step aside. It's not that Southerners walk around chronically fuming: a control group who had not been insulted were as cool and collected as the Northerners. And Southerners do not approve of violence in the abstract, only of violence provoked by an insult or trespass.
African American inner-city neighborhoods are among the more conspicuously violent environments in Western democracies, and they too have an entrenched culture of honor. In his insightful essay "The Code of the Streets," the sociologist Elijah Anderson describes the young men's obsession with respect, their cultivation of a reputation for toughness, their willingness to engage in violent retaliation for any slight, and their universal acknowledgment of the rules of this code. 83 Were it not for giveaways in their dialect, such as "If someone disses you, you got to straighten them out," Anderson's description of the code would be indistinguishable from accounts of the culture of honor among white Southerners.
Inner-city African Americans were never goatherds, so why did they develop a culture of honor? One possibility is that they brought it with them from {329} the South when they migrated to large cities after the two world wars -- a nice irony for Southern racists who would blame inner-city violence on something distinctively African American. Another factor is that the young men's wealth is easily stealable, since it is often in the form of cash or drugs. A third is that the ghettos are a kind of frontier in which police protection is unreliable -- the gangsta rap group Public Enemy has a recording called "911 Is a Joke. " A fourth is that poor people, especially young men, cannot take pride in a prestigious job, a nice house, or professional accomplishments, and this may be doubly true for African Americans after centuries of slavery and discrimination. Their reputation on the streets is their only claim to status. Finally, Anderson points out that the code of the streets is self-perpetuating. A majority of African American families in the inner city subscribe to peaceable middle-class values they refer to as "decent. "84 But that is not enough to end the culture of honor:
Everybody knows that if the rules are violated, there are penalties. Knowledge of the code is thus largely defensive; it is literally necessary for operating in public. Therefore, even though families with a decency orientation are usually opposed to the values of the code, they often reluctantly encourage
? ? ? ? ? ? ? their children's familiarity with it to enable them to negotiate the inner-city environment. 85
? Studies of the dynamics of ghetto violence are consistent with Anderson's analysis. The jump in American urban crime rates between 1985 and 1993 can be tied in part to the appearance of crack cocaine and the underground economy it spawned. As the economist Jeff Grogger points out, "Violence is a way to enforce property rights in the absence of legal recourse. "86 The emergence of violence within the new drug economy then set off the expected Hobbesian trap. As the criminologist Jeffrey Fagan noted, gun use spread contagiously as "young people who otherwise wouldn't carry guns felt that they had to in order to avoid being victimized by their armed peers. "87 And as we saw in the chapter on politics, conspicuous economic inequality is a good predictor of violence (better than poverty itself), presumably because men deprived of legitimate means of acquiring status compete for status on the streets instead. 88 It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers. 89
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Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a "pathology" except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms.
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But Hobbes is famous for presenting not just the causes of violence but a means of preventing it: "a common power to keep them all in awe. " His commonwealth was a means of implementing the principle "that a man be willing, when others are so too . . . to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself. "90 People vest authority in a sovereign person or assembly who can use the collective force of the contractors to hold each one to the agreement, because "covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all. "91
A governing body that has been granted a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence can neutralize each of Hobbes's reasons for quarrel. By inflicting penalties on aggressors, the governing body eliminates the profitability of invading for gain. That in turn defuses the Hobbesian trap in which mutually distrustful peoples are each tempted to inflict a preemptive strike to avoid being invaded for gain. And a system of laws that defines infractions and penalties and metes them out disinterestedly can obviate the need for a hair trigger for retaliation and the accompanying culture of honor. People can rest assured that someone else will impose disincentives on their enemies, making it unnecessary for them to maintain a belligerent stance to prove they are not punching bags. And having a third party measure the infractions and the punishments circumvents the hazard of self-deception, which ordinarily convinces those on each side that they have suffered the greater number of offenses. These advantages of third-party intercession can also come from nongovernmental methods of conflict resolution, in which mediators try to help the hostile parties negotiate an agreement or arbitrators render a verdict but cannot enforce it. 92 The problem with these toothless measures is that the parties can always walk away when the outcome doesn't come out the way they want. Adjudication by an armed authority appears to be the most effective general violence-reduction technique ever invented. Though we debate whether tweaks in criminal policy, such as executing murderers versus locking them up for life, can reduce violence by a few percentage points, there can be no debate on the massive effects of having a criminal justice system as opposed to living in anarchy. The shockingly high homicide rates of pre-state societies, with 10 to 60 percent of the men dying at the hands of other men, provide one kind of evidence. 93 Another is the emergence of a violent culture of honor in just about any corner of the world that is beyond the reach of the law. 94 Many historians argue that people acquiesced to centralized authorities during the Middle Ages and other periods to relieve themselves of the burden of having to retaliate against those who would harm them and their kin. 95 And the growth of those authorities may explain the hundredfold decline in homicide rates in European societies since the Middle Ages. 96 The United States saw a dramatic reduction in urban crime rates from the first half of the nineteenth
{331} century to the second half, which coincided with the formation of professional police forces in the cities. 97 The causes of the decline in American crime in the 1990s are controversial and probably multifarious, but many criminologists trace it in part to more intensive community policing and higher incarceration rates of violent criminals. 98
The inverse is true as well. When law enforcement vanishes, all manner of violence breaks out: looting, settling old scores, ethnic cleansing, and petty warfare among gangs, warlords, and mafias. This was obvious in the remnants of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and parts of Africa in the 1990s, but can also happen in countries with a long tradition of civility. As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a. m. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 a. m. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. 99 This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).
The generalization that anarchy in the sense of a lack of government leads to anarchy in the sense of violent chaos may seem banal, but it is often overlooked in today's still-romantic climate. Government in general is anathema to many conservatives, and the police and prison system are anathema to many liberals. Many people on the left, citing uncertainty about the deterrent value of capital punishment compared to life imprisonment, maintain that deterrence is not effective in general. And many oppose more effective policing of inner-city neighborhoods, even though it may be the most effective way for their decent inhabitants to abjure the code of the streets. Certainly we must combat the racial inequities that put too many African American men in prison, but as the legal scholar Randall Kennedy has argued, we must also combat the racial inequities that leave too many African Americans exposed to criminals. 100 Many on the right oppose decriminalizing drugs, prostitution, and gambling without factoring in the costs of the zones of anarchy that, by their own free-market logic, are inevitably spawned by prohibition policies. When demand for a commodity is high, suppliers will materialize, and if they cannot protect their property rights by calling the police, they will do so with {332} a violent culture of honor. (This is distinct from the moral argument that our current drug policies incarcerate multitudes of nonviolent people. ) Schoolchildren are currently fed the disinformation that Native Americans and other peoples in pre-state societies were inherently peaceable, leaving them uncomprehending, indeed contemptuous, of one of our species' greatest inventions, democratic government and the rule of law.
Where Hobbes fell short was in dealing with the problem of policing the police. In his view, civil war was such a calamity that any government -- monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy -- was preferable to it. He did not seem to appreciate that in practice a leviathan would not be an otherworldly sea monster but a human being or group of them, complete with the deadly sins of greed, mistrust, and honor. (As we saw in the preceding chapter, this became the obsession of the heirs of Hobbes who framed the American Constitution. ) Armed men are always a menace, so police who are not under tight democratic control can be a far worse calamity than the crime and feuding that go on without them. In the twentieth century, according to the political scientist R. J. Rummel in Death by Government, 170 million people were killed by their own governments. Nor is murder-by-government a relic of the tyrannies of the middle of the century. The World Conflict List for the year 2000 reported:
The stupidest conflict in this year's count is Cameroon. Early in the year, Cameroon was experiencing widespread problems with violent crime. The government responded to this crisis by creating and arming militias and paramilitary groups to stamp out the crime extrajudicially. Now, while violent crime has fallen, the militias and paramilitaries have created far more chaos and death than crime ever would have. Indeed, as the year wore on mass graves were discovered that were tied to the paramilitary groups. 101
The pattern is familiar from other regions of the world (including our own) and shows that civil libertarians' concern about abusive police practices is an indispensable counterweight to the monopoly on violence we grant the state.
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Democratic leviathans have proven to be an effective antiviolence measure, but they leave much to be desired. Because they fight violence with violence or the threat of violence, they can be a danger themselves. And it would be far better if we could find a way to get people to abjure violence to begin with rather than punishing them after the fact. Worst of all, no one has yet figured out how to set up a worldwide democratic leviathan that would penalize the aggressive competition, defuse the Hobbesian traps, and eliminate the cultures of honor that hold between the most dangerous perpetrators of violence of all, nation-states. As Kant noted, "The depravity of human nature {333} is displayed without disguise in the unrestricted relations which obtain between the various nations. "102 The great question is how to get people and nations to repudiate violence from the start, preempting escalations of hostility before they can take off.
In the 1960s it all seemed so simple. War is unhealthy for children and other living things. What if they gave a war and nobody came? War: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! The problem with these sentiments is that the other
? ? ? ? ? ? side has to feel the same way at the same time. In 1939 Neville Chamberlain offered his own antiwar slogan, "Peace in our time.
" It was followed by a world war and a holocaust, because his adversary did not agree that war is good for absolutely nothing. Chamberlain's successor, Churchill, explained why peace is not a simple matter of unilateral pacifism: "Nothing is worse than war? Dishonor is worse than war. Slavery is worse than war. " A popular bumper sticker captures a related sentiment: if you want peace, work for justice. The problem is that what one side sees as honor and justice the other side may see as dishonor and injustice. Also, "honor" can be a laudable willingness to defend life and liberty, but it can also be a reckless refusal to de-escalate.
Sometimes all sides really do see that they would be better off beating their swords into plowshares. Scholars such as John Keegan and Donald Horowitz have noted a general decline in the taste for violence as a means of settling disputes within most Western democracies in the last half-century. 103 Civil wars, corporal and capital punishment, deadly ethnic riots, and foreign wars requiring face-to-face killing have declined or vanished. And as I have mentioned, though some decades in recent centuries have been more violent than others, the overall trend in crime has been downward.
One possible reason is the cosmopolitan forces that work to expand people's moral circle. Another may be the long- term effects of living with a leviathan. Today's civility in Europe, after all, followed centuries of beheadings and public hangings and exiles to penal colonies. And Canada may be more peaceable than its neighbor in part because its government outraced its people to the land. Unlike the United States, where settlers fanned out over a vast two- dimensional landscape with innumerable nooks and crannies, the habitable portion of Canada is a one-dimensional ribbon along the American border without remote frontiers and enclaves in which cultures of honor could fester. According to the Canadian studies scholar Desmond Morton, "Our west expanded in an orderly, peaceful fashion, with the police arriving before the settlers. "104
But people can become less truculent without the external incentives of dollars and cents or governmental brute force. People all over the world have reflected on the futility of violence (at least when they are evenly enough matched with their adversaries that no one can prevail). A New Guinean {334} native laments, "War is bad and nobody likes it. Sweet potatoes disappear, pigs disappear, fields deteriorate, and many relatives and friends get killed. But one cannot help it. "105 Chagnon reports that some Yanomamo? men reflect on the futility of their feuds and a few make it known that they will have nothing to do with raiding. 106 In such cases it can become clear that both sides would come out ahead by splitting the differences between them rather than continuing to fight over them. During the trench warfare of World War I, weary British and German soldiers would probe each other's hostile intent with momentary respites in shelling. If the other side responded with a respite in kind, long periods of unofficial peace broke out beneath the notice of their bellicose commanders. 107 As a British soldier said, "We don't want to kill you, and you don't want to kill us, so why shoot? "108
The most consequential episode in which belligerents sought a way to release their deadly embrace was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the United States discovered Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and demanded that they be removed. Khrushchev and Kennedy were both reminded of the human costs of the nuclear brink they were approaching, Khrushchev by memories of two world wars fought on his soil, Kennedy by a graphic briefing of the aftermath of an atomic bomb. And each understood they were in a Hobbesian trap. Kennedy had just read The Guns of August and saw how the leaders of great nations could blunder into a pointless war. Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy:
You and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter this knot will become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the knot will have to be cut. 109
By identifying the trap, they could formulate a shared goal of escaping it. In the teeth of opposition from many of their advisers and large sectors of their publics, both made concessions that averted a catastrophe.
The problem with violence, then, is that the advantages of deploying it or renouncing it depend on what the other side does. Such scenarios are the province of game theory, and game theorists have shown that the best decision for each player individually is sometimes the worst decision for both collectively. The most famous example is the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which partners in crime are held in separate cells. Each is promised freedom if he is the first to implicate his partner (who then will get a harsh sentence), a light sentence if neither implicates the other, and a moderate sentence if each implicates the other. The optimal strategy for each prisoner is to defect from their partnership, but when both do so they end up with a worse outcome than if each stayed loyal. Yet neither can stay loyal out of fear that his partner might defect {335} and leave him with the worst outcome of all. The Prisoner's Dilemma is similar to the pacifist's dilemma: what is good for one (belligerence) is bad for both, but what is good for both (pacifism) is unattainable when neither can be sure the other is opting for it.
The only way to win a Prisoner's Dilemma is to change the rules or find a way out of the game. The World War I
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? soldiers changed the rules in a way that has been much discussed in evolutionary psychology: play it repeatedly and apply a strategy of reciprocity, remembering the other player's last action and repaying him in kind. 110 But in many
antagonistic encounters that is not an option, because when the other player defects he can destroy you -- or, in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis, destroy the world. In that case the players had to recognize they were in a futile game and mutually decide to get out of it.
Glover draws an important conclusion about how the cognitive component of human nature might allow us to reduce violence even when it appears to be a rational strategy at the time:
Sometimes, apparently rational self-interested strategies turn out (as in the prisoners' dilemma . . . ) to be self-defeating. This may look like a defeat for rationality, but it is not. Rationality is saved by its own open-endedness. If a strategy of following accepted rules of rationality is sometimes self- defeating, this is not the end. We revise the rules to take account of this, so producing a higher-order rational strategy. This in turn may fail, but again we go up a level. At whatever level we fail, there is always the process of standing back and going up a further level. 111
The process of "standing back and going up a further level" might be necessary to overcome the emotional impediments to peace as well as the intellectual ones. Diplomatic peacemakers try to hurry along the epiphanies that prompt adversaries to extricate themselves from a deadly game. They try to blunt competition by carefully fashioning compromises over the disputed resources. They try to defuse Hobbesian traps via "confidence-building measures" such as making military activities transparent and bringing in third parties as guarantors. And they try to bring the two sides into each other's moral circles by facilitating trade, cultural exchanges, and people-to-people activities.
This is fine as far as it goes, but the diplomats are sometimes frustrated that at the end of the day the two sides seem to hate each other as much as they did at the beginning. They continue to demonize their opponents, warp the facts, and denounce the conciliators on their own side as traitors. Milton J. Wilkinson, a diplomat who failed to get the Greeks and Turks to bury the hatchet over Cyprus, suggests that peacemakers must understand the emotional faculties of adversaries and not just neutralize the current rational {336} incentives. The best-laid plans of peacemakers are often derailed by the adversaries' ethnocentrism, sense of honor, moralization, and self-deception. 112 These mindsets evolved to deal with hostilities in the ancestral past, and we must bring them into the open if we are to work around them in the present.
An emphasis on the open-endedness of human rationality resonates with the finding from cognitive science that the mind is a combinatorial, recursive system. 113 Not only do we have thoughts, but we have thoughts about our thoughts, and thoughts about our thoughts about our thoughts. The advances in human conflict resolution we have encountered in this chapter -- submitting to the rule of law, figuring out a way for both sides to back down without losing face, acknowledging the possibility of one's own self-deception, accepting the equivalence of one's own interests and other people's -- depend on this ability.
Many intellectuals have averted their gaze from the evolutionary logic of violence, fearing that acknowledging it is tantamount to accepting it or even to approving it. Instead they have pursued the comforting delusion of the Noble Savage, in which violence is an arbitrary product of learning or a pathogen that bores into us from the outside. But denying the logic of violence makes it easy to forget how readily violence can flare up, and ignoring the parts of the mind that ignite violence makes it easy to overlook the parts that can extinguish it. With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.
<< {337} >> Chapter 18
Gender
Now that its namesake year has come and gone, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey provides an opportunity to measure imagination against reality. Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 sci-fi classic traced out the destiny of our species from ape-men on the savanna to a transcendence of time, space, and bodies that we can only dimly comprehend. Clarke and the director, Stanley Kubrick, contrived a radical vision of life in the third millennium, and in some ways it has come to pass. A permanent space station is being built, and voice mail and the Internet are a routine part of our lives. In other regards Clarke and Kubrick were overoptimistic about the march of progress. We still don't have suspended animation, missions to Jupiter, or computers that read lips and plot mutinies. And in still other regards they missed the boat completely. In their vision of the year 2001, people recorded their words on typewriters; Clarke and Kubrick did not anticipate word processors or laptop computers. And in their depiction of the new millennium, the American
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? women were "girl assistants": secretaries, receptionists, and flight attendants.
That these visionaries did not anticipate the revolution in women's status of the 1970s is a pointed reminder of how quickly social arrangements can change. It was not so long ago that women were seen as fit only to be housewives, mothers, and sexual partners, were discouraged from entering the professions because they would be taking the place of a man, and were routinely subjected to discrimination, condescension, and sexual extortion. The ongoing liberation of women after millennia of oppression is one of the great moral achievements of our species, and I consider myself fortunate to have lived through some of its major victories.
The change in the status of women has several causes. One is the inexorable logic of the expanding moral circle, which led also to the abolition of despotism, slavery, feudalism, and racial segregation. 1 In the midst of the Enlightenment, the early feminist Mary Astell (1688-1731) wrote: {338}
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? 2
Another cause is the technological and economic progress that made it possible for couples to have sex and raise children without a pitiless division of labor in which a mother had to devote every waking moment to keeping the children alive. Clean water, sanitation, and modern medicine lowered infant mortality and reduced the desire for large broods of children. Baby bottles and pasteurized cow's milk, and then breast pumps and freezers, made it possible to feed babies without their mothers being chained to them around the clock. Mass production made it cheaper to buy things than to make them by hand, and plumbing, electricity, and appliances reduced the domestic workload even more. The increased value of brains over brawn in the economy, the extension of the human lifespan (with the prospect of decades of life after childrearing), and the affordability of extended education changed the values of women's options in life. Contraception, amniocentesis, ultrasound, and reproductive technologies made it possible for women to defer childbearing to the optimal points in their lives.
And of course the other major cause of women's progress is feminism: the political, literary, and academic movements that channeled these advances into tangible changes in policies and attitudes. The first wave of feminism, bookended in the United States by the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920, gave women the right to vote, to serve as jurors, to hold property in marriage, to divorce, and to receive an education. The second wave, flowering in the 1970s, brought women into the professions, changed the division of labor in the home, exposed sexist biases in business, government, and other institutions, and threw a spotlight on women's interests in all walks of life. The recent progress in women's rights has not drained feminism of its raison d'etre. In much of the Third World, women's position has not improved since the Middle Ages, and in our own society women are still subjected to discrimination, harassment, and violence. Feminism is widely seen as being opposed to the sciences of human nature. Many of those scientists believe that the minds of the two sexes differ at birth, and feminists have pointed out that such beliefs have long been used to justify the unequal treatment of women. Women were thought to be designed for childrearing and home life and to be incapable of the reason necessary for {339} politics and the professions. Men were believed to harbor irresistible urges that made them harass and rape women, and that belief served to excuse the perpetrators and to license fathers and husbands to control women in the guise of protecting them. Therefore, it might seem, the theories that are most friendly to women are the Blank Slate -- if nothing is innate, differences between the sexes cannot be innate -- and the Noble Savage -- if we harbor no ignoble urges, sexual exploitation can be eliminated by changing our institutions.
The belief that feminism requires a blank slate and a noble savage has become a powerful impetus for spreading disinformation. A 1994 headline in the New York Times science section, for example, proclaimed, "Sexes Equal on South Sea Isle. "3 It was based on the work of the anthropologist Maria Lepowsky, who (perhaps channeling the ghost of Margaret Mead) said that gender relations on the island of Vanatinai prove that "the subjugation of women by men is not a human universal, and it is not inevitable. " Only late in the story do we learn what this supposed "equality" amounts to: that men must do bride service to pay for wives, that warfare had been waged exclusively by men (who raided neighboring islands for brides), that women spend more time caring for children and sweeping up pig excrement, and that men spend more time building their reputations and hunting wild boar (which is accorded more prestige by both sexes). A similar disconnect between headline and fact appeared in a 1998 Boston Globe story entitled "Girls Appear to Be Closing Aggression Gap with Boys. " How much have they "closed this gap"? According to the story, they now commit murder at one-tenth the rate of boys. 4 And in a 1998 op-ed, the co-producer of Ms.
? ? ? ? ? ? magazine's "Take Our Daughters to Work Day" explained recent high school shootings with the remarkable assertion that boys in America "are being trained by their parents, other adults, and our culture and media to harass, assault, rape, and murder girls. "5
On the other side, some conservatives are confirming feminists' worst fears by invoking dubious sex differences to condemn the choices of women. In a Wall Street Journal editorial, the political scientist Harvey Mansfield wrote that "the protective element of manliness is endangered by women having equal access to jobs outside the home. "6 A book by E Carolyn Graglia called Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism theorized that women's maternal and sexual instincts are being distorted by the assertiveness and analytical mind demanded by a career. The journalists Wendy Shalit and Danielle Crittenden recently advised women to marry young, postpone their careers, and care for children in traditional marriages, even though they could not have written their books if they had followed their own advice. 7 Leon Kass has taken it upon himself to inform young women what they want: "For the first time in human history, mature women by the tens of thousands live the entire decade of their twenties -- their most fertile years -- neither in the homes of their {340} fathers nor in the homes of their husbands; unprotected, lonely, and out of sync with their inborn nature. Some women positively welcome this state of affairs, but most do not. "8
There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the principles of feminism and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical. To repeat: equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group. In the case of gender, the barely defeated Equal Rights Amendment put it succinctly: "Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex. " If we recognize this principle, no one has to spin myths about the indistinguishability of the sexes to justify equality. Nor should anyone invoke sex differences to justify discriminatory policies or to hector women into doing what they don't want to do.
In any case, what we do know about the sexes does not call for any action that would penalize or constrain one sex or the other. Many psychological traits relevant to the public sphere, such as general intelligence, are the same on average for men and women, and virtually all psychological traits may be found in varying degrees among the members of each sex. No sex difference yet discovered applies to every last man compared with every last woman, so generalizations about a sex will always be untrue of many individuals. And notions like "proper role" and "natural place" are scientifically meaningless and give no grounds for restricting freedom.
Despite these principles, many feminists vehemently attack research on sexuality and sex differences. The politics of gender is a major reason that the application of evolution, genetics, and neuroscience to the human mind is bitterly resisted in modern intellectual life. But unlike other human divisions such as race and ethnicity, where any biological differences are minor at most and scientifically uninteresting, gender cannot possibly be ignored in the science of human beings. The sexes are as old as complex life and are a fundamental topic in evolutionary biology, genetics, and behavioral ecology. To disregard them in the case of our own species would be to make a hash of our understanding of our place in the cosmos. And of course differences between men and women affect every aspect of our lives. We all have a mother and a father, are attracted to members of the opposite sex (or notice our contrast with the people who are), and are never unaware of the sex of our siblings, children, and friends. To ignore gender would be to ignore a major part of the human condition.
The goal of this chapter is to clarify the relation between the biology of human nature and current controversies on the sexes, including the two most incendiary, the gender gap and sexual assault. With both of these hot buttons, I will argue against the conventional wisdom associated with certain people who claim to speak on behalf of feminism. That may create an illusion that the {341} arguments go against feminism in general, or even against the interests of women. They don't in the least, and I must begin by showing why.
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Feminism is often derided because of the arguments of its lunatic fringe -- for example, that all intercourse is rape, that all women should be lesbians, or that only 10 percent of the population should be allowed to be male. 9 Feminists reply that proponents of women's rights do not speak with one voice, and that feminist thought comprises many positions, which have to be evaluated independently. 10 That is completely legitimate, but it cuts both ways. To criticize a particular feminist proposal is not to attack feminism in general.
Anyone familiar with academia knows that it breeds ideological cults that are prone to dogma and resistant to criticism. Many women believe that this has now happened to feminism. In her book Who Stole Feminism? the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers draws a useful distinction between two schools of thought. 11 Equity feminism opposes sex discrimination and other forms of unfairness to women. It is part of the classical liberal and humanistic tradition that grew out of the Enlightenment, and it guided the first wave of feminism and launched the second wave.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Gender feminism holds that women continue to be enslaved by a pervasive system of male dominance, the gender system, in which "bi-sexual infants are transformed into male and female gender personalities, the one destined to command, the other to obey. "12 It is opposed to the classical liberal tradition and allied instead with Marxism, postmodernism, social constructionism, and radical science. It has became the credo of some women's studies programs, feminist organizations, and spokespeople for the women's movement.
Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature. The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety. The second is that humans possess a single social motive -- power -- and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups -- in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender.
In embracing these doctrines, the genderists are handcuffing feminism to railroad tracks on which a train is bearing down. As we shall see, neuroscience, genetics, psychology, and ethnography are documenting sex differences that almost certainly originate in human biology.
