The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (111 page)
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Authors: Steven Pinker
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BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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The unease with which we read these rationalizations tells us something about the very act of donning psychological spectacles. Baumeister notes that in the attempt to understand harm-doing, the viewpoint of the scientist or scholar overlaps with the viewpoint of the perpetrator.
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Both take a detached, amoral stance toward the harmful act. Both are contextualizers, always attentive to the complexities of the situation and how they contributed to the causation of the harm. And both believe that the harm is ultimately explicable. The viewpoint of the moralist, in contrast, is the viewpoint of the victim. The harm is treated with reverence and awe. It continues to evoke sadness and anger long after it was perpetrated. And for all the feeble ratiocination we mortals throw at it, it remains a cosmic mystery, a manifestation of the irreducible and inexplicable existence of evil in the universe. Many chroniclers of the Holocaust consider it immoral even to try to explain it.
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Both take a detached, amoral stance toward the harmful act. Both are contextualizers, always attentive to the complexities of the situation and how they contributed to the causation of the harm. And both believe that the harm is ultimately explicable. The viewpoint of the moralist, in contrast, is the viewpoint of the victim. The harm is treated with reverence and awe. It continues to evoke sadness and anger long after it was perpetrated. And for all the feeble ratiocination we mortals throw at it, it remains a cosmic mystery, a manifestation of the irreducible and inexplicable existence of evil in the universe. Many chroniclers of the Holocaust consider it immoral even to try to explain it.
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Baumeister, with psychological spectacles still affixed, calls this the myth of pure evil. The mindset that we adopt when we don moral spectacles is the mindset of the victim. Evil is the intentional and gratuitous infliction of harm for its own sake, perpetrated by a villain who is malevolent to the bone, inflicted on a victim who is innocent and good. The reason that this is a myth (when seen through psychological spectacles) is that evil in fact is perpetrated by people who are mostly ordinary, and who respond to their circumstances, including provocations by the victim, in ways they feel are reasonable and just.
The myth of pure evil gives rise to an archetype that is common in religions, horror movies, children’s literature, nationalist mythologies, and sensationalist news coverage. In many religions evil is personified as the Devil—Hades, Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Mephistopheles—or as the antithesis to a benevolent God in a bilateral Manichean struggle. In popular fiction evil takes the form of the slasher, the serial killer, the bogeyman, the ogre, the Joker, the James Bond villain, or depending on the cinematic decade, the Nazi officer, Soviet spy, Italian gangster, Arab terrorist, inner-city predator, Mexican druglord, galactic emperor, or corporate executive. The evildoer may enjoy money and power, but these motives are vague and ill formed; what he really craves is the infliction of chaos and suffering on innocent victims. The evildoer is an adversary—the enemy of good—and the evildoer is often foreign. Hollywood villains, even if they are stateless, speak with a generic foreign accent.
The myth of pure evil bedevils our attempt to understand real evil. Because the standpoint of the scientist resembles the standpoint of the perpetrator, while the standpoint of the moralizer resembles the standpoint of the victim, the scientist is bound to be seen as “making excuses” or “blaming the victim,” or as trying to vindicate the amoral doctrine that “to understand all is to forgive all.” (Recall Lewis Richardson’s reply that to condemn much is to understand little.) The accusation of relativizing evil is particularly likely when the motive the analyst imputes to the perpetrator appears to be venial, like jealousy, status, or retaliation, rather than grandiose, like the persistence of suffering in the world or the perpetuation of race, class, or gender oppression. It is also likely when the analyst ascribes the motive to every human being rather than to a few psychopaths or to the agents of a malignant political system (hence the popularity of the doctrine of the Noble Savage). The scholar Hannah Arendt, in her writings on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for his role in organizing the logistics of the Holocaust, coined the expression “the banality of evil” to capture what she saw as the ordinariness of the man and the ordinariness of his motives.
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Whether or not she was right about Eichmann (and historians have shown that he was more of an ideological anti-Semite than Arendt allowed), she was prescient in deconstructing the myth of pure evil.
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As we shall see, four decades of research in social psychology—some of it inspired by Arendt herself—have underscored the banality of most of the motives that lead to harmful consequences.
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Whether or not she was right about Eichmann (and historians have shown that he was more of an ideological anti-Semite than Arendt allowed), she was prescient in deconstructing the myth of pure evil.
43
As we shall see, four decades of research in social psychology—some of it inspired by Arendt herself—have underscored the banality of most of the motives that lead to harmful consequences.
44
In the rest of this chapter I’ll lay out the brain systems and motives that incline us toward violence, while trying to identify the inputs that ramp them up or down and thereby offer insight into the historical decline of violence. Appearing to take the perspective of the perpetrator is just one of the dangers that attends this effort. Another is the assumption that nature organized the brain into systems that are morally meaningful to us, such as ones that lead to evil and ones that lead to good. As we shall see, some of the dividing lines between the inner demons of this chapter and the better angels of the next were guided as much by expository convenience as by neurobiological reality, because certain brain systems can cause both the best and the worst in human behavior.
ORGANS OF VIOLENCEOne of the symptoms of the myth of pure evil is to identify violence as an animalistic impulse, as we see in words like
beastly, bestial, brutish, inhuman,
and
wild
, and in depictions of the devil with horns and a tail. But while violence is certainly common in the animal kingdom, to think of it as arising from a single impulse is to see the world through a victim’s eyes. Consider all the destructive things that members of our species do to ants. We eat them, poison them, accidentally trample them, and deliberately squish them. Each category of formicide is driven by an utterly distinct motive. But if you were an ant, you might not care about these fine distinctions. We
are
humans, so we tend to think that the terrible things that humans do to other humans come from a single, animalistic motive. But biologists have long noted that the mammalian brain has distinct circuits that underlie very different kinds of aggression.
beastly, bestial, brutish, inhuman,
and
wild
, and in depictions of the devil with horns and a tail. But while violence is certainly common in the animal kingdom, to think of it as arising from a single impulse is to see the world through a victim’s eyes. Consider all the destructive things that members of our species do to ants. We eat them, poison them, accidentally trample them, and deliberately squish them. Each category of formicide is driven by an utterly distinct motive. But if you were an ant, you might not care about these fine distinctions. We
are
humans, so we tend to think that the terrible things that humans do to other humans come from a single, animalistic motive. But biologists have long noted that the mammalian brain has distinct circuits that underlie very different kinds of aggression.
The most obvious form of aggression in the animal kingdom is predation. Hunters such as hawks, eagles, wolves, lions, tigers, and bears adorn the jerseys of athletes and the coats of arms of nations, and many writers have blamed human violence, as William James did, on “the carnivore within.” Yet biologically speaking, predation for food could not be more different from aggression against rivals and threats. Cat people are well aware of the distinction. When their animal companion sets its sights on a beetle on the floorboards, it is crouched, silent, and intently focused. But when one alley cat faces off against another, the cat stands tall, fur erect, hissing and yowling. We saw how neuroscientists can implant an electrode into the Rage circuit of a cat, press a button, and set the animal on attack mode. With the electrode implanted in a different circuit, they can set it on hunting mode and watch in amazement as the cat quietly stalks a hallucinatory mouse.
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Like many systems in the brain, the circuits that control aggression are organized in a hierarchy. Subroutines that control the muscles in basic actions are encapsulated in the hindbrain, which sits on top of the spinal cord. But the emotional states that trigger them, such as the Rage circuit, are distributed higher up in the midbrain and forebrain. In cats, for example, stimulating the hindbrain can activate what neuroscientists call sham rage. The cat hisses, bristles, and extends its fangs, but it can be petted without it attacking the petter. If, in contrast, they stimulate the Rage circuit higher up, the resulting emotional state is no sham: the cat is mad as hell and lunges for the experimenter’s head.
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Evolution takes advantage of this modularity. Different mammals use different body parts as offensive weapons, including jaws, fangs, antlers, and in the case of primates, hands. While the hindbrain circuits that drive these peripherals can be reprogrammed or swapped out as a lineage evolves, the central programs that control their emotional states are remarkably conserved.
47
That includes the lineage leading to humans, as neurosurgeons discovered when they found a counterpart to the Rage circuit in the brains of their patients.
46
Evolution takes advantage of this modularity. Different mammals use different body parts as offensive weapons, including jaws, fangs, antlers, and in the case of primates, hands. While the hindbrain circuits that drive these peripherals can be reprogrammed or swapped out as a lineage evolves, the central programs that control their emotional states are remarkably conserved.
47
That includes the lineage leading to humans, as neurosurgeons discovered when they found a counterpart to the Rage circuit in the brains of their patients.
Figure 8–1 is a computer-generated model of the brain of a rat, facing left. A rat is a sniffy little animal that depends on its sense of smell, and so it has enormous olfactory bulbs, which have been amputated from the left-hand side of the model to leave room for the rest of the brain in the picture. And like all quadrupeds, the rat is a horizontal creature, so what we think of as the “higher” and “lower” levels of the nervous system are really laid out front to back, with the rat’s high-level cogitation, such as it is, located at the front (left) end of the model and the control of the body at the rear (right), extending into the spinal cord, which would spill out of the right edge of the picture if it were shown.
FIGURE 8–1.
Rat brain, showing the major structures involved in aggression
Source:
Image derived from the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas,
http://mouse.brain-map.org
.
Rat brain, showing the major structures involved in aggression
Source:
Image derived from the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas,
http://mouse.brain-map.org
.
The Rage circuit is a pathway that connects three major structures in the lower parts of the brain.
48
In the midbrain there is a collar of tissue called the periaqueductal gray—“gray” because it consists of gray matter (a tangle of neurons, lacking the white sheaths that insulate output fibers), “periaqueductal” because it surrounds the aqueduct, a fluid-filled canal that runs the length of the central nervous system from the spinal cord up to large cavities in the brain. The periaqueductal gray contains circuits that control the sensorimotor components of rage. They get inputs from parts of the brain that register pain, balance, hunger, blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, and hearing (particularly the shrieks of a fellow rat), all of which can make the animal irritated, frustrated, or enraged. Their outputs feed the motor programs that make the rat lunge, kick, and bite.
49
One of the oldest discoveries in the biology of violence is the link between pain or frustration and aggression. When an animal is shocked, or access to food is taken away, it will attack the nearest fellow animal, or bite an inanimate object if no living target is available.
50
48
In the midbrain there is a collar of tissue called the periaqueductal gray—“gray” because it consists of gray matter (a tangle of neurons, lacking the white sheaths that insulate output fibers), “periaqueductal” because it surrounds the aqueduct, a fluid-filled canal that runs the length of the central nervous system from the spinal cord up to large cavities in the brain. The periaqueductal gray contains circuits that control the sensorimotor components of rage. They get inputs from parts of the brain that register pain, balance, hunger, blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, and hearing (particularly the shrieks of a fellow rat), all of which can make the animal irritated, frustrated, or enraged. Their outputs feed the motor programs that make the rat lunge, kick, and bite.
49
One of the oldest discoveries in the biology of violence is the link between pain or frustration and aggression. When an animal is shocked, or access to food is taken away, it will attack the nearest fellow animal, or bite an inanimate object if no living target is available.
50
The periaqueductal gray is partly under the control of the hypothalamus, a cluster of nuclei that regulate the animal’s emotional, motivational, and physiological state, including hunger, thirst, and lust. The hypothalamus monitors the temperature, pressure, and chemistry of the bloodstream and sits on top of the pituitary gland, which pumps hormones into the bloodstream that regulate, among other things, the release of adrenaline from the adrenal glands and the release of testosterone and estrogen from the gonads. Two of its nuclei, the medial and ventrolateral, are parts of the Rage circuit. “Ventral” refers to the belly side of the animal, as opposed to its “dorsal” or back side. The terms were grandfathered over to the human brain as it evolved its perpendicular perch atop a vertical body, so in the human brain “ventral” points to our feet and “dorsal” to the top of our scalp.
Modulating the hypothalamus is the amygdala, Latin for “almond,” the shape it takes in the human brain. The amygdala is a small, multipart organ connected to brain systems for memory and motivation. It applies the emotional coloring to our thoughts and memories, particularly fear. When an animal has been trained to expect a shock after a tone, the amygdala helps to store the connections that give the tone its aura of anxiety and dread. The amygdala also lights up at the sight of a dangerous predator or of a threatening display from a member of the same species. In the case of humans, for example, the amygdala responds to an angry face.
And sitting on top of the entire Rage circuit is the cerebral cortex—the thin layer of gray matter on the outer surface of the cerebral hemispheres where the computations behind perception, thinking, planning, and decision-making are carried out. Each cerebral hemisphere is divided into lobes, and the one at the front, the frontal lobe, computes decisions relevant to how to behave. One of the major patches of the frontal lobes sits on top of the eye sockets in the skull, also known as orbits, so it is called the orbitofrontal cortex, orbital cortex for short.
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The orbital cortex is densely connected to the amygdala and other emotional circuits, and it helps integrate emotions and memories into decisions about what to do next. When the animal modulates its readiness to attack in response to the circumstances, including its emotional state and any lessons it has learned in the past, it is this part of the brain, behind the eyeballs, that is responsible. By the way, though I have described the control of rage as a topdown chain of command—orbital cortex to amygdala to hypothalamus to periaqueductal gray to motor programs—the connections are all two-way: there is considerable feedback and cross talk among these components and with other parts of the brain.
51
The orbital cortex is densely connected to the amygdala and other emotional circuits, and it helps integrate emotions and memories into decisions about what to do next. When the animal modulates its readiness to attack in response to the circumstances, including its emotional state and any lessons it has learned in the past, it is this part of the brain, behind the eyeballs, that is responsible. By the way, though I have described the control of rage as a topdown chain of command—orbital cortex to amygdala to hypothalamus to periaqueductal gray to motor programs—the connections are all two-way: there is considerable feedback and cross talk among these components and with other parts of the brain.
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