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L Seventeen War and Peace et’s review some facts. The amygdala typically activates when seeing a face of another race. If you’re poor, by the time you’re five, your frontal cortical development probably lags behind average. Oxytocin makes us crappy to strangers. Empathy doesn’t particularly translate into compassionate acts, nor does refined moral development translate into doing the harder, right thing. There are gene variants that, in particular settings, make you prone toward antisocial acts. And bonobos aren’t perfectly peaceful—they wouldn’t be masters of reconciliation if they didn’t have conflicts to reconcile. All this makes one mighty pessimistic. Yet the rationale for this book is that, nonetheless, there’s ground for optimism. Thus this final chapter’s goals are (a) to evidence that things have improved, that many of our worst behaviors are in retreat, our best ones ascendant; (b) to examine ways to improve this further; (c) to derive emotional support for this venture, to see that our best behaviors can occur in the most unlikely circumstances; (d) and finally, to see if I can actually get away with calling this chapter “War and Peace.” W SOMEWHAT BETTER ANGELS hen it comes to our best and worst behaviors, the world is astonishingly different from that of the not-so-distant past. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, slavery occurred worldwide, including in the colonies of a Europe basking in the Enlightenment. Child labor was universal and would soon reach its exploitative golden age with the Industrial Revolution. And there wasn’t a country that punished mistreatment of animals. Now every nation has outlawed slavery, and most attempt to enforce that; most have child labor laws, rates of child labor have declined, and it increasingly consists of children working alongside their parents in their homes; most countries regulate the treatment of animals in some manner. The world is also safer. Fifteenth-century Europe averaged 41 homicides per 100,000 people per year. Currently only El Salvador, Venezuela, and Honduras, at 62, 64, and 85, respectively, are worse; the world averages 6.9, Europe averages 1.4, and there are Iceland, Japan, and Singapore at 0.3. Here are things that are rarer in recent centuries: Forced marriages, child brides, genital mutilation, wife beating, polygamy, widow burning. Persecution of homosexuals, epileptics, albinos. Beating of schoolchildren, beating of beasts of burden. Rule of a land by an occupying army, by a colonial overlord, by an unelected dictator. Illiteracy, death in infancy, death in childbirth, death from preventable disease. Capital punishment. Here are things invented in the last century: Bans on the use of certain types of weapons. The World Court and the concept of crimes against humanity. The UN and the dispatching of multinational peacekeeping forces. International agreements to hinder trafficking of blood diamonds, elephant tusks, rhino horns, leopard skins, and humans. Agencies that collect money to aid disaster victims anywhere on the planet, that facilitate intercontinental adoption of orphans, that battle global pandemics and send medical personnel to any place of conflict. Yes, I know, I’m an utter naïf if I think laws are universally enforced. For example, in 1981 Mauritania became the last country to ban slavery; nevertheless, today roughly 20 percent of its people are slaves, and the government has prosecuted a total of one slave owner.1 I recognize that little has changed in many places; I have spent decades in Africa living around people who believe that epileptics are possessed and that the organs of murdered albinos have healing powers, where beating of wives, children, and animals is the norm, five-year-olds herd cattle and haul firewood, pubescent girls are clitoridectomized and given to old men as third wives. Nonetheless, worldwide, things have improved. The definitive account of this is Pinker’s monumental The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.2 It’s a scholarly work that’s gut- wrenchingly effective in documenting just how bad things once were. Pinker graphically describes the appalling historical inhumanity of humans. Roughly half a million people died in the Roman Colosseum to supply audiences of tens of thousands the pleasure of watching captives raped, dismembered, tortured, eaten by animals. Throughout the Middle Ages, armies swept across Eurasia, destroying villages, killing every man, consigning every woman and child to slavery. Aristocracy accounted for a disproportionate share of violence, savaging peasantry with impunity. Religious and governmental authorities, ranging from Europeans to Persians, Chinese, Hindus, Polynesians, Aztecs, Africans, and Native Americans, invented means of torture. For a bored sixteenth-century Parisian, entertainment might consist of a cat burning, execution of a “criminal” animal, or bearbaiting, where a bear, chained to a post, would be torn apart by dogs. It is a sickeningly different world; Pinker quotes the writer L. P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Better Angels has provoked three controversies: Why Were People So Awful Then? For Pinker the answer is clear. Because people had always been so awful. This is chapter 9’s debate—when was war invented, was ancestral hunter- gatherer life about Hobbes or Rousseau? As we saw, Pinker is in the camp holding that organized human violence predates civilization, stretching back to our last common ancestor with chimps. And as reviewed, most experts convincingly disagree, suggesting that data have been cherry-picked, hunter- horticulturalists mislabeled as hunter-gatherers, and newfangled sedentary hunter-gatherers inappropriately grouped with traditional nomadic ones. Why Have People Gotten Less Awful? Pinker’s answer reflects two factors. He draws on the sociologist Norbert Elias, whose notion of the “civilizing process” centered on the fact that violence declines when states monopolize force. That is coupled with spread of commerce and trade, fostering realpolitik self-restraint—recognizing that it’s better to have this other person alive and trading with you. Their well-being begins to matter, prompting what Pinker calls an “escalator of reasoning”—an enlarged capacity for empathy and Us-ness. This underlies the “rights revolution”—civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, animal rights. This view is a triumph of cognition. Pinker yokes this to the “Flynn effect,” the well- documented increase in average IQ over the last century; he invokes a moral Flynn effect, as increasing intelligence and respect for reasoning fuel better Theory of Mind and perspective taking and an increased ability to appreciate the long-term advantages of peace. In the words of one reviewer, Pinker is “not too fainthearted to call his own culture civilized.”3 Predictably, this has drawn fire from all sides. The Left charges that this giddy overvaluing of the dead-white-male Enlightenment fuels Western neoimperialism.4 My personal political instincts run in this direction. Nonetheless, one must admit that the countries with minimal violence, extensive social safety nets, few child brides, numerous female legislators, and sacrosanct civil liberties are usually direct cultural descendants of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, the Right claims that Pinker ignores religion, pretending that decency was invented in the Enlightenment.5 He is eloquently unapologetic about this—for him much of what has gone right reflects people’s “shifting from valuing souls to valuing lives.” For others the criticism is that this escalator of reasoning fetishizes cognition over affect—after all, sociopaths have great Theory of Mind, a (damage-induced) purely rational mind makes abhorrent moral judgments, and a sense of justice is fueled by the amygdala and insula, not the dlPFC. Obviously, this many pages into the book, I feel that the interaction of reasoning and feeling is key. Have People Really Gotten Less Awful? This has been very contentious. Pinker offers the sound bite “We may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.” The fact most driving this optimism is that, except for the Balkan wars, Europe has been at peace since 1945, the longest stretch in history. For Pinker, this “Long Peace” represents the West coming to its senses after the ruin of World War II, seeing how the advantages of being a common market outweigh those of being a perpetually warring continent, plus some expanding empathy thrown in on the side. Critics characterize this as Eurocentrism. Western countries may kumbaya one another, but they’ve sure made war elsewhere—France in Indochina and Algeria, Britain in Malaya and Kenya, Portugal in Angola and Mozambique, the USSR in Afghanistan, the United States in Vietnam, Korea, and Latin America. Moreover, parts of the developing world have been continuously at war for decades—consider the eastern Congo. Most important, such wars have been made bloodier because the West invented the idea of having client states fight proxy wars for them. After all, the late twentieth century saw the United States and USSR arm the warring Somalia and Ethiopia, only to switch to arming the other side within a few years. The Long Peace has been for Westerners. The claim of violence declining steadily over the last millennium also must accommodate the entire bloody twentieth century. World War II killed 55 million people, more than any conflict in history. Throw in World War I, Stalin, Mao, and the Russian and Chinese civil wars, and you’re up to 130 million. Pinker does something sensible that reflects his being a scientist. He corrects for total population size. Thus, while the eighth century’s An Lushan Rebellion and civil war in Tang dynasty China killed “only” 36 million, that represented one sixth of the world’s population—the equivalent of 429 million in the midtwentieth century. When deaths are expressed as a percentage of total population, World War II is the only twentieth-century event cracking the top ten, behind An Lushan, the Mongol conquests, the Mideast slave trade, the fall of the Ming dynasty, the fall of Rome, the deaths caused by Tamerlane, the annihilation of Native Americans by Europeans, and the Atlantic slave trade. Critics have questioned this—“Hey, stop using fudge factors to somehow make World War II’s 55 million dead less than the fall of Rome’s 8 million.” After all, 9/11’s murders would not have evoked only half as much terror if America had 600 million instead of 300 million citizens. But Pinker’s analysis is appropriate, and analyzing rates of events is how you discover that today’s London is much safer than was Dickens’s or that some hunter-gatherer groups have homicide rates that match Detroit’s. But Pinker failed to take things one logical step further—also correcting for differing durations of events. Thus he compares the half dozen years of World War II with, for example, twelve centuries of the Mideast slave trade and four centuries of Native American genocide. When corrected for duration as well as total world population, the top ten now include World War II (number one), World War I (number three), the Russian Civil War (number eight), Mao (number ten), and an event that didn’t even make Pinker’s original list, the Rwandan genocide (number seven), where 700,000 people were killed in a hundred days.* This suggests both good and bad news. Compared with the past, we are extraordinarily different in terms of whom we extend rights to and feel empathy for and what global ills we counter. And things are better in terms of fewer people acting violently and societies attempting to contain them. But the bad news is that the reach of the violent few is ever greater. They don’t just rage about events on another continent—they travel there and wreak havoc. The charismatically violent inspire thousands in chat rooms instead of a mob in their village. Like-minded lone wolves more readily meet and metastasize. And the chaos once let loose with a cudgel or machete occurs now with an automatic weapon or bomb, with far more horrific consequences. Things have improved. But that doesn’t mean they’re good. Thus we now consider insights provided by this book that might help. F SOME TRADITIONAL ROUTES irst there’s the strategy for reducing violence that stretches back tens of thousands of years—moving. If two individuals in a hunter-gatherer band are having tensions, one frequently shifts to a neighboring band, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not. Similarly, interband tensions are reduced when one shifts to a different location, an advantage of nomadicism. A recent study of the hunter-gathering Hadza of Tanzania showed an additional benefit to this fluidity straight out of chapter 10. Specifically, it facilitates highly cooperative individuals associating with one another.6 Then there are the beneficial effects of trade, as emphasized by anthropologists, as well as Pinker. From trading at a village market to signing international trade agreements, it is often true that where goods do not pass frontiers, armies will. It’s a version of Thomas Friedman’s somewhat tongue-in- cheek Golden Arches Theory of peace—countries with McDonald’s don’t fight one another. While there are exceptions (e.g., the U.S. invasion of Panama, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon), Friedman’s broad point holds—countries that are sufficiently stable that they are integrated into global markets with the likes of McDonald’s and prosperous enough that their people keep those establishments in business likely conclude that the trade advantages of peace outweigh the imagined spoils of war.**7 This isn’t surefire—for example, despite being major trading partners, Germany and the UK fought World War I—and there’s no shortage of people willing to go to war, even at the cost of disrupted trade and scarce commodities. Moreover, “trade” is double-edged. It’s certifiably groovy when occurring between indigenous rain forest hunters; it’s certifiably vile if you’re protesting the WTO. But as long as countries can wage war on distant nations, long- distance trade that makes them interdependent is a good deterrent. Cultural diffusion in general (which includes trade) can also facilitate peace. This can have a modern tint—across 189 countries, digital access predicts increased civil liberties and media freedom. Moreover, the more civil liberties in a neighboring country, the stronger this effect, as ideas flow with goods.8 Religion Well, I’d love to skip this section, but I can’t. That’s because religion is arguably our most defining cultural invention, an incredibly powerful catalyst for both our best and worst behaviors. When introducing the pituitary in chapter 4, I didn’t feel obliged to first disclose my feelings about the gland. But the equivalent feels appropriate here. Thus: I was raised highly observant and Orthodox, felt intensely religious. But then, around age thirteen, the whole edifice collapsed; ever since, I’ve been incapable of any religiosity or spirituality and more readily focus on religion’s destructive than its beneficial aspects. But I like being around religious people and am moved by them—while baffled by how they can believe that stuff. And I fervently wish that I could. The end. As emphasized in chapter 9, we’ve created a staggering variety of religions. In considering solely religions with worldwide reaches, there are some important commonalities: a. They all involve facets of religiosity that are intensely personal, solitary, and individualized, as well as facets that are about community; as we’ll see, these are very different realms when it comes to fostering our best and worst behaviors. b. All involve personal and communal ritualized behaviors that comfort in times of anxiety; however, many of those anxieties were created by the religion itself. The anxiety-reducing effects of belief are logical, given that psychological stress is about lack of control, predictability, outlets, and social support. Depending on the religion, belief brings an explanation for why things happen, a conviction that there is a purpose, and the sense of a creator who is interested in us, who is benevolent, who responds to human entreaties, who preferentially responds to entreaties from people like you. No wonder religiosity has health benefits (independent of the community support that it brings and the decreased rates of substance abuse). Recall the role of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in sounding an alarm when there is a discrepancy between how you thought things worked and how they actually do. After controlling for personality and cognitive abilities, more religious people show less ACC activation when getting news of a negative discrepancy. Other studies show the anxiety-reducing effects of repetitive religious rituals.9 c. Finally, all the world religions distinguish between Us and Them, though they differ as to what is required to be an Us and whether the pertinent attributes are immutable. Enough is known about the neurobiology of religiosity that there’s even a journal called Religion, Brain and Behavior. Reciting a familiar prayer activates mesolimbic dopaminergic systems. Improvising one activates regions associated with Theory of Mind, as you try to understand a deity’s perspective (“God wants me to be humble in addition to grateful; better make sure I mention that”). Moreover, more activation of this Theory of Mind network correlates with a more personified image of a deity. Believing that someone is faith healing deactivates the (cognitive) dlPFC, suspending disbelief. And performing a familiar ritual activates cortical regions associated with habit and reflexive evaluation.10 So are religious people nicer than nonreligious ones? It depends on whether they’re interacting with in- or out-group members. Okay, are religious people nicer to in-group members? Numerous studies say yes—more volunteering (with or without a religious context), charitable giving, and spontaneous prosociality, more generosity, trust, honesty, and forgiveness in economic games. However, numerous studies show no differences.11 Why the discrepancy? For starters, it matters whether data are self-reported —religious people tend to inflate reports of their prosociality more than do nonreligious people. Another factor is whether the prosociality is public— conspicuous display is particularly important to those religious people who strongly need social approval. As more context dependency, in one study religious people were more charitable than nonreligious ones—but only on their Sabbath.12 Another important issue: what kind of religion? As introduced in chapter 9, Ara Norenzayan, Azim Shariff, and Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia have identified links between features of various religions and aspects of prosociality.13 As we saw, small-band cultures (such as hunter-gatherers) rarely invent moralizing deities. It is not until cultures are large enough that people regularly interact anonymously with strangers that it becomes commonplace to invent a judgmental god—the Judeo-Christian/Muslim deity. In such cultures overt and subliminal religious cues boost prosociality. In one study religious subjects unscrambled sentences that did or didn’t contain religious terms (e.g., spirit, divine, sacred); doing the former prompted generosity afterward. This is reminiscent of chapter 3’s finding that merely seeing a pair of eyes posted on a wall makes people more prosocial. And showing that this is about being monitored, unscrambling sentences with secular terms such as “jury,” “police,” or “contract” had the same effect.14 Thus reminders of a judgmental god(s) boosts prosociality. It also matters what that deity does about transgressions. Within and among cultures, the more punitive the god, the more generosity to an anonymous coreligion