No More Learning

"46 For Singer this means acknowledging the limits of human nature, which makes the perfectibility of humankind an impossible goal. And it means acknowledging specific components of human nature. They include self-interest, which implies that competitive economic systems will work better than state monopolies; the drive for dominance, which makes powerful governments vulnerable to overweening autocrats; ethnocentrism, which puts nationalist movements at risk of committing discrimination and genocide; and differences between the sexes, which should temper measures for rigid gender parity in all walks of life.
So what's left of the left? an observer might ask. Singer replies, "If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, or who simply do not have enough to sustain life at a decent level, we are not of the left. If we say that that is just the way the world is, and always will be, and there is nothing we can do about it, we are not part of the left. The left wants to do something about this situation. "47 Singer's leftism, like traditional leftism, is defined by a contrast with a defeatist Tragic Vision. But its goal -- "doing something" -- has been downsized considerably from Robert Kennedy's goal in the 1960s of "building a new world society. "
The Darwinian left has ranged from vague expressions of values to wonk-ish policy initiatives. We have already met two theoreticians at the vaguer end. Chomsky has been the most vocal defender of an innate cognitive endowment since he nailed his thesis of an inborn language faculty to the behaviorists' door in the late 1950s. He has also been a fierce left-wing critic of American society and has recently inspired a whole new generation of campus radicals (as we saw in his interview with Rage Against the Machine). Chomsky insists that the connections between his science and his politics are slender but real:
A vision of a future social order is . . . based on a concept of human nature. If, in fact, man is an indefinitely malleable, completely plastic being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then he is a fit subject for the "shaping of behavior" by the State authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species will hope this is not so and will try to determine the intrinsic characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community. 48 {301}
He describes his political vision as "libertarian socialist" and "anarcho-syndicalist," the kind of anarchism that values spontaneous cooperation (as opposed to anarcho-capitalism, the kind that values individualism). 49 This vision, he suggests, lies in a Cartesian tradition that includes "Rousseau's opposition to tyranny, oppression, and established authority,. . . Kant's defense of freedom, Humboldt's precapitalist liberalism with its emphasis on the basic human need for free creation under conditions of voluntary association, and Marx's critique of alienated fragmented labor that turns men into machines, depriving them of their 'species character' of 'free conscious activity' and 'productive life' in association with their fellows. "50 Chomsky's political beliefs, then, resonate with his scientific belief that humans are innately endowed with a desire for community and a drive for creative free expression, language being the paradigm example. That holds out the hope for a society organized by cooperation and natural productivity rather than by hierarchical control and the profit motive.
Chomsky's theory of human nature, though strongly innatist, is innocent of modern evolutionary biology, with its demonstration of ubiquitous conflicts of genetic interest. These conflicts lead to a darker view of human nature, one that has always been a headache for those with anarchist dreams. But the thinker who first elucidated these conflicts, Robert Trivers, was a left-wing radical as well, and one of the rare white Black Panthers. As we saw in Chapter 6, Trivers viewed sociobiology as a subversive discipline. A sensitivity to conflicts of interest can illuminate the interests of repressed agents, such as women and younger generations, and it can expose the deception and self- deception that elites use to justify their dominance. 51 In that way sociobiology follows in the liberal tradition of Locke by using science and reason to debunk the rationalizations of rulers. Reason was used in Locke's time to question the divine right of kings, and may be used in our time to question the pretension that current political arrangements serve everyone's interests.
Though it may come as a shock to many people, the use of IQ tests and a recognition of innate differences in intelligence can support -- and in the past did support -- left-wing political goals. In his article "Bell Curve Liberals," the journalist Adrian Wooldridge points out that IQ testing was welcomed by the British left as the ultimate subverter of a caste society ruled by inbred upper-class twits. 52 Together with other liberals and socialists, Sidney and Beatrice Webb hoped to turn the educational system into a "capacity-catching machine" that could "rescue talented poverty from the shop or the plough" and direct them into the ruling elite. They were opposed by
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? conservatives such as T. S. Eliot, who worried that a system that sorts people by ability would disorganize civil society by breaking the bonds of class and tradition at both ends of the ladder. At one end it would fragment working- class communities, dividing them by talent. At the other it would remove the ethic of noblesse oblige from the upper classes, who now would have "earned" their success and be {302} responsible to no one, rather than inheriting it and being obligated to help the less fortunate. Wooldridge argues that "the left can hardly afford to ignore I. Q. tests, which, for all their inadequacies, are still the best means yet devised for spotting talent wherever it occurs, in the inner cities as well as the plush housing estates, and ensuring that talent is matched to the appropriate educational streams and job opportunities. "
For their part, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (the authors of The Bell Curve) argued that the heritability of intelligence ought to galvanize the left into a greater commitment to Rawlsian social justice. 53 If intelligence were entirely acquired, then policies for equal opportunity would suffice to guarantee an equitable distribution of wealth and power. But if some souls have the misfortune of being born into brains with lower ability, they could fall into poverty through no fault of their own, even in a perfectly fair system of economic competition. If social justice consists of seeing to the well-being of the worst off, then recognizing genetic differences calls for an active redistribution of wealth. Indeed, though Herrnstein was a conservative and Murray a right-leaning libertarian and communitarian, they were not opposed to simple redistributive measures such as a negative income tax for the lowest wage earners, which would give a break to those who play by the rules but still can't scrape by. Murray's libertarianism leads him to oppose government programs that are more activist than that, but he and Herrnstein noted that a hereditarian left is a niche waiting to be filled.
An important challenge to conservative political theory has come from behavioral economists such as Richard Thaler and George Akerlof, who were influenced by the evolutionary cognitive psychology of Herbert Simon, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Paul Slovic. 54 These psychologists have argued that human thinking and decision making are biological adaptations rather than engines of pure rationality. These mental systems work with limited amounts of information, have to reach decisions in a finite amount of time, and ultimately serve evolutionary goals such as status and security. Conservatives have always invoked limitations on human reason to rein in the pretense that we can understand social behavior well enough to redesign society. But those limitations also undermine the assumption of rational self-interest that underlies classical economics and secular conservatism. Ever since Adam Smith, classical economists have argued that in the absence of outside interference, individuals making decisions in their own interests will do what is best for themselves and for society. But if people do not always calculate what is best for themselves, they might be better off with the taxes and regulations that classical economists find so perverse.
For example, rational agents informed by interest rates and their life expectancies should save the optimal proportion of their wages for comfort in their old age. Social security and mandatory savings plans should be {303} unnecessary -- indeed, harmful -- because they take away choice and hence the opportunity to find the best balance between consuming now and saving for the future. But economists repeatedly find that people spend their money like drunken sailors. They act as if they think they will die in a few years, or as if the future is completely unpredictable, which may be closer to the reality of our evolutionary ancestors than it is to life today. 55 If so, then allowing people to manage their own savings (for example, letting them keep their entire paycheck and investing it as they please) may work against their interests. Like Odysseus approaching the island of the Sirens, people might rationally agree to let their employer or the government tie them to the mast of forced savings.
The economist Robert Frank has appealed to the evolutionary psychology of status to point out other shortcomings of the rational-actor theory and, by extension, laissez-faire economics. 56 Rational actors should eschew not only forced retirement savings but other policies that ostensibly protect them, such as mandatory health benefits, workplace safety regulations, unemployment insurance, and union dues. All of these cost money that would otherwise go into their paychecks, and workers could decide for themselves whether to take a pay cut to work for a company with the most paternalistic policies or go for the biggest salary and take higher risks on the job. Companies, in their competition for the best employees, should find the balance demanded by the employees they want.
The rub, Frank points out, is that people are endowed with a craving for status. Their first impulse is to spend money in ways that put themselves ahead of the Joneses (houses, cars, clothing, prestigious educations), rather than in ways that only they know about (health care, job safety, retirement savings). Unfortunately, status is a zero-sum game, so when everyone has more money to spend on cars and houses, the houses and cars get bigger but people are no happier than they were before. Like hockey players who agree to wear helmets only if a rule forces their opponents to wear them too, people might agree to regulations that force everyone to pay for hidden benefits like health care that make them happier in the long run, even if the regulations come at the expense of disposable income. For the same reason, Frank argues, we would be better off if we implemented a steeply graduated tax on consumption, replacing the current graduated tax on income. A consumption tax would damp down the futile arms race for ever more lavish
? ? ? ? ? ? cars, houses, and watches and compensate people with resources that provably increase happiness, such as leisure time, safer streets, and more pleasant commuting and working conditions.
Finally, Darwinian leftists have been examining the evolutionary psychology of economic inequality. The economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, formerly Marxists and now Darwinians, have reviewed the literature from ethnography and behavioral economics which suggests that people are neither antlike altruists nor self-centered misers. 57 As we saw in Chapter 14, people {304} share with others who they think are willing to share, and punish those who are not. (Gintis calls this "strong reciprocity," which is like reciprocal altruism or "weak reciprocity" but is aimed at other people's willingness to contribute to public goods rather than at tit-for-tat exchanges. )58 This psychology makes people oppose indiscriminate welfare and expansive social programs not because they are callous or greedy but because they think such programs reward the indolent and punish the industrious. Bowles and Gintis note that even in today's supposedly antiwelfare climate, polls show that most people are willing to pay higher taxes for some kinds of universal social insurance. They are willing to pay to guarantee basic needs such as food, shelter, and health care, to aid the victims of bad luck, and to help people who are down and out become self-sufficient. In other words, people are opposed to a blanket welfare state not out of greed but out of fairness. A welfare system that did not try to rewrite the public consciousness, and which distinguished between the deserving and the undeserving poor, would, they argue, be perfectly consonant with human nature.
The politics of economic inequality ultimately hinge on a tradeoff between economic freedom and economic equality. Though scientists cannot dictate how these desiderata should be weighted, they can help assess the morally relevant costs and thereby enable us to make a more informed decision. Once again the psychology of status and dominance has a role to play in this assessment. In absolute terms, today's poor are materially better off than the aristocracy of just a century ago. They live longer, are better fed, and enjoy formerly unimaginable luxuries such as central heating, refrigerators, telephones, and round-the-clock entertainment from television and radio. Conservatives say this makes it hard to argue that the station of lower-income people is an ethical outrage that ought to be redressed at any cost.
But if people's sense of well-being comes from an assessment of their social status, and social status is relative, then extreme inequality can make people on the lower rungs feel defeated even if they are better off than most of humanity. It is not just a matter of hurt feelings: people with lower status are less healthy and die younger, and communities with greater inequality have poorer health and shorter life expectancies. 59 The medical researcher Richard Wilkinson, who documented these patterns, argues that low status triggers an ancient stress reaction that sacrifices tissue repair and immune function for an immediate fight-or-flight response. Wilkinson, together with Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, have pointed to another measurable cost of economic inequality. Crime rates are much higher in regions with greater disparities of wealth (even after controlling for absolute levels of wealth), partly because chronic low status leads men to become obsessed with rank and to kill one another over trivial insults. 60 Wilkinson argues that reducing economic inequality would make millions of lives happier, safer, and longer. {305} This well-populated gallery of left-wing innatists should not come as a surprise, even after centuries in which human nature was a preserve of the right. Mindful both of science and of history, the Darwinian left has abandoned the Utopian Vision that brought so many unintended disasters. Whether this non-Utopian left is really all that different from the contemporary secular right, and whether its particular policies are worth their costs, is not for me to argue here. The point is that traditional political alignments ought to change as we learn more about human beings. The ideologies of the left and the right took shape before Darwin, before Mendel, before anyone knew what a gene or a neuron or a hormone was. Every student of political science is taught that political ideologies are based on theories of human nature. Why must they be based on theories that are three hundred years out of date?
<< {306} >> Chapter 17
Violence
The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending. 1
Winston Churchill's summary of our species could be dismissed as the pessimism of a man who fought history's most awful war and was present at the birth of a cold war that could have destroyed humanity altogether. In fact it has sadly stood the test of time. Though the cold war is a memory, and hot wars between major nations are rare, we still do not have peace in the world. Even before the infamous year of 2001, with its horrific terrorist attacks on the United States and subsequent war in Afghanistan, the World Conflict List catalogued sixty-eight areas of systematic
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? violence, from Albania and Algeria through Zambia and Zimbabwe. 2
Churchill's speculation about prehistory has also been borne out. Modern foragers, who offer a glimpse of life in prehistoric societies, were once thought to engage only in ceremonial battles that were called to a halt as soon as the first man fell. Now they are known to kill one another at rates that dwarf the casualties from our world wars. 3 The archaeological record is no happier. Buried in the ground and hidden in caves lie silent witnesses to a bloody prehistory stretching back hundreds of thousands of years. They include skeletons with scalping marks, ax-shaped dents, and arrowheads embedded in them; weapons like tomahawks and maces that are useless for hunting but specialized for homicide; fortification defenses such as palisades of sharpened sticks; and paintings from several continents showing men firing arrows, spears, or boomerangs at one another and being felled by these weapons. 4 For decades, "anthropologists of peace" denied that any human group had ever practiced cannibalism, but evidence to the contrary has been piling up and now includes a smoking gun. In an 850-year-old site in the American Southwest, archaeologists have found human bones that were hacked up like the bones of animals {307} used for food. They also found traces of human myoglobin (a muscle protein) on pot shards, and -- damningly -- in a lump of fossilized human excrement. 5 Members of Homo antecessor, relatives of the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans, bashed and butchered one another too, suggesting that violence and cannibalism go back at least 800,000 years. 6
War is only one of the ways in which people kill other people. In much of the world, war shades into smaller-scale violence such as ethnic strife, turf battles, blood feuds, and individual homicides. Here too, despite undeniable improvements, we do not have anything like peace. Though Western societies have seen murder rates fall between tenfold and a hundredfold in the past millennium, the United States lost a million people to homicide in the twentieth century, and an American man has about a one-half percent lifetime chance of being murdered. 7
History indicts our species not just with the number of killings but with the manner. Hundreds of millions of Christians decorate their homes and adorn their bodies with a facsimile of a device that inflicted an unimaginably agonizing death on people who were a nuisance to Roman politicians. It is just one example of the endless variations of torture that the human mind has devised over the millennia, many of them common enough to have become words in our lexicon: to crucify, to draw and quarter, to flay, to press, to stone; the garrote, the rack, the stake, the thumbscrew. Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, learning of the atrocities committed by the Turks in Bulgaria, said, "No animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel. " The annual reports of Amnesty International show that artistic cruelty is by no means a thing of the past.
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The reduction of violence on scales large and small is one of our greatest moral concerns. We ought to use every intellectual tool available to understand what it is about the human mind and human social arrangements that leads people to hurt and kill so much. But as with the other moral concerns examined in this part of the book, the effort to figure out what is going on has been hijacked by an effort to legislate the correct answer. In the case of violence, the correct answer is that violence has nothing to do with human nature but is a pathology inflicted by malign elements outside us. Violence is a behavior taught by the culture, or an infectious disease endemic to certain environments. This hypothesis has become the central dogma of a secular faith, repeatedly avowed in public proclamations like a daily prayer or pledge of allegiance. Recall Ashley Montagu's UNESCO resolution that biology supports an ethic of "universal brotherhood" and the anthropologists who believed that "nonviolence and peace were likely the norm throughout most of human prehistory. " In the 1980s, many social science organizations endorsed the Seville {308} Statement, which declared that it is "scientifically incorrect" to say that humans have a "violent brain" or have undergone selection for violence. 8 "War is not an instinct but an invention," wrote Ortega y Gasset, paralleling his claim that man has no nature but only history. 9 A recent United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women announced that "violence is part of an historical process, and is not natural or born of biological determinism. " A 1999 ad by the National Funding Collaborative on Violence Prevention declared that "violence is learned behavior. "10
Another sign of this faith-based approach to violence is the averred certainty that particular environmental explanations are correct. We know the causes of violence, it is repeatedly said, and we also know how to eliminate it. Only a failure of commitment has prevented us from doing so. Remember Lyndon Johnson saying that "all of us know" that the conditions that breed violence are ignorance, discrimination, poverty, and disease. A 1997 article on violence in a popular science magazine quoted a clinical geneticist who echoed LBJ:
We know what causes violence in our society: poverty, discrimination, the failure of our educational system. It's not the genes that cause violence in our society. It's our social system. 11
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? The authors of the article, the historians Betty and Daniel Kevles, agreed:
We need better education, nutrition, and intervention in dysfunctional homes and in the lives of abused children, perhaps to the point of removing them from the control of their incompetent parents. But such responses would be expensive and socially controversial. 12
The creed that violence is learned behavior often points to particular elements of American culture as the cause. A member of a toy-monitoring group recently told a reporter, "Violence is a learned behavior; Every toy is educational. The question is, what do you want your children to learn? "13 Media violence is another usual suspect. As two public health experts recently wrote:
The reality is that children learn to value and use violence to solve their problems and deal with strong feelings. They learn it from role models in their families and communities. They learn it from the heroes we put in front of them on television, the movies, and video games. 14
Childhood abuse, recently implicated in Richard Rhodes's Why They Kill, is a third putative cause. "The tragedy is that people who have been victimized {309} often become victimizers themselves," said the president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. "It's a cycle we could break, but it involves some expense. As a society, we haven't put our resources there. "15 Note in these statements the mouthing of the creed ("Violence is a learned behavior"), the certainty that it is true ("The reality is"), and the accusation that we suffer from a lack of commitment ("We haven't put our resources there") rather than an ignorance of how to solve the problem.
Many explanations blame "culture," conceived as a superorganism that teaches, issues commands, and doles out rewards and punishments. A Boston Globe columnist must have been oblivious to the circularity of his reasoning when he wrote:
So why is America more violent than other industrialized Western democracies? It's our cultural predisposition to violence. We pummel each other, maul each other, stab each other and shoot each other because it's our cultural imperative to do so. 16
When culture is seen as an entity with beliefs and desires, the beliefs and desires of actual people are unimportant. After Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, the journalist Alfie Kohn ridiculed Americans who "yammer about individual responsibility" and attributed the bombing to American individualism: "We have a cultural addiction to competition in this country. We're taught in classrooms and playing fields that other people are obstacles to our own success. "17 A related explanation for the bombing put the blame on American symbols, such as the arrow-clutching eagle on the national seal, and state mottoes, including "Live Free or Die" (New Hampshire) and "With the sword, we seek peace, but under liberty" (Massachusetts). 18
A popular recent theory attributes American violence to a toxic and peculiarly American conception of maleness inculcated in childhood. The social psychologist Alice Eagly explained sprees of random shootings by saying, "This sort of behavior has been part of the male role as it has been construed in US culture, from the frontier tradition on. "19 According to the theory, popularized in bestsellers like Dan Kindlon's Raising Cain and William Pollack's Real Boys, we are going through a "national crisis of boyhood in America," caused by the fact that boys are forced to separate from their mothers and stifle their emotions. "What's the matter with men? " asked an article in the Boston Globe Magazine. "Violent behavior, emotional distance, and higher rates of drug addiction can't be explained by hormones," it answers. "The problem, experts say, is cultural beliefs about masculinity -- everything packed into the phrase 'a real man. ' "20 {310}
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The statement that "violence is learned behavior" is a mantra repeated by right-thinking people to show that they believe that violence should be reduced. It is not based on any sound research. The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that "we know the conditions that breed violence," we barely have a clue. Wild swings in crime rates -- up in the 1960s and late 1980s, down in the late 1990s -- continue to defy any simple explanation. And the usual suspects for understanding violence are completely unproven and sometimes patently false. This is most blatant in the case of factors like "nutrition" and "disease" that are glibly thrown into lists of the social ills that allegedly bring on violence. There is no evidence, to put it mildly, that violence is caused by a vitamin deficiency or a bacterial infection. But the other putative causes suffer from a lack of evidence as well.
Aggressive parents often have aggressive children, but people who conclude that aggression is learned from parents in a "cycle of violence" never consider the possibility that violent tendencies could be inherited as well as learned. Unless one looks at adopted children and shows that they act more like their adoptive parents than like their
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? biological parents, cycles of violence prove nothing. Similarly, the psychologists who note that men commit more acts of violence than women and then blame it on a culture of masculinity are wearing intellectual blinkers that keep them from noticing that men and women differ in their biology as well as in their social roles. American children are exposed to violent role models, of course, but they are also exposed to clowns, preachers, folk singers, and drag queens; the question is why children find some people more worthy of imitation than others.
To show that violence is caused by special themes of American culture, a bare minimum of evidence would be a correlation in which the cultures that have those themes also tend to be more violent. Even that correlation, if it existed, would not prove that the cultural themes cause the violence rather than the other way around. But there may be no such correlation in the first place.
To begin with, American culture is not uniquely violent. All societies have violence, and America is not the most violent one in history or even in today's world. Most countries in the Third World, and many of the former republics of the Soviet Union, are considerably more violent, and they have nothing like the American tradition of individualism. 21 As for cultural norms of masculinity and sexism, Spain has its machismo, Italy its braggadocio, and Japan its rigid gender roles, yet their homicide rates are a fraction of that of the more feminist-influenced United States. The archetype of a masculine hero prepared to use violence in a just cause is one of the most common motifs in mythology, and it can be found in many cultures with relatively low rates of violent crime. James Bond, for example -- who actually has a license to kill -- is British, and martial arts films are popular in many industrialized Asian {311} countries. In any case, only a bookworm who has never actually seen an American movie or television program could believe that they glorify murderous fanatics like Timothy McVeigh or teenagers who randomly shoot classmates in high school cafeterias. Masculine heroes in the mass media are highly moralistic: they fight bad guys. Among conservative politicians and liberal health professionals alike it is an article of faith that violence in the media is a major cause of American violent crime. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics testified before Congress that over 3,500 studies had investigated the connection and only 18 failed to find one. Any social scientist can smell fishy numbers here, and the psychologist Jonathan Freedman decided to look for himself. In fact, only two hundred studies have looked for a connection between media violence and violent behavior, and more than half failed to find one. 22 The others found correlations that are small and readily explainable in other ways -- for example, that violent children seek out violent entertainment, and that children are temporarily aroused (but not permanently affected) by action-packed footage. Freedman and several other psychologists who have reviewed the literature have concluded that exposure to media violence has little or no effect on violent behavior in the world. 23 Reality checks from recent history suggest the same thing. People were more violent in the centuries before television and movies were invented. Canadians watch the same television shows as Americans but have a fourth their homicide rate. When the British colony of St. Helena installed television for the first time in 1995, its people did not become more violent. 24 Violent computer games took off in the 1990s, a time when crime rates plummeted.
What about the other usual suspects? Guns, discrimination, and poverty play a role in violence, but in no case is it a simple or decisive one. Guns surely make it easier for people to kill, and harder for them to de-escalate a fight before a death occurs, and thus multiply the lethality of conflicts large and small. Nonetheless, many societies had sickening rates of violence before guns were invented, and people do not automatically kill one another just because they have access to guns. The Israelis and Swiss are armed to the teeth but have low rates of violent personal crime, and among American states, Maine and North Dakota have the lowest homicide rates but almost every home has a gun. 25 The idea that guns increase lethal crime, though certainly plausible, has been so difficult to prove that in 1998 the legal scholar John Lott published a book of statistical analyses with a title that flaunts the opposite conclusion: More Guns, Less Crime. Even if he is wrong, as I suspect he is, it is not so easy to show that more guns mean more crime.
As for discrimination and poverty, again it is hard to show a direct cause-and-effect relationship. Chinese immigrants to California in the nineteenth {312} century and Japanese-Americans in World War II faced severe discrimination, but they did not react with high rates of violence. Women are poorer than men and are more likely to need money to feed children, but they are less likely to steal things by force. Different subcultures that are equally impoverished can vary radically in their rates of violence, and as we shall see, in many cultures relatively affluent men can be quick to use lethal force. 26 Though no one could object to a well-designed program that was shown to reduce crime, one cannot simply blame crime rates on a lack of commitment to social programs. These programs first flourished in the 1960s, the decade in which rates of violent crime skyrocketed.
Scientifically oriented researchers on violence chant a different mantra: "Violence is a public health problem. " According to the National Institute of Mental Health, "Violent behavior can best be understood -- and prevented -- if it is attacked as if it were a contagious disease that flourishes in vulnerable individuals and resource-poor neighborhoods. " The public health theory has been echoed by many professional organizations, such as the American Psychological Society and the Centers for Disease Control, and by political figures as diverse as the surgeon general
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? in the Clinton administration and the Republican senator Arlen Specter. 27 The public health approach tries to identify "risk factors" that are more common in poor neighborhoods than affluent ones. They include neglect and abuse in childhood, harsh and inconsistent discipline, divorce, malnutrition, lead poisoning, head injuries, untreated attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and the use of alcohol and crack cocaine during pregnancy.
Researchers in this tradition are proud that their approach is both "biological" -- they measure bodily fluids and take pictures of the brain -- and "cultural" -- they look for environmental causes of the brain conditions that might be ameliorated by the equivalent of public health measures. Unfortunately, there is a rather glaring flaw in the whole analogy. A good definition of a disease or disorder is that it consists of suffering experienced by an individual because of a malfunction of a mechanism in the individual's body. 28 But as a writer for Science recently pointed out, "Unlike most diseases, it's usually not the perpetrator who defines aggression as a problem; it's the environment. Violent people may feel they are functioning normally, and some may even enjoy their occasional outbursts and resist treatment. "29 Other than the truism that violence is more common in some people and places than others, the public health theory has little to recommend it. As we shall see, violence is not a disease in anything like the medical sense.
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Pure environmental theories of violence remain an article of faith because they embody the Blank Slate and the Noble Savage. Violence, according to these theories, isn't a natural strategy in the human repertoire; it's learned {313} behavior, or poisoning by a toxic substance, or the symptom of an infectious illness. In earlier chapters we saw the moral appeal of such doctrines: to differentiate the doctrine-holders from jingoists of earlier periods and ruffians of different classes; to reassure audiences that they do not think violence is "natural" in the sense of "good"; to express an optimism that violence can be eliminated, particularly by benign social programs rather than punitive deterrence; to stay miles away from the radioactive position that some individuals, classes, or races are innately more violent than others.
Most of all, the learned-behavior and public health theories are moral declarations, public avowals that the declarer is opposed to violence. Condemning violence is all to the good, of course, but not if it is disguised as an empirical claim about our psychological makeup. Perhaps the purest example of this wishful confusion comes from Ramsey Clark, attorney general in the Johnson administration and the author of the 1970 bestseller Crime in America. In arguing that the criminal justice system should replace punishment with rehabilitation, Clark explained:
The theory of rehabilitation is based on the belief that healthy, rational people will not injure others, that they will understand that the individual and his society are best served by conduct that does not inflict injury, and that a just society has the ability to provide health and purpose and opportunity for all its citizens. Rehabilitated, an individual will not have the capacity -- cannot bring himself -- to injure another or take or destroy property. 30
Would that it were so! This theory is a fine example of the moralistic fallacy: it would be so nice if the idea were true that we should all believe that it is true. The problem is that it is not true. History has shown that plenty of healthy, rational people can bring themselves to injure others and destroy property because, tragically, an individual's interests sometimes are served by hurting others (especially if criminal penalties for hurting others are eliminated, an irony that Clark seems to have missed). Conflicts of interest are inherent to the human condition, and as Martin Daly and Margo Wilson point out, "Killing one's adversary is the ultimate conflict resolution technique. "31
Admittedly, it is easy to equate health and rationality with morality. The metaphors pervade the English language, as when we call an evildoer crazy, degenerate, depraved, deranged, mad, malignant, psycho, sick, or twisted. But the metaphors are bound to mislead us when we contemplate the causes of violence and ways to reduce it. Termites are not malfunctioning when they eat the wooden beams in houses, nor are mosquitoes when they bite a victim and spread the malaria parasite. They are doing exactly what evolution designed them to do, even if the outcome makes people suffer. For scientists to moralize {314} about these creatures or call their behavior pathological would only send us all down blind alleys, such as a search for the "toxic" influences on these creatures or a "cure" that would restore them to health. For the same reason, human violence does not have to be a disease for it to be worth combating. If anything, it is the belief that violence is an aberration that is dangerous, because it lulls us into forgetting how easily violence may erupt in quiescent places.
The Blank Slate and the Noble Savage owe their support not just to their moral appeal but to enforcement by ideology police. The blood libel against Napoleon Chagnon for documenting warfare among the Yanomamo? is the most lurid example of the punishment of heretics, but it is not the only one. In 1992 a Violence Initiative in the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration was canceled because of false accusations that the research aimed to sedate inner-city youth and to stigmatize them as genetically prone to violence. (In fact, it advocated the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? public health approach. ) A conference and book on the legal and moral issues surrounding the biology of violence, which was to include advocates of all viewpoints, was canceled by Bernadine Healey, director of the National Institutes of Health, who overruled a unanimous peer-review decision because of concerns "associated with the sensitivity and validity of the proposed conference. "32 The university sponsoring the conference appealed and won, but when the conference was held three years later, protesters invaded the hall and, as if to provide material for comedians, began a shoving match with the participants. 33
What was everyone so sensitive about? The stated fear was that the government would define political unrest in response to inequitable social conditions as a psychiatric disease and silence the protesters by drugging them or worse. The radical psychiatrist Peter Breggin called the Violence Initiative "the most terrifying, most racist, most hideous thing imaginable" and "the kind of plan one would associate with Nazi Germany. "34 The reasons included "the medicalization of social issues, the declaration that the victim of oppression, in this case the Jew, is in fact a genetically and biologically defective person, the mobilization of the state for eugenic purposes and biological purposes, the heavy use of psychiatry in the development of social-control programs. "35 This is a fanciful, indeed paranoid, reading, but Breggin has tirelessly repeated it, especially to African American politicians and media outlets. Anyone using the words "violence" and "biology" in the same paragraph may be put under a cloud of suspicion for racism, and this has affected the intellectual climate regarding violence. No one has ever gotten into trouble for saying that violence is completely learned.
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There are many reasons to believe that violence in humans is not literally a sickness or poisoning but part of our design. Before presenting them, let me allay two fears. {315}
The first fear is that examining the roots of violence in human nature consists of reducing violence to the bad genes of violent individuals, with the unsavory implication that ethnic groups with higher rates of violence must have more of these genes.
There can be little doubt that some individuals are constitutionally more prone to violence than others. Take men, for starters: across cultures, men kill men twenty to forty times more often than women kill women. 36 And the lion's share of the killers are young men, between the ages of fifteen and thirty. 37 Some young men, moreover, are more violent than others. According to one estimate, 7 percent of young men commit 79 percent of repeated violent offenses. 38 Psychologists find that individuals prone to violence have a distinctive personality profile. They tend to be impulsive, low in intelligence, hyperactive, and attention-deficient. They are described as having an "oppositional temperament": they are vindictive, easily angered, resistant to control, deliberately annoying, and likely to blame everything on other people. 39 The most callous among them are psychopaths, people who lack a conscience, and they make up a substantial percentage of murderers. 40 These traits emerge in early childhood, persist through the lifespan, and are largely heritable, though nowhere near completely so.
Sadists, hotheads, and other natural-born killers are part of the problem of violence, not just because of the harm they wreak but because of the aggressive posture they force others into for deterrence and self-defense. But my point here is that they are not the major part of the problem. Wars start and stop, crime rates yo-yo, societies go from militant to pacifist or vice versa within a generation, all without any change in the frequencies of the local genes. Though ethnic groups differ today in their average rates of violence, the differences do not call for a genetic explanation, because the rate for a group at one historical period may be matched to that of any other group at another period. Today's docile Scandinavians descended from bloodthirsty Vikings, and Africa, wracked by war after the fall of colonialism, is much like Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Any ethnic group that has made it into the present probably had pugnacious ancestors in the not-too-distant past.
The second fear is that if people are endowed with violent motives, they can't help being violent, or must be violent all the time, like the Tasmanian Devil in Looney Tunes who tears through an area leaving a swath of destruction in his wake. This fear is a reaction to archaic ideas of killer apes, a thirst for blood, a death wish, a territorial imperative, and a violent brain. In fact, if the brain is equipped with strategies for violence, they are contingent strategies, connected to complicated circuitry that computes when and where they should be deployed. Animals deploy aggression in highly selective ways, and humans, whose limbic systems are enmeshed with outsize frontal lobes, are of {316} course even more calculating. Most people today live their adult lives without ever pressing their violence buttons.
So what is the evidence that our species may have evolved mechanisms for discretionary violence? The first thing to keep in mind is that aggression is an organized, goal-directed activity, not the kind of event that could come from a random malfunction. If your lawnmower continued to run after you released the handle and it injured your foot, you might suspect a sticky switch or other breakdown. But if the lawnmower lay in wait until you emerged from the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? garage and then chased you around the yard, you would have to conclude that someone had installed a chip that programmed it to do so.
The presence of deliberate chimpicide in our chimpanzee cousins raises the possibility that the forces of evolution, not just the idiosyncrasies of a particular human culture, prepared us for violence. And the ubiquity of violence in human societies throughout history and prehistory is a stronger hint that we are so prepared.
When we look at human bodies and brains, we find more direct signs of design for aggression. The larger size, strength, and upper-body mass of men is a zoological giveaway of an evolutionary history of violent male-male competition. 41 Other signs include the effects of testosterone on dominance and violence (which we will encounter in the chapter on gender), the emotion of anger (complete with reflexive baring of the canine teeth and clenching of the fists), the revealingly named fight-or-flight response of the autonomic nervous system, and the fact that disruptions of inhibitory systems of the brain (by alcohol, damage to the frontal lobe or amygdala, or defective genes involved in serotonin metabolism) can lead to aggressive attacks, initiated by circuits in the limbic system. 42
Boys in all cultures spontaneously engage in rough-and-tumble play, which is obviously practice for fighting. They also divide themselves into coalitions that compete aggressively (calling to mind the remark attributed to the Duke of Wellington that "the Battle of Waterloo was won upon the playing fields of Eton") . 43 And children are violent well before they have been infected by war toys or cultural stereotypes. The most violent age is not adolescence but toddlerhood: in a recent large study, almost half the boys just past the age of two, and a slightly smaller percentage of the girls, engaged in hitting, biting, and kicking. As the author pointed out, "Babies do not kill each other, because we do not give them access to knives and guns. The question . . . we've been trying to answer for the past 30 years is how do children learn to aggress. [But] that's the wrong question. The right question is how do they learn not to aggress. "44 Violence continues to preoccupy the mind throughout life. According to independent surveys in several countries by the psychologists Douglas Kenrick and David Buss, more than 80 percent of women and 90 percent of men {317} fantasize about killing people they don't like, especially romantic rivals, stepparents, and people who have humiliated them in public. 45 People in all cultures take pleasure in thinking about killings, if we are to judge by the popularity of murder mysteries, crime dramas, spy thrillers, Shakespearean tragedies, biblical stories, hero myths, and epic poems. (A character in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead asks, "You're familiar with the great tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics? ") People also enjoy watching the stylized combat we call "sports," which are contests of aiming, chasing, or fighting, complete with victors and the vanquished. If language is a guide, many other efforts are conceptualized as forms of aggression: intellectual argument (to shoot down, defeat, or destroy an idea or its proponent), social reform (to fight crime, to combat prejudice, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs), and medical treatment (to fight cancer, painkillers, to defeat AIDS, the War on Cancer). In fact, the entire question of what went wrong (socially or biologically) when a person engages in violence is badly posed. Almost everyone recognizes the need for violence in defense of self, family, and innocent victims. Moral philosophers point out that there are even circumstances in which torture is justified -- say, when a captured terrorist has planted a time bomb in a crowded place and refuses to say where it is.