No More Learning

~
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. More generally, whether a violent mindset is called heroic or pathological often depends on whose ox has been gored. Freedom fighter or terrorist, Robin Hood or thief, Guardian Angel or vigilante, nobleman or warlord, martyr or kamikaze, general or gang leader -- these are value judgments, not scientific classifications. I doubt that the brains or genes of most of the lauded protagonists would differ from those of their vilified counterparts.
In this way I find myself in agreement with the radical scientists who insist that we will never understand violence by looking only at the genes or brains of violent people. Violence is a social and political problem, not just a biological and psychological one. Nonetheless, the phenomena we call "social" and "political" are not external happenings that mysteriously affect human affairs like sunspots; they are shared understandings among individuals at a given time and place. So one cannot understand violence without a thorough understanding of the human mind.
In the rest of this chapter I explore the logic of violence, and why emotions and thoughts devoted to it may have evolved. This is necessary to disentangle the knot of biological and cultural causes that make violence so puzzling. It can help explain why people are prepared for violence but act on those inclinations only in particular circumstances; when violence is, at least in some sense, rational and when it is blatantly self-defeating; why violence is more prevalent in some times and places than in others, despite a lack of any genetic difference among the actors; and, ultimately, how we might reduce and prevent violence. {318}
~
The first step in understanding violence is to set aside our abhorrence of it long enough to examine why it can sometimes pay off in personal or evolutionary terms. This requires one to invert the statement of the problem -- not why violence occurs, but why it is avoided. Morality, after all, did not enter the universe with the Big Bang and then pervade it like background radiation. It was discovered by our ancestors after billions of years of the morally
? ? ? ? ? ? ? indifferent process known as natural selection.
In my view, the consequences of this background amorality were best worked out by Hobbes in Leviathan. Unfortunately, Hobbes's pithy phrase "nasty, brutish, and short" and his image of an all-powerful leviathan keeping us from each other's throats have led people to misunderstand his argument. Hobbes is commonly interpreted as proposing that man in a state of nature was saddled with an irrational impulse for hatred and destruction. In fact his analysis is more subtle, and perhaps even more tragic, for he showed how the dynamics of violence fall out of interactions among rational and self-interested agents. Hobbes's analysis has been rediscovered by evolutionary biology, game theory, and social psychology, and I will use it to organize my discussion of the logic of violence before turning to the ways in which humans deploy peaceable instincts to counteract their violent ones.
Here is the analysis that preceded the famous "life of man" passage:
So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men's persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name. 46
First, competition. Natural selection is powered by competition, which means that the products of natural selection -- survival machines, in Richard Dawkins's metaphor -- should, by default, do whatever helps them survive and reproduce. He explains:
To a survival machine, another survival machine (which is not its own child or another close relative) is part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is something that gets in the way, or something that can be exploited. It differs from a rock or a river in one important respect: it is inclined to hit back. This is because it too is a machine that holds its immortal genes in trust for the future, and it too {319} will stop at nothing to preserve them. Natural selection favors genes that control their survival machines in such a way that they make the best use of their environment. This includes making the best use of other survival machines, both of the same and of different species. 47
If an obstacle stands in the way of something an organism needs, it should neutralize the obstacle by disabling or eliminating it. This includes obstacles that happen to be other human beings -- say, ones that are monopolizing desirable land or sources of food. Even among modern nation-states, raw self-interest is a major motive for war. The political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita analyzed the instigators of 251 real-world conflicts of the past two centuries and concluded that in most cases the aggressor correctly calculated that a successful invasion would be in its national interest. 48
Another human obstacle consists of men who are monopolizing women who could otherwise be taken as wives. Hobbes called attention to the phenomenon without knowing the evolutionary reason, which was provided centuries later by Robert Trivers: the difference in the minimal parental investments of males and females makes the reproductive capacity of females a scarce commodity over which males compete. 49 This explains why men are the violent gender, and also why they always have something to fight over, even when their survival needs have been met. Studies of warfare in pre-state societies have confirmed that men do not have to be short of food or land to wage war. 50 They often raid other villages to abduct women, to retaliate for past abductions, or to defend their interests in disputes over exchanges of women for marriage. In societies in which women have more say in the matter, men still compete for women by competing for the status and wealth that tend to attract them. The competition can be violent because, as Daly and Wilson point out, "Any creature that is recognizably on track toward complete reproductive failure must somehow expend effort, often at risk of death, to try to improve its present life trajectory. "51 Impoverished young men on this track are therefore likely to risk life and limb to improve their chances in the sweepstakes for status, wealth, and mates. 52 In all societies they are the demographic sector in which the firebrands, delinquents, and cannon fodder are concentrated. One of the reasons the crime rate shot up in the 1960s is that boys from the baby boom began to enter their crime-prone years. 53 Though there are many reasons why countries differ in their willingness to wage war, one factor is simply the proportion of the population that consists of men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine. 54
This whole cynical analysis may not ring true to modern readers, because we cannot think of other people as mere parts of our environment that may have to be neutralized like weeds in a garden. Unless we are psychopaths, we sympathize with other people and cannot blithely treat them as obstacles or {320} prey. Such sympathy, however, has not prevented people from committing all manner of atrocities throughout history and prehistory. The
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? contradiction may be resolved by recalling that people discern a moral circle that may not embrace all human beings but only the members of their clan, village, or tribe. 55 Inside the circle, fellow humans are targets of sympathy;
outside, they are treated like a rock or a river or a lump of food. In a previous book I mentioned that the language of the Wari people of the Amazon has a set of noun classifiers that distinguish edible from inedible objects, and that the edible class includes anyone who is not a member of the tribe. This prompted the psychologist Judith Rich Harris to observe:
In the Wari dictionary
Food's defined as "Not a Wari. " Their dinners are a lot of fun For all but the un-Wari one.
Cannibalism is so repugnant to us that for years even anthropologists failed to admit that it was common in prehistory. It is easy to think: could other human beings really be capable of such a depraved act? But of course animal rights activists have a similarly low opinion of meat eaters, who not only cause millions of preventable deaths but do so with utter callousness: castrating and branding cattle without an anesthetic, impaling fish by the mouth and letting them suffocate in the hold of a boat, boiling lobsters alive. My point is not to make a moral case for vegetarianism but to shed light on the mindset of human violence and cruelty. History and ethnography suggest that people can treat strangers the way we now treat lobsters, and our incomprehension of such deeds may be compared with animal rights activists' incomprehension of ours. It is no coincidence that Peter Singer, the author of The Expanding Circle, is also the author of Animal Liberation.
The observation that people may be morally indifferent to other people who are outside a mental circle immediately suggests an opening for the effort to reduce violence: understand the psychology of the circle well enough to encourage people to put all of humanity inside it. In earlier chapters we saw how the moral circle has been growing for millennia, pushed outward by the expanding networks of reciprocity that make other human beings more valuable alive than dead. 56 As Robert Wright has put it, "Among the many reasons I don't think we should bomb the Japanese is that they built my minivan. " Other technologies have contributed to a cosmopolitan view that makes it easy to imagine trading places with other people. These include literacy, travel, a knowledge of history, and realistic art that helps people project themselves into the daily lives of people who in other times might have been their mortal enemies.
We have also seen how the circle can shrink. Recall that Jonathan Glover {321} showed that atrocities are often accompanied by tactics of dehumanization such as the use of pejorative names, degrading conditions, humiliating dress, and "cold jokes" that make light of suffering. 57 These tactics can flip a mental switch and reclassify an individual from "person" to "nonperson," making it as easy for someone to torture or kill him as it is for us to boil a lobster alive. (Those who poke fun at politically correct names for ethnic minorities, including me, should keep in mind that they originally had a humane rationale. ) The social psychologist Philip Zimbardo has shown that even among the students of an elite university, tactics of dehumanization can easily push one person outside another's moral circle. Zimbardo created a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department and randomly assigned students to the role of prisoner or guard. The "prisoners" had to wear smocks, leg irons, and nylon- stocking caps and were referred to by serial numbers. Before long the "guards" began to brutalize them -- standing on their backs while they did push-ups, spraying them with fire extinguishers, forcing them to clean toilets with their bare hands -- and Zimbardo called off the experiment for the subjects' safety. 58
In the other direction, signs of a victim's humanity can occasionally break through and flip the switch back to the sympathy setting. When George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War, he once saw a man running for his life half- dressed, holding up his pants with one hand. "I refrained from shooting at him," Orwell wrote. "I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at 'Fascists'; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn't a 'Fascist,' he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to your self. "59 Glover recounts another example, reported by a South African journalist:
In 1985, in the old apartheid South Africa, there was a demonstration in Durban. The police attacked the demonstrators with customary violence. One policeman chased a black woman, obviously intending to beat her with his club. As she ran, her shoe slipped off. The brutal policeman was also a well-brought-up young Afrikaner, who knew that when a woman loses her shoe you pick it up for her. Their eyes met as he handed her the shoe. He then left her, since clubbing her was no longer an option. 60
? ? ? ? ? ? ? We should not, however, delude ourselves into thinking that the reaction of Orwell (one of the twentieth century's
greatest moral voices) and of the "well-brought-up" Afrikaner is typical. Many intellectuals believe that the majority of soldiers cannot bring themselves to fire their weapons in battle. The claim is incredible on the face of it, given the tens of millions of soldiers who were shot in the wars of the last century. (I am reminded of the professor in Stoppard's Jumpers who noted that Zeno's Paradox prevents an arrow from {322} ever reaching its target, so Saint Sebastian must have died of fright. ) The belief turns out to be traceable to a single, dubious study of infantrymen in World War II. In follow-up interviews, the men denied having even been asked whether they had fired their weapons, let alone having claimed they hadn't. 61 Recent surveys of soldiers in battle and of rioters in ethnic massacres find that they often kill with gusto, sometimes in a state they describe as "joy" or "ecstasy. "62
Glover's anecdotes reinforce the hope that people are capable of putting strangers inside a violence-proof moral circle. But they also remind us that the default setting may be to keep them out.
~
Secondly, diffidence, in its original sense of "distrust. " Hobbes had translated Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and was struck by his observation that "what made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta. " If you have neighbors, they may covet what you have, in which case you have become an obstacle to their desires. Therefore you must be prepared to defend yourself. Defense is an iffy matter even with technologies such as castle walls, the Maginot Line, or antiballistic missile defenses, and it is even iffier without them. The only option for self-protection may be to wipe out potentially hostile neighbors first in a preemptive strike. As Yogi Berra advised, "The best defense is a good offense and vice versa. "
Tragically, you might arrive at this conclusion even if you didn't have an aggressive bone in your body. All it would take is the realization that others might covet what you have and a strong desire not to be massacred. Even more tragically, your neighbors have every reason to be cranking through the same deduction, and if they are, it makes your fears all the more compelling, which makes a preemptive strike all the more tempting, which makes a preemptive strike by them all the more tempting, and so on.
This "Hobbesian trap," as it is now called, is a ubiquitous cause of violent conflict. 63 The political scientist Thomas Schelling offered the analogy of an armed homeowner who surprises an armed burglar. Each might be tempted to shoot first to avoid being shot, even if neither wanted to kill the other. A Hobbesian trap pitting one man against another is a recurring theme in fiction, such as the desperado in Hollywood westerns, spy-versus-spy plots in cold- war thrillers, and the lyrics to Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff. "
But because we are a social species, Hobbesian traps more commonly pit groups against groups. There is safety in numbers, so humans, bound by shared genes or reciprocal promises, form coalitions for protection.
Unfortunately, the logic of the Hobbesian trap means there is also danger in numbers, because neighbors may fear they are becoming outnumbered and form alliances in their turn to contain the growing menace. Since one man's {323} containment is another man's encirclement, this can send the spiral of danger upward. Human sociality is the original "entangling alliance," in which two parties with no prior animus can find themselves at war when the ally of one attacks the ally of the other. It is the reason I discuss homicide and war in a single chapter. In a species whose members form bonds of loyalty, the first can easily turn into the second.
The danger is particularly acute for humans because, unlike most mammals, we tend to be patrilocal, with related males living together instead of dispersing from the group when they become sexually mature. 64 (Among chimpanzees and dolphins, related males also live together, and they too form aggressive coalitions. ) What we call "ethnic groups" are very large extended families, and though in a modern ethnic group the family ties are too distant for kin-based altruism to be significant, this was not true of the smaller coalitions in which we evolved. Even today ethnic groups often perceive themselves as large families, and the role of ethnic loyalties in group-against-group violence is all too obvious. 65
The other distinctive feature of Homo sapiens as a species is, of course, toolmaking. Competitiveness can channel toolmaking into weaponry, and diffidence can channel weaponry into an arms race. An arms race, like an alliance, can make war more likely by accelerating the spiral of fear and distrust. Our species' vaunted ability to make tools is one of the reasons we are so good at killing one another.
The vicious circle of a Hobbesian trap can help us understand why the escalation from friction to war (and occasionally, the de-escalation to detente) can happen so suddenly. Mathematicians and computer simulators have devised models in which several players acquire arms or form alliances in response to what the other players are doing. The models often display chaotic behavior, in which small differences in the values of the parameters can have large and unpredictable consequences. 66
As we can infer from Hobbes's allusion to the Peloponnesian War, Hobbesian traps among groups are far from hypothetical. Chagnon describes how Yanomamo? villages obsess over the danger of being massacred by other villages (with good reason) and occasionally engage in preemptive assaults, giving other villages good reason to
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? engage in their own preemptive assaults, and prompting groups of villages to form alliances that make their neighbors ever more nervous. 67 Street gangs and Mafia families engage in similar machinations. In the past century, World War I, the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War, and the Yugoslavian wars in the 1990s arose in part from Hobbesian traps. 68
The political scientist John Vasquez has made the point quantitatively. Using a database of hundreds of conflicts from the past two centuries, he concludes that the ingredients of a Hobbesian trap -- concern with security, entangling alliances, and arms races -- can statistically predict the escalation of {324} friction into war. 69 The most conscious playing-out of the logic of Hobbesian traps took place among nuclear strategists during the cold war, when the fate of the world literally hinged on it. The logic produced some of the maddening paradoxes of nuclear strategy: why it is extraordinarily dangerous to have enough missiles to destroy an enemy but not enough to destroy him after he has attacked those missiles (because the enemy would have a strong incentive to strike preemptively), and why erecting an impregnable defense against enemy missiles could make the world a more dangerous place (because the enemy has an incentive to launch a preemptive strike before the completed defense turns him into a sitting duck). When a stronger group overpowers a weaker one in a surprise raid, it should come as no surprise to a Hobbesian cynic. But when one side defeats another in a battle that both have joined, the logic is not so clear. Given that both the victor and the vanquished have much to lose in a battle, one would expect each side to assess the strength of the other and the weaker to cede the contested resource without useless bloodshed that would only lead to the same outcome. Most behavioral ecologists believe that rituals of appeasement and surrender among animals evolved for this reason (and not for the good of the species, as Lorenz had supposed). Sometimes the two sides are so well matched, and the stakes of a battle are so high, that they engage in a battle because it is the only way to find out who is stronger. 70
But at other times a leader will march -- or march his men -- into the valley of death without any reasonable hope of prevailing. Military incompetence has long puzzled historians, and the primatologist Richard Wrangham suggests that it might grow out of the logic of bluff and self-deception. 71 Convincing an adversary to avoid a battle does not depend on being stronger but on appearing stronger, and that creates an incentive to bluff and to be good at detecting bluffs. Since the most effective bluffer is the one who believes his own bluff, a limited degree of self-deception in hostile escalations can evolve. It has to be limited, because having one's bluff called can be worse than folding on the first round, but when the limits are miscalibrated and both sides go to the brink, the result can be a human disaster. The historian Barbara Tuchman has highlighted the role of self-deception in calamitous wars throughout history in her books The Guns of August (about World War I) and The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.
~
A readiness to inflict a preemptive strike is a double-edged sword, because it makes one an inviting target for a preemptive strike. So people have invented, and perhaps evolved, an alternative defense: the advertised deterrence policy known as lex talionis, the law of retaliation, familiar from the biblical injunction "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. "72 If you can credibly say to potential adversaries, "We won't attack first, but if we are attacked, we will survive {325} and strike back," you remove Hobbes's first two incentives for quarrel, gain and mistrust. The policy that you will inflict as much harm on others as they inflicted on you cancels their incentive to raid for gain, and the policy that you will not strike first cancels their incentive to raid for mistrust. This is reinforced by the policy to retaliate with no more harm than they inflicted on you, because it allays the fear that you will use a flimsy pretext to justify a massive opportunistic raid.
The nuclear strategy of "Mutual Assured Destruction" is the most obvious contemporary example of the law of retaliation. But it is an explicit version of an ancient impulse, the emotion of vengeance, that may have been installed in our brains by natural selection. Daly and Wilson observe, "In societies from every corner of the world, we can read of vows to avenge a slain father or brother, and of rituals that sanctify those vows -- of a mother raising her son to avenge a father who died in the avenger's infancy, of graveside vows, of drinking the deceased kinsman's blood as a covenant, or keeping his bloody garment as a relic. "73 Modern states often find themselves at odds with their citizens' craving for revenge. They prosecute vigilantes -- people who "take the law into their own hands" -- and, with a few recent exceptions, ignore the clamoring of crime victims and their relatives for a say in decisions to prosecute, plea- bargain, or punish.
As we saw in Chapter 10, for revenge to work as a deterrent it has to be implacable. Exacting revenge is a risky business, because if an adversary was dangerous enough to have hurt you in the first place, he is not likely to take punishment lying down. Since the damage has already been done, a coolly rational victim may not see it in his interests to retaliate. And since the aggressor can anticipate this, he could call the victim's bluff and abuse him with impunity. If, on the other hand, potential victims and their kin would be so consumed with the lust for retribution as to raise a son to avenge a slain father, drink the kinsman's blood as a covenant, and so on, an aggressor might think
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 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.
{326}
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.
{330}
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
? ? ? ? ? ? ?