INNER. DEMONS But man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As makes the angels weep. -William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure T wo aspects of the decline of violence have profound implications for our understanding of human nature: (1) the violence; (2) the decline. The last six chapters have shown that human history is a cavalcade of bloodshed. We have seen tribal raiding and feuding that kills a majority of males, the disposal of newborns that kills a majority of females, the staging of torture for ven­ geance and pleasure, and killings of enough kinds of victims to fill a page of . a rhyming dictionary: homicide, democide, genocide, ethnocide, politicide, regicide, infanticide, neonaticide, filicide, siblicide, gynecide, uxoricide, marit­ icide, and terrorism by suicide. Violence is found throughout the history and prehistory of our species, and shows no signs of having been invented in one place and spread to the others. At the same time, those chapters contain five dozen graphs that plot vio­ lence over time and display a line that meanders from the top left to the bottom right. Not a single category of violence has been pinned to a fixed rate over the course of history. Whatever causes violence, it is not a perennial urge like hunger, sex, or the need to sleep. The decline of violence thereby allows us to dispatch a dichotomy that has stood in the way of understanding the roots of violence for millennia: whether humankind is basically bad or basically good, an ape or an angel, a hawk or a dove, the nasty brute of textbook Hobbes or the noble savage of textbook Rousseau. Left to their own devices1 humans will not fall into a state of peace­ ful cooperation, but nor do they have a thirst for blood that must regularly be slaked. There must be at least a grain of truth in conceptions of the human INNER DEMONS 483 mind that grant it more than one part-theories like faculty psychology, mul­ tiple intelligences, mental organs, modularity, domain-specificity, and the metaphor of the mind as a Swiss army knife.Human nature accommodates motives that impel us to violence, like predation, dominance, and vengeance, but also motives that-under the right circumstances-impel us toward peace, like compassion, fairness, self-control, and reason.This chapter and its suc­ cessor will explore these motives and the circumstances that engage them. THE DARK SIDE Before exploring our inner demons, I need to make the case that they exist, because there is a resistance in modern intellectual life to the idea that human nature embraces any motives that incline us toward violence at all. Though the ideas that we evolved from hippie chimps and that primitive people had no concept of violence have been refuted by the facts of anthropology, one still sometimes reads that violence is perpetrated by a few bad apples who do all the damage and that everyone else is peaceful at heart. It is certainly true that the lives of most people in most societies do not end in violence.The numbers on the vertical axes of the graphs in the preceding chapters have been graduated in single digits, tens, or at most hundreds of killings per 100,000 people per year; only rarely, as in tribal warfare or an unfolding genocide, are the rates in the thousands.It is also true that in most hostile encounters, the antagonists, whether humans or other animals, usually back down before either of them can do serious damage to the other.Even in wartime, many soldiers do not fire their weapons and are racked by post­ traumatic stress disorder when they do.Some writers conclude that the vast majority of humans are constitutionally averse to violence and that the high body counts are merely signs of how much harm a few psychopaths can do. So let me begin by convincing you that most of us-including you, dear reader-are wired for violence, even if in all likelihood we will never have an occasion to use it.We can begin with our younger selves. The psychologist Richard Tremblay has measured rates of violence over the course of the life span and shown that the most violent stage of life is not adolescence or even young adulthood but the aptly named terrible twos. A typical toddler at least sometimes kicks, bites, hits, and gets into fights, and the rate of physical aggres­ sion then goes steadily down over the course of childhood.Tremblay remarks, “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.”3 Now let’s turn to our inner selves.Have you ever fantasized about killing someone you don’t like? In separate studies, the psychologists Douglas Kenrick and David Buss have posed this question to a demographic that is known to 1 2 484 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE have exceptionally low rates of violence-university students-and were stunned at the outcome. 4 Between 70 and 90 percent of the men, and between 50 and 80 percent of the women, admitted to having at least one homicidal fantasy in the preceding year. When I described these studies in a lecture, a student shouted, “Yeah, and the others are lying!” At the very least, they may sympathize with Clarence Darrow when he said, “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” The motives for imaginary homicides overlap with those on police blotters: a lover’s quarrel, a response to a threat, vengeance for an act of humiliation or betrayal, and family conflict, proportionally more often with stepparents than with biological parents. Often the reveries are played out before the mind’s eye in theatrical detail, like the jealous revenge fantasy entertained by Rex Harrison while conducting a symphony orchestra in Unfaithfully Yours. One young man in Buss’s survey estimated that he came “eighty percent of the way” toward killing a former friend who had lied to the man’s fiancee that he had been unfaithful to her and then made a move on the fiancee himself: First, I would break every bone in his body, starting with his fingers and toes, slowly making my way to larger ones. Then I would puncture his lungs and maybe a few other organs. Basically give him as much pain as possible before killing him.s A woman said she had gone 60 percent of the way toward killing an ex­ boyfriend who wanted to get back together and had threatened to send a video of the two of them having sex to her new boyfriend and her fellow students: I actually did this. I invited him over for dinner. And as he was in the kitchen, looking stupid peeling the carrots to make a salad, I came to him laughing, gently, so he wouldn’t suspect anything. I thought about grabbing a knife quickly and stabbing him in the chest repeatedly until he was dead. I actu­ ally did the first thing, but he saw my intentions, and ran away. Many actual homicides are preceded by lengthy ruminations just like this. The small number of premeditated murders that are actually carried out must be the cusp of a colossal iceberg of homicidal desires submerged in a sea of inhibitions. As the forensic psychiatrist Robert Simon put it in a book title (paraphrasing Freud paraphrasing Plato), Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream. Even people who don’t daydream about killing get intense pleasure from vicarious experiences of doing it or seeing it done. People spend large amounts of their time and income immersing themselves in any of a number of genres of bloody virtual reality: Bible stories, Homeric sagas, martyrologies, portray­ als of hell, hero myths, Gilgamesh, Greek tragedies, Beowulf, the Bayeux Tap­ estry, Shakespearean dramas, Grimm’s fairy tales, Punch and Judy, opera, INNER DEMONS 485 murder mysteries, penny dreadfuls, pulp fiction, dime novels, Grand Guignol, murder ballads, films noirs, Westerns, horror comics, superhero comics, the Three Stooges, Tom and Jerry, the Road Runner, video games, and movies starring a certain ex-governor of California. In Savage Pastimes: A Cultural His­ tory of Violent Entertainment, the literary scholar Harold Schechter shows that today’s splatter films are mild stuff compared to the simulated torture and mutilation that have titillated audiences for centuries. Long before computer­ generated imagery, theater directors would apply their ingenuity to grisly special effects, such as “phony heads that could be decapitated from dummies and impaled on pikes; fake skin that could be flayed from an actor’s torso; concealed bladders filled with animal blood that could produce a satisfying spurt of gore when punctured.” 6 The vast mismatch between the number of violent acts that run through people’s imaginations and the number they carry out in the world tells us something about the design of the mind. Statistics on violence underestimate the importance of violence in the human condition. The human brain runs on the Latin adage “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Even in peaceable soci­ eties, people are fascinated by the logic of bluff and threat, the psychology of alliance and betrayal, the vulnerabilities of a human body and how they can be exploited or shielded. The universal pleasure that people take in violent entertainment, always in the teeth of censorship and moralistic denunciation, suggests that the mind craves information on the conduct of violence? A likely explanation is that in evolutionary history, violence was not so improbable that people could afford not to understand how it works.8 The anthropologist Donald Symons has noticed a similar mismatch in the other major content of naughty reverie and entertainment, sex.9 People fantasize about and make art out of illicit sex vastly more often than they engage in it. Like adultery, violence may be improbable, but when an opportunity arises, the potential consequences for Darwinian fitness are gargantuan. Symons sug­ gests that higher consciousness itself is designed for low-frequency, high­ impact events. We seldom muse about daily necessities like grasping, walking, or speaking, let alone pay money to see them dramatized. What grabs our mental spotlight is illicit sex, violent death, and Walter Mittyish leaps of status. Now to our brains. The human brain is a swollen and warped version of the brains of other mammals. All the major parts may be found in our furry cousins, where they do pretty much the same things, such as process informa­ tion from the senses, control muscles and glands, and store and retrieve mem­ ories. Among these parts is a network of regions that has been called the Rage circuit. The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp describes what happened when he sent an electrical current through a part of the Rage circuit of a cat: Within the first few seconds of the electrical brain stimulation the peaceful animal was emotionally transformed. It leaped viciously toward me with 486 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE claws unsheathed, fangs bared, hissing and spitting.It could have pounced in many different directions, but its arousal was directed right at my head. Fortunately, a Plexiglas wall separated me from the enraged beast.Within a fraction of a minute after terminating the stimulation, the cat was again relaxed and peaceful, and could be petted without further retribution.1° The Rage circuit in the cat brain has a counterpart in the human brain, it too can be stimulated by an electrical current-not in an experiment, course, but during neurosurgery. A surgeon describes what follows: The most significant (and the most dramatic) effect of stimulation has been the eliciting of a range of aggressive responses, from coherent, appropriately directed verbal responses (speaking to surgeon, “I feel I could get up and bite you”) to uncontrolled swearing and physically destructive behav­ iour….On one occasion the patient was asked, 30 sec after cessation of the stimulus, if he had felt angry. He agreed that he had been angry, but that he no longer was, and he sounded very surprised. 11 Cats hiss; humans swear.The fact that the Rage circuit can activate speech suggests that it is not an inert vestige but has functioning connections with the rest of the human brain. The Rage circuit is one of several circuits that control aggression in nonhuman mammals, and as we shall see, they help make sense of the varieties of aggression in humans as well. 1 2 If violence is stamped into our childhoods, our fantasy lives, our art, and our brains, then how is it possible that soldiers are reluctant to fire their guns in combat, when that is what they are there to do? A famous study of World War II veterans claimed that no more than 15 to 25 percent of them were able to discharge their weapons in battle; other studies have found that most of the bullets that are fired miss their targets.13 Now, the first claim is based on a dubious study, and the second is a red herring-most shots are fired in war not to pick off individual soldiers but to deter any of them from advancing.’4 Nor is it surprising that when a soldier targets an enemy in combat conditions, it isn’t easy to score a direct hit. But let’s grant that anxiety on the battlefield is high and that many soldiers are paralyzed when the time comes to pull the trigger. A nervousness about the use of deadly force may also be seen in street fights and barroom brawls. Most confrontations between macho ruffians are noth­ ing like the stupendous fistfights in Hollywood westerns that so impressed Nabokov’s Humbert, with “the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in the belly, the flying tackle.” The sociologist Randall Collins has scrutinized pho­ tographs, videotapes, and eyewitness accounts of real fights and found that they are closer to a two-minute penalty for roughing in a boring hockey game INNER DEMONS 487 than an action-packed brawl in Roaring Gulch.15 Two men glower, talk trash, swing and miss, clutch each other, sometimes fall to the ground. Occasionally a fist will emerge from the mutual embrace and land a couple of blows, but more often the men will separate, trade angry bluster and face-saving verbiage, and walk away with their egos more bruised than their bodies. It’s true, then, that when men confront each other in face-to-face conflict, they often exercise restraint. But this reticence is not a sign that humans are gentle and compassionate. On the contrary, it’s just what one would expect from the analyses of violence by Hobbes and Darwin. Recall from chapter 2 that any tendency toward violence must have evolved in a world in which everyone else was evolving the same tendency. (As Richard Dawkins put it, a living thing differs from a rock or a river because it is inclined to hit back.) That means that the first move toward harming a fellow human simultane­ ously accomplishes two things: 1. It increases the chance that the target will come to harm. 2. It gives the target an overriding goal of harming you before you harm him. Even if you prevail by killing him, you will have given his kin the goal of killing you in revenge. It stands to reason that initiating serious aggression in a symmetrical standoff is something a Darwinian creature must consider very, very carefully-a reticence experienced as anxiety or paralysis. Discretion is the better part of valor; compassion has nothing to do with it. When an opportunity does arise to eliminate a hated opponent with little danger of reprisal, a Darwinian creature will seize on it. We saw this in chim­ panzee raiding. When a group of males patrolling a territory encounters a male from another community who has been isolated from his fellows, they will take advantage of the strength in numbers and tear him limb from limb. Pre-state peoples too decimate their enemies not in pitched battles but in stealthy ambushes and raids. Much of human violence is cowardly violence: sucker punches, unfair fights, preemptive strikes, predawn raids, mafia hits, drive-by shootings. Collins also documents a recurring syndrome that he calls forward panic, though a more familiar term would be rampage. When an aggressive coalition has stalked or faced off against an opponent in a prolonged state of apprehen­ sion and fear, then catches the opponent in a moment of vulnerability, fear turns to rage, and the men will explode in a savage frenzy. A seemingly unstoppable fury drives them to beat the enemy senseless, torture and muti­ late the men, rape the women, and destroy their property. A forward panic is violence at its ugliest. It is the state of mind that causes genocides, massacres, deadly ethnic riots, and battles in which no prisoners are taken. It also lies behind episodes of police brutality, such as the savage beating of Rodney King 488 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE in 1991 after he had been apprehended in a high-speed car chase and had violently resisted his arrest. As the butchery gains momentum, rage may give way to ecstasy, and the rampagers may laugh and whoop in a carnival of bar­ barity. 16 No one has to be trained to carry out a rampage, and when they erupt in armies or police squads the commanders are often taken by surprise and have to take steps to quell them, since the overkill and atrocities serve no military or law-enforcement purpose. A rampage may be a primitive adaptation to seize a fleeting opportunity to decisively rout a dangerous enemy before it can remobilize and retaliate. The resemblance to lethal raiding among chim­ panzees is uncanny, including the common trigger: an isolated member of the enemy who is outnumbered by a cluster of three or four allies. 17 The instinct behind rampages suggests that the human behavioral repertoire includes scripts for violence that lie quiescent and may be cued by propitious circum­ stances, rather than building up over time like hunger or thirst. THE MORALIZATION GAP AND THE MYTH OF PURE EVIL In The Blank Slate I argued that the modern denial of the dark side of human nature-the doctrine of the Noble Savage-was a reaction against the roman­ tic militarism, hydraulic theories of aggression, and glorification of struggle and strife that had been popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sci­ entists and scholars who question the modern doctrine have been accused of justifying violence and have been subjected to vilification, blood libel, and physical assault.18 The Noble Savage myth appears to be another instance of an antiviolence movement leaving a cultural legacy of propriety and taboo. But I am now convinced that a denial of the human capacity for evil runs even deeper, and may itself be a feature of human nature, thanks to a brilliant analy­ sis by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister in his book Evil.19 Baumeister was moved to study the commonsense understanding of evil when he noticed that the people who perpetrate destructive acts, from everyday peccadilloes to serial murders and genocides, never think they are doing anything wrong. How can there be so much evil in the world with so few evil people doing it? When psychologists are confronted with a timeless mystery, they run an experiment. Baumeister and his collaborators Arlene Stillwell and Sara Wot­ man couldn’t very well get people to commit atrocities in the lab, but they reasoned that everyday life has its share of smaller hurts that they could put under the microscope. They asked people to describe one incident in which someone angered them, and one incident in which they angered someone. The order of the two questions was randomly flipped from one participant to the next, and they were separated by a busywork task so the participants wouldn’t answer them in quick succession. Most people get angry at least once a week, and nearly everyone gets angry at least once a month, so there was no 20 INNER DEMONS 489 shortage of material. Both perpetrators and victims recounted plenty of lies, broken promises, violated rules and obligations, betrayed secrets, unfair acts, and conflicts over money. But that was all that the perpetrators and victims agreed on. The psychol­ ogists pored over the narratives and coded features such as the time span of the events, the culpability of each side, the perpetrator’s motive, and the after­ math of the harm. If one were to weave composite narratives out of their tallies, they might look something like this: 21 The Perpetrator’s Narrative: The story begins with the harmful act. At the time I had good reasons for doing it. Perhaps I was responding to an immediate provocation. Or I was just reacting to the situation in a way that any rea­ sonable person would. I had a perfect right to do what I did, and it’s unfair to blame me for it. The harm was minor, and easily repaired, and I apolo­ gized. It’s time to get over it, put it behind us, let bygones be bygones. The Victim’s Narrative: The story begins long before the harmful act, which was just the latest incident in a long history of mistreatment. The perpe­ trator’s actions were incoherent, senseless, incomprehensible. Either that or he was an abnormal sadist, motivated only by a desire to see me suffer, though I was completely innocent. The harm he did is grievous and irrep­ arable, with effects that will last forever. None of us should ever forget it. They can’t both be right-or more to the point, neither of them can be right all of the time, since the same participants provided a story in which they were the victim and a story in which they were the perpetrator. Something in human psychology distorts our interpretation and memory of harmful events. This raises an obvious question. Does our inner perpetrator whitewash our crimes in a campaign to exonerate ourselves? Or does our inner victim nurse our grievances in a campaign to claim the world’s sympathy? Since the psy­ chologists were not flies on the wall at the time of the actual incidents, they had no way of knowing whose retrospective accounts should be trusted. In an ingenious follow-up, Stillwell and Baumeister controlled the event by writing an ambiguous story in which one college roommate offers to help another with some coursework but reneges for a number of reasons, which leads the student to receive a low grade for the course, change his or her major, and switch to another university. The participants (students themselves) sim­ ply had to read the story and then retell it as accurately as possible in the first person, half of them taking the perspective of the perpetrator and half the perspective of the victim. A third group was asked to retell the story in the third person; the details they provided or omitted serve as a baseline for ordi­ nary distortions of human memory that are unaffected by self-serving biases. The psychologists coded the narratives for missing or embellished details that would make either the perpetrator or the victim look better. 22 490 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE The answer to the question “Who should we believe?” turned out to b neither. Compared to the benchmark of the story itself, and to the recall oft disinterested third-person narrators, both victims and perpetrators distorte the stories to the same extent but in opposite directions, each omitting embellishing details in a way that made the actions of their character loq: more reasonable and the other’s less reasonable. Remarkably, nothing was stake in the exercise. Not only had the participants not taken part in the events} but they were not asked to sympathize with the character or to justify anyone’.s behavior, just to read and remember the story from a first-person perspective. That was all it took to recruit their cognitive processes to the cause of self­ servingpropagancla. The dive:rgingcnarratives of a harmful event in the eyes of the aggressor, the victim/ ancl a neutral party are a psychological overlay on the violence trian:glein figure 2d. Let’s call it the Moralization Gap. The Moralization Gap is part of a larger phenomenon called self-serving biases. People try to look good. “Good” can mean effective, potent, desirable, and competent, or it can mean virtuous, honest, generous, and altruistic. The drive to present the self in a positive light was one of the major findings of 20th-century social psychology. An early expose was the sociologist Erving Coffman’s The Present�tion of Self in Everyday Life, and recent summaries include Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me), Robert Trivers’s Deceit and Self-Deception, and Robert Kurzban’s Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite. 3 Among the signature phenomena are cognitive disso­ nance, in which people change their evaluation of something they have been manipulated into doing to preserve the impression that they are in control of their actions, and the Lake Wobegon Effect (named after Garrison Keillor’s fictitious town in which all the children are above average), in which a major­ ity of people rate themselves above average in every desirable talent or trait.24 Self-serving biases are part of the evolutionary price we pay for being social animals. People congregate in groups not because they are robots who are magnetically attracted to one another but because they have social and moral emotions. They feel warmth and sympathy, gratitude and trust, loneliness and guilt, jealousy and anger. The emotions are internal regulators that ensure that people reap the benefits of social life-reciprocal exchange and coopera­ tive action-without suffering the costs, namely exploitation by cheaters and social parasites.25 We’ sympathize with, trust, and feel grateful to those who are likely to cooperate with us, rewarding them with our own cooperation. And we get angry at or ostracize those who are likely to cheat, withdrawing cooperation or meting out punishment. A person’s own level of virtue is a tradeoff between the esteem that comes from cultivating a reputation as a cooperator and the ill-gotten gains of stealthy cheating. A social group is a mar­ ketplace of cooperators of differing degrees of generosity and trustworthiness, and people advertise themselves as being as generous and trustworthy as 2 INNER DEMONS 491 they can get away with, which may be a bit more generous and trustworthy than they are. The Moralization Gap consists of complementary bargaining tactics in the negotiation for recompense between a victim and a perpetrator. Like oppos­ ing counsel in a lawsuit over a tort, the social plaintiff will emphasize the deliberateness, or at least the depraved indifference, of the defendant’s action, together with the pain and suffering the plaintiff endures. The social defen­ dant will emphasize the reasonableness or unavoidability of the action, and will minimize the plaintiff’s pain and suffering. The competing framings shape the negotiations over amends, and also play to the gallery in a competi­ tion for their sympathy and for a reputation as a responsible reciprocator. 26 Trivers, the first to propose that the moral emotions are adaptations to cooperation, also identified an important twist. The problem with trying to convey an exaggerated impression ofkindness and skill is that other people are bound to develop the ability to see through it, setting in motion a psycho­ logical arms race between better liars and better lie detection. Lies can be spotted through internal contradictions (as in the Yiddish proverb “A liar must have a good memory”), or through tells such as hesitations, twitches, blushes, and sweats. Trivers ventured that natural selection may have favored a degree of self-deception so as to suppress the tells at the source. We lie to ourselves so that we’re more believable when we lie to others. 27 At the same time, an unconscious part of the mind registers the truth about our abilities so that we don’t get too far out of touch with reality. Trivers credits George Orwell with an earlier formulation of the idea: “The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.”28 Self-deception is an exotic theory, because it makes the paradoxical claim that something called “the self” can be both deceiver and deceived. It’s easy enough to show that people are liable to self-serving biases, like a butcher’s scale that has been miscalibrated in the butcher’s favor. But it’s not so easy to show that people are liable to self-deception, the psychological equivalent of the dual books kept by shady businesses in which a public ledger is made available to prying eyes and a private ledger with the correct information is used to run the business. 9 A pair of social psychologists, Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno, have devised an ingenious experiment that catches people in the act of true, dual­ book self-deception.30 They asked the participants to cooperate with them in planning and evaluating a study in which half of them would get a pleasant and easy task, namely looking through photographs for ten minutes, and half would get a tedious and difficult one, namely solving math problems for forty­ five minutes. They told the participants that they were being run in pairs, but that the experimenters had not yet settled on the best way to decide who got which task. So they allowed each participant to choose one of two methods to decide who would get the pleasant task and who would get the unpleasant 2 492 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE one. The participants could just choose the easy task for themselves, or they could use a random number generator to decide who got which. Human self­ ishness being what it is, almost everyone kept the pleasant task for themselves. Later they were given an anonymous questionnaire to evaluate the experiment which unobtrusively slipped in a question about whether the participants thought that their decision had been fair. Human hypocrisy being what it is, most of them said it was. Then the experimenters described the selfish choice to another .group of participants and asked them how fairly the selfish subject acted. Not surprisingly, they didn’t think it was fair at all. The difference between the way people judge other people’s behavior and the way they judge their own behavior is a classic instance of a self-serving bias. But now comes the key question. Did the self-servers really, deep down, believe that they were acting fairly? Or did the conscious spin doctor in their brains just say that, while the unconscious reality-checker registered the truth? To find out, the psychologists tied up the conscious mind by forcing a group of participants to keep seven digits in memory while they evaluated the exper­ iment, including the judgment about whether they (or others) had acted fairly. With the conscious mind distracted, the terrible truth came out: the partici­ pants judged themselves as harshly as they judged other people. This vindi­ cates Trivers’s theory that the truth was in there all along. I was happy to discover the result, not just because the theory of self­ deception is so elegant that it deserves to be true, but because it offers a glimmer of hope for humanity. Though acknowledging a compromising truth about ourselves is among our most painful experiences-Freud posited an arma­ mentarium of defense mechanisms to postpone that dreadful day, such as denial, repression, projection, and reaction formation-it is, at least in principle, possible. It may take ridicule, it may take argument, it may take time, it may take being distracted, but people have the means to recognize that they are not always in the right. Still, we shouldn’t deceive ourselves about self-deception. In the absence of these puncturings, the overwhelming tendency is for people to misjudge the harmful acts they have perpetrated or experienced. Once you become aware of this fateful quirk in our psychology, social life begins to look different, and so do history and current events. It’s not just that there are two sides to every dispute. It’s that each side sincerely believes its version of the story, namely that it is an innocent and long-suffering victim and the other side a malevolent and treacherous sadist. And each side has assembled a historical narrative and database of facts consistent with its sin­ cere belief.3′ For example: • The Crusades were an upwelling of religious idealism that were marked by a few excesses but left the world with the fruits of cultural exchange. The Crusades were a series of vicious pogroms against Jewish communities that INNER DEMONS 493 were part of a long history of European anti-Semitism. The Crusades were a brutal invasion of Muslim lands and the start of a long history of humiliation of Islam by Christendom. • The American Civil War was necessary to abolish the evil institution of slavery and preserve a nation conceived in liberty and equality. The American Civil War was a power grab by a centralized tyranny intended to destroy the way of life of the traditional South. • The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe was the act of an evil empire drawing an iron curtain across the continent. The Warsaw Pact was a defensive alliance to protect the Soviet Union and its allies from a repeat of the horren­ dous losses it had suffered from two German invasions. • The Six-Day War was a struggle for national survival. It began when Egypt expelled UN peacekeepers and blockaded the Straits of Tiran, the first step in its plan to push the Jews into the sea, and it ended when Israel reunified a divided city and secured defensible borders. The Six-Day War was a campaign of aggression and conquest. It began when Israel invaded its neighbors and ended when it expropriated their land and instituted an apartheid regime. Adversaries are divided not just by their competitive spin-doctoring but by the calendars with which they measure history and the importance they put on remembrance. The victims of a conflict are assiduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present Ordinarily we tend to think of historical memory as a good thing, but when the events being remembered are lingering wounds that call for redress, it can be a call to violence. The slogans “Remember the Alamo!” “Remember the Maine!” “Remember the Lusitania!” “Remember Pearl Harbor!” and “Remember 9/11!” were not advisories to brush up your history but battle cries that led to Americans’ engaging in wars. It is often said that the Balkans are a region that is cursed with too much history per square mile. The Serbs, who in the 1990s perpetrated ethnic cleansings in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, are also among the world’s most aggrieved people.32 They were inflamed by memories of depredations by the Nazi puppet state in Croatia in World War II, the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, and the Ottoman Turks going back to the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. On the six hundredth anniversary of that battle, President Slobodan Milosevic delivered a bellicose speech that presaged the Balkan wars of the 1990s. In the late 1970s the newly elected separatist government of Quebec redis­ covered the thrills of 19th-century nationalism, and among other trappings of Quebecois patriotism replaced the license-plate motto “La Belle Province” (the beautiful province) with “Je Me Souviens” (I remember). It was never made clear exactly what was being remembered, but most people interpreted it as nostalgia for New France, which had been vanquished by Britain during the Seven Years’ War in 1763. All this remembering made Anglophone 494 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE Quebeckers a bit nervous and set off an exodus of my generation to Toronto. Fortunately, late-20th-century European pacifism prevailed over 19th-century Gallic nationalism, and Quebec today is an unusually cosmopolitan and peace­ able part of the world. The counterpart of too much memory on the part of victims is too little memory on the part of perpetrators. On a visit to Japan in 1992, I bought a tourist guide that included a helpful time line of Japanese history. There was an entry for the period of the Taisho democracy from 1912 to 1926, and then there was an entry for the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970. I guess nothing interest­ ing happened in Japan in the years in between. It’s disconcerting to realize that all sides to a conflict, from roommates squabbling over a term paper to nations waging world wars, are convinced of their rectitude and can back up their convictions with the historical record. That record may include some whoppers, but it may just be biased by the omission of facts we consider significant and the sacralization of facts we consider ancient history. The realization is disconcerting because it suggests that in a given disagreement, the other guy might have a point, we may not be as pure as we think, the two sides will come to blows each convinced that it is in the right, and no one will think the better of it because everyone’s self­ deception is invisible to them. For example, few Americans today would second-guess the participation of “the greatest generation” in the epitome of a just war, World War II. Yet it’s unsettling to reread Franklin Roosevelt’s historic speech following Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and see that it is a textbook case of a victim nar­ rative. All the coding categories of the Baumeister experiment can be filled in: the fetishization of memory (“a date which will live in infamy”), the innocence of the victim (“The United States was at peace with that nation”), the sense­ lessness and malice of the aggression (“this unprovoked and dastardly attack”), the magnitude of the harm (“The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Very many American lives have been lost”), and the justness of retaliation (“the American people in their righteous might will win”). Historians today point out that each of these ringing assertions was, at best, truthy. The United States had imposed a hostile embargo of oil and machinery on Japan, had anticipated possible attacks, had sustained relatively minor military damage, eventually sacrificed 100,000 American lives in response to the 2,500 lost in the attack, forced innocent Japanese Americans into concentration camps, and attained victory with incendiary and nuclear strikes on Japanese civilians that could be considered among history’s greatest war crimes.33 Even in matters when no reasonable third party can doubt who’s right and who’s wrong, we have to be prepared, when putting on psychological spec­ tacles, to see that evildoers always think they are acting morally. The spec­ tacles are a painful fit.34 Just monitor your blood pressure as you read the INNER DEMONS 495 sentence “Try to see it from Hitler’s point of view.” (Or Osama bin Laden’s, or Kim Jong-il’s.) Yet Hitler, like all sentient beings, had a point of view, and his­ torians tell us that it was a highly moralistic one. He experienced Germany’s sudden and unexpected defeat in World War I and concluded that it could be explained only by the treachery of an internal enemy. He was aggrieved by the Allies’ murderous postwar food blockade and their vindictive reparations. He lived through the economic chaos and street violence of the 1920s. And Hitler was an idealist: he had a moral vision in which heroic sacrifices would bring about a thousand-year utopia.35 At the smaller scale of interpersonal violence, the most brutal serial killers minimize and even justify their crimes in ways that would be comical if their actions were not so horrific. In 1994 the police quoted a spree killer as saying, “Other than the two we killed, the two we wounded, the woman we pistol­ whipped, and the light bulbs we stuck in people’s mouths, we didn’t really hurt anybody.” 36 A serial rapist-murderer interviewed by the sociologist Diana Scully claimed to be “kind and gentle” to the women he captured at gunpoint, and that they enjoyed the experience of being raped. As further proof of this kindness, he noted that when he stabbed his victims “the killing was always sudden, so they wouldn’t know it was coming.” 37 John Wayne Cacy, who kid­ napped, raped, and murdered thirty-three boys, said, “I see myself more as a victim than as a perpetrator,” adding, without irony, “I was cheated out of my childhood.” His victimization continued into adulthood, when the media inex­ plicably tried to make him into “an asshole and a scapegoat.” 38 Smaller-time criminals rationalize just as readily. Anyone who has worked with prisoners knows that today’s penitentiaries are filled to a man with inno­ cent victims-not just those who were framed by sloppy police work but those whose violence was a form of self-help justice. Remember Donald Black’s theory of crime as social control (chapter 3), which seeks to explain why a majority of violent crimes don’t bring the perpetrator a tangible benefit.39 The offender is genuinely provoked by an affront or betrayal; the reprisal that we deem to be excessive-striking a sharp-tongued wife during an argument, killing a swaggering stranger over a parking spot-is from his point of view a natural response to a provocation and the administration of rough justice. 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. 40 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 view­ point 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 496 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE 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 inex­ plicable existence of evil in the universe. Many chroniclers of the Holocaust consider it immoral even to try to explain it.41 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 sensational­ ist 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 for­ give all.” (Recall Lewis Richardson’s reply that to condemn much is to under­ stand little.) The accusation of relativizing evil is particularly likely when the motive the analyst imputes to the perpetrator appears to be venial, like jeal­ ousy, status, or retaliation, rather than grandiose, like the persistence of suf­ fering 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 Han­ nah 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 ordi­ nariness of his motives.42 Whether or not she was right about Eichmann (and INNER DEMONS 497 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. Appear­ ing 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 VIOLENCE One 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 vio­ lence 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 bio­ logically speaking, predation for food could not be more different from aggres­ sion 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 qne alley cat faces off against another, the cat stands tall, fur erect, hissing and yowling. We saw how neuroscientists can implant an elec trode 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.45 498 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE 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 experi­ menter’shead.46 Evolution takes advantage of this modularity. Different mam­ mals 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 remark­ ably conserved.47 That includes the lineage leading to humans, as neurosur­ geons 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” 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. 500 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE 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.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 top­ down chain of command-orbital cortex to amygdala to hypothalamus to peri­ aqueductal 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. As I mentioned, predation and rage play out very differently in the behav­ ioral repertoire of a carnivorous mammal and are triggered by electrical stim­ ulation of different parts of the brain. Predation involves a circuit that is part of what Panksepp calls the Seeking system.52 A major part of the Seeking sys­ tem runs from a part of the midbrain (not shown in figure 8-1) via a bundle of fibers in the midclle of the brain (the medial forebrain bundle) to the lateral hypothalamus, and from there up to the ventral striatum, a major part of the so-called reptilian brain. The striatum is composed of many parallel tracts (giving it a striated appearance), and it is buried deep in the cerebral hemi­ spheres and densely connected to the frontal lobes. The Seeking system was discovered when the psychologists James Olds and Peter Milner implanted an electrode into the middle of a rat brain, hooked it up to a lever in a Skinner box, and found that the rat would press the lever to stimulate its own brain until it dropped of exhaustion.53 Originally they thought they had found the pleasure center in the brain, but neuroscientists today believe that the system underlies wanting or craving rather than actual pleasure. (The major realization of adulthood, that you should be careful about what you want because when you get it you may not enjoy it, has a basis in the anatomy of the brain.) The Seeking system is held together not just by wiring but by chemistry. Its neurons signal to each other with a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Drugs that make dopamine more plentiful, like cocaine and amphetamines, jazz the animal up, while drugs that decrease it, like antipsy­ chotic medications, leave the animal apathetic. (The ventral striatum also con­ tains circuits that respond to a different family of transmitters, the endorphins or endogenous opiates. These circuits are more closely related to enjoying a reward once it arrives than to craving it in anticipation.) The Seeking system identifies goals for the animal to pursue, like access to a lever that it may press to receive food. In more natural settings, the Seek­ ing system motivates a carnivorous animal to hunt. The animal stalks its INNER DEMONS 501 quarry in what we can imagine is a state of pleasant anticipation. If successful, it dispatches the prey in a quiet bite that is completely unlike the snarling attack of rage. Animals can attack both in offense and in defense.54 The simplest trigger of an offensive attack is sudden pain or frustration, the latter delivered as a signal from the Seeking system. The reflex may be seen in some of the primi­ tive responses of a human being. Babies react with rage when their arms are suddenly pinned at their sides, and adults may lash out by swearing or break­ ing things when they hit their thumb with a hammer or are surprised by not getting what they expect (as in the technique of computer repair called per­ cussive maintenance). Defensive attacks, which in the rat consist of lunging at the head of an adversary rather than kicking and biting its flank, are trig­ gered by yet another brain system, the one that underlies fear. The Fear system, like the Rage system, consists of a circuit that runs from the periaqueductal gray through the hypothalamus to the amygdala. The Fear and Rage circuits are distinct, connecting different nuclei in each of these organs, but their phys­ ical proximity reflects the ease with which they interact.55 Mild fear can trigger freezing or flight, but extreme fear, combined with other stimuli, can trigger an enraged defensive attack. Forward panic or rampage in humans may involve a similar handoff from the Fear system to the Rage system. Panksepp identifies a fourth motivational system in the mammalian brain that can trigger violence; he calls it the Intermale Aggression or Dominance system?6 Like Fear and Rage, it runs from the periaqueductal gray through the hypothalamus to the amygdala, connecting yet another trio of nuclei along the way. Each of these nuclei has receptors for testosterone. As Panskepp notes, “In virtually all mammals, male sexuality requires an assertive attitude, so that male sexuality and aggressiveness normally go together. Indeed, these tenden­ cies are intertwined throughout the neuroaxis, and to the best of our limited knowledge, the circuitry for this type of aggression is located near, and prob­ ably interacts strongly with, both Rage and Seeking circuits.”57 To psychologize the anatomy, the Seeking system leads a male to willingly, even eagerly, seek out an aggressive challenge with another male, but when the battle is joined and one of them is in danger of defeat or death, focused fighting may give way to blind rage. Panksepp notes that the two kinds of aggression, though they interact with each other, are neurobiologically distinct. When certain parts of the medial hypothalamus or striatum are damaged, the animal is more likely to attack a prey animal or an unwitting experimenter, but less likely to attack another male. And as we shall see, giving an animal (or a man) testosterone does not make him testy across the board. On the contrary, it makes him feel great, while putting a chip on his shoulder when he is faced with a rival malea58 One look at a human brain and you know you are dealing with a very unusual mammal. Figure 8-2, with its transparent cortex, shows that all the parts of 502 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE FIGURE 8-2. Human brain, showing the major subcortical structures involved in aggression Source: 3D Brain Illustration by AXS Biomedical Animation Studio, created for Dolan DNA Learn­ ing Center. the rat brain have been carried over to the human brain, including the organs that house the circuits for rage, fear, and dominance: the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the periaqueductal gray (which is found inside the midbrain, lining the cerebrospinal canal running through it). The dopamine­ fueled striatum, whose ventral portion helps set goals for the whole brain to seek, is also prominent. But while these structures take up a large proportion of the rat brain, in the human brain they are enveloped by a bloated cerebrum. As figure 8-3 shows, the outsize cerebral cortex has been wrinkled like a wad of newspaper to get it to fit inside the skull. A large part of the cerebrum is taken up by the frontal lobes, which in this view of the brain extend about three-quarters of the way back The neuroanatomy suggests that in Homo sapiens primitive impulses of rage, fear, and craving must contend with the cerebral restraints of prudence, moralization, and self-control-though as in all attempts at taming the wild, it’s not always clear who has the upper hand. Within the frontal lobes, one can readily see how the orbital cortex got its name: it is a big spherical dent that accommodates the bony socket of the eye. Scientists have known that the orbital cortex is involved with regulating the emotions since 1848, when a railroad foreman named Phineas Gage tamped down some blasting powder in a hole in a rock and ignited an explosion that FIGURE 8-3. Human brain, showing the major cortical regions that regulate aggression Source: 3D Brain Illustration by AXS Biomedical Animation Studio, created for Dolan DNA Learn­ ing Center. sent the tamping iron up through his cheekbone and out the top of his skull. 59 A 20th-century computer reconstruction based on the holes in the skull sug­ gest that the spike tore up his left orbital cortex, together with the ventromedial cortex on the inside wall of the cerebrum. (It is visible in the medial view of the brain in figure 8-4.) The orbital and ventromedial cortex are continuous, wrapping around the bottom edge of the frontal lobe, and neuroscientists often use either term to refer to the combination of the two of them. Though Gage’s senses, memories, and movement were intact, it soon became clear that the damaged parts of his brain had been doing something important. Here is how his physician described the change: The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irrever­ ent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his 504 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE FIGURE 8-4. Human brain, medial view Source: 3D Brain Illustration by AXS Biomedical Animation Studio, created for Dolan DNA Learn­ ing Center. injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was “no longer Gage.” 60 Though Gage eventually recovered much of his equipoise, and the story has been embellished and sometimes garbled in generations of retelling to introductory psychology students, today our understanding of the function of the orbital cortex is broadly consistent with the doctor’s description. The orbital cortex is strongly connected to the amygdala, hypothalamus, and other parts of the brain involved with emotion.61 It is suffused with neu­ rons that use dopamine as their neurotransmitter and that are connected to the Seeking system in the striatum. It is adjacent to an island of cortex called the insula, the front of which just barely peeks out from beneath the Sylvian fissure in figure 8-3; the rest of the insula extends back under that fissure, obscured by overhanging flaps of the frontal and temporal lobes. The insula registers our physical gut feelings, including the sensation of a distended stomach and other inner states like nausea, warmth, a full bladder, and a pounding heart. The brain takes metaphors like “that makes my blood boil” INNER DEMONS 505 and “his behavior disgusts me” literally. The cognitive neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen and his team found that when a person feels he is getting a raw deal from another person who is dividing a windfall between them, the insula is fired up. When the stingy allocation is thought to come from a computer, so there’s no one to get mad at, the insula remains dark. 62 The orbital cortex resting on the eyeballs (figure 8-3) and the ventromedial cortex facing inward (figure 8-4) are, as mentioned, adjacent, and it’s not easy to distinguish what they do, which is why neuroscientists often lump them together. The orbital cortex seems to be more involved with determining whether an experience is pleasant or unpleasant (befitting its position next to the insula, with its input from the viscera), while the ventromedial cortex is more involved with determining whether you are getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want (befitting its position along the midline of the brain, where the Seeking circuit extends). 63 The distinction may carry over to a difference in the moral realm between an emotional reaction to a harm, and judgment and reflection on it. But the dividing line is fuzzy, and I’ll continue to use “orbital” to refer to both parts of the brain. The inputs to the orbital cortex-gut feelings, objects of desire, and emo­ tional impulses, together with sensations and memories from other parts of the cortex-allow it to serve as the regulator of emotional life. Visceral feelings of anger, warmth, fear, and disgust are combined with the person’s goals, and modulating signals are computed and sent back down to the emotional struc­ tures from which they originated. Signals are also sent upward to regions of the cortex that carry out cool deliberation and executive control. This flowchart suggested by the neuroanatomy corresponds fairly well with what psychologists see in the clinic and lab. Making allowances for the dif­ ference between the flowery language of medical reports in the 19th century and the clinical jargon of the 21st, today’s descriptions of patients with dam­ age to their orbital cortex could have applied to Phineas Gage: “Disinhibited, socially inappropriate, susceptible to misinterpreting others’ moods, impul­ sive, unconcerned with the consequences of their actions, irresponsible in everyday life, lacking in insight into the seriousness of their condition, and prone to weak initiative.” 64 The psychologists Angela Scarpa and Adrian Raine offer a similar list, but with an additional symptom at the end that is relevant to our discussion: “Argumentativeness, lack of concern for consequences of behavior, loss of social graces, impulsivity, distractibility, shallowness, lability, violence.” 65 The extra noun came from Raine’s own studies, which, instead of selecting patients with orbital brain damage and then examining their personalities, selected people prone to violence and then examined their brains. He focused on peo­ ple with antisocial personality disorder, defined by the American Psychiatric Association as “a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others,” including lawbreaking, deceit, aggressiveness, recklessness, and 506 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE lack of remorse. People with antisocial personality disorder make up a large proportion of violent felons, and a subset of them, who possess glibness, nar… cissism, grandiosity, and a superficial charm, are called psychopaths (or some-­ times sociopaths). Raine scanned the brains of violence-prone people with antisocial personality disorder and found that the orbital regions were shrunken and.less metaboHcallya.ctive, as were other parts of the emotional brain, including the.ainygdahr,66 In one experiment; Raine compared the brains of prisoners who had committed an impulsive murder with those who had killed with premeditation: Only the impulsive murderers showed a malfunc­ tion in their.:orbital cortex, suggesting that the self-control implemented by this part oflhebrain is a major inhibitor of violence. But another part of its job description may come into play as well. Monkeys with lesions in the orbital cortex have trouble fitting into dominance hierarchies, and they get into more fights.67 Not coincidentally, humans with orbital damage are insensitive to social faux pas. When they hear a story about a woman who inadvertently disparaged a gift she received from a friend, or accidentally divulged that the friend had been excluded from a party list, the patients fail td recognize that anyone had said anything wrong, and don’t realize that the friend might have been hurt.68 Raine found that when people with antisocial personal­ ity disorder were asked to compose and deliver a speech about their own faults; which for ordinary people is a nerve-racking ordeal accompanied by embar­ rassment, shame, and guilt, their nervous systems were unresponsive.69 The orbital cortex, then (together with its ventromedial neighbor), is involved in several of the pacifying faculties of the human mind, including self-control, sympathy to others, and sensitivity to norms and conventions. For all that, the orbital cortex is a fairly primitive part of the cerebrum. We saw it in the lowly rat, and its inputs are literally and figuratively from the gut. The more delib,. erative and intellectual modulators of violence rely on other parts of the brain. Consider the process of deciding whether to punish someone who has caused a harm. Our sense of justice tells us that the perpetrator’s culpability: depends not just on the harm done but on his or her mental state-the mens rea, or guilty mind, that is necessary for an act to be considered a crime in most legal systems. Suppose a woman kills her husband by putting rat poison in his tea. Our decision as to whether to send her to the electric chair very much depends on whether the container she spooned it out of was mislabeled DOM­ INO SUGAR or correctly labeled D-CON: KILLS RATS-that is, whether she knew she was poisoning him and wanted him dead, or it was all a tragic accident A brute emotional reflex to the actus reus, the bad act (“She killed her husband! Shame!”), could trigger an urge for retribution regardless of her intention. The. crucial role played by the perpetrator’s mental state in our assignment of blame is what makes the Moralization Gap possible. Victims insist that the perpetra’- INNER DEMONS 507 tor deliberately and knowingly wanted to harm them, while perpetrators insist that the harm was unintended. The psychologists Liane Young and Rebecca Saxe put people in an £MRI scanner and had them read stories involving deliberate and accidental harms. 7° They found that the ability to exculpate harm-doers in the light of their men­ tal state depends on the part of the brain at the junction between the temporal and parietal lobes, which is illuminated in figure 8-3 (though it’s actually the counterpart of this region in the right hemisphere that lit up in the study). The temporoparietal junction sits at a crossroads for many kinds of information, including the perception of the position of one’s own body, and the perception of the bodies and actions of other people. Saxe had previously shown that the region is necessary for the mental faculty that has been called mentalizing, intuitive psychology, and theory of mind, namely the ability to understand the beliefs and desires of another person?’ There is another kind of moral deliberation that goes beyond the gut: weigh­ ing the consequences of different courses of action. Consider the old chestnut from moral philosophy: a family is hiding from the Nazis in a cellar. Should they smother their baby to prevent it from crying and giving away their loca­ tion, which would result in the deaths of everyone in the family, baby included? How about throwing a fat man in front of a runaway trolley so that his bulk will stop it before it slams into five workers on the track? A utilitarian calculus would say that both killings are permissible, because they would sacrifice one life to save five. Yet many people would balk at smothering the baby or heav­ ing the fat man, presumably because they have a visceral reaction against harming an innocent person with their bare hands. In a logically equivalent dilemma, a bystander to the runaway trolley could save the five workers by diverting it onto a side track, where it would kill just one. In this version, everyone agrees that it’s permissible to throw the switch and save five lives at a cost of one, presumably because it doesn’tfeel like you’re really killing anyone; you’re just failing to prevent the trolley from doing it?2 The philosopher Joshua Greene, working with Cohen and others, has shown that the visceral reaction against smothering the baby or throwing the man in front of the train comes from the amygdala and orbital cortex, whereas the utilitarian thinking that would save the greatest number of lives is com­ puted in a part of the frontal lobe called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, also illuminated in figure 8-3-73 The dorsolateral cortex is the part of the brain that is most involved in intellectual, abstract problem-solving-it lights up, for example, when people do the problems on an IQ test.74 When people consider the case of the crying baby in the cellar, both their orbital cortex (which reacts to the horror of smothering the baby) and their dorsolateral cortex (which calculates lives saved and lost) light up, together with a third part of the brain that deals with conflicting impulses-the anterior cingulate cortex in the 508 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE medial wall of the brain, shown in figure 8-4. The people who deduce that it’s all right to smother the baby show greater activation in the dorsolateral cortex. The temporoparietal junction and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which grew tremendously over the course of evolution, give us the wherewithal to perform cool calculations that deem certain kinds of violence justifiable. Our ambivalence about the outputs of those calculations-whether smothering the baby should be thought of as an act of violence or an act that prevents violence-shows that the quintessentially cerebral parts of the cerebrum are neither inner demons nor better angels. They are cognitive tools that can both foster violence and inhibit it, and as we shall see, both powers are exuberantly employed in the distinctively human forms of violence. My brief tour of the neurobiology of violence barely does justice to our scien­ tific understanding, and our scientific understanding barely does justice to the phenomena themselves. But I hope it has persuaded you that violence does not have a single psychological root but a number of them, working by differ­ ent principles. To understand them, we need to look not just at the hardware of the brain but also at its software-that is, at the reasons people engage in violence. Those reasons are implemented as intricate patterns in the micro­ circuitry of brain tissue; we cannot read them directly from the neurons, any more than we can understand a movie by putting a DVD under a microscope. So the remainder of the chapter will shift to the bird’s-eye view of psychology, while connecting the psychological phenomena to the neuroanatomy. There are many taxonomies of violence, and they tend to make similar distinctions. I will adapt a four-part scheme from Baumeister, splitting one of his categories in two.75 The first category of violence may be called practical, instrumental, exploit­ ative, or predatory. It is the simplest kind of violence: the use of force as a means to an end. The violence is deployed in pursuit of a goal such as greed, lust, or ambition, which is set up by the Seeking system, and it is guided by the entirety of the person’s intelligence, for which the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is a convenient symbol. The second root of violence is dominance-the drive for supremacy over one’s rivals (Baumeister calls it “egotism”). This drive may be tied to the testosterone-fueled Dominance or Intermale Aggression system, though it is by no means confined to males, or even to individual people. As we shall see, groups compete for dominance too. The third root of violence is revenge-the drive to pay back a harm in kind. Its immediate engine is the Rage system, but it can recruit the Seeking system to its cause as well. The fourth root is sadism, the joy of hurting. This motive, puzzling and horrifying in equal measure, may be a by-product of several quirks of our psychology, particularly the Seeking system. The fifth and most consequential cause of violence is ide0. true believers weave a collection of motives into a creed antl people to carry out its destructive goals. An ideology cannot be ide a part of the brain or even with a whole brain, because itis distribut the brains of many people. PREDATION The first category of violence is not really a category at all, because its perpe­ trators have no destructive motive like hate or anger. They simply take the shortest path to something they want, and a living thing happens to be in the way. At best it is a category by exclusion: the absence of any inhibiting factor like sympathy or moral concern. When Immanuel Kant stated the second formulation of his Categorical Imperative-that an act is moral if it treats a person as an end in itself and not as a means to an end-he was in effect defin­ ing morality as the avoidance of this kind of violence. Predation may also be called exploitative, instrumental, or practical violence.76 It coincides with Hobbes’s first cause of quarrel: to invade for gain. It is Dawkins’s survival machine treating another survival machine as a part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is the interpersonal equivalent of Clause­ witz’s dictum that war is merely the continuation of policy by other means. It is Willie Sutton’s answer to the question of why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” It lies beneath the advice of a farmer to increase a horse’s efficiency by castrating it with two bricks. When asked, “Doesn’t that hurt,” the farmer replies, “Not if you keep your thumbs out of the way.” 77 Because predatory violence is just a means to a goal, it comes in as many varieties as there are human goals. The paradigm case is literal predation­ hunting for food or sport-because it involves no animosity toward the victim. Far from hating their quarry, hunters valorize and totemize them, from Paleo­ lithic cave paintings to trophies above the mantels in gentlemen’s clubs. Hunters may even empathize with their prey-proof that empathy alone is not a bar to violence. The ecologist Louis Liebenberg studied the remarkable ability of the !Kung San to infer the whereabouts and physical condition of their game from a few faint tracks as they pursue them across the Kalahari Desert.78 They do it with empathy-putting themselves in the hooves of the animal and imagining what it is feeling and where it is tempted to flee. There may even be an element of love. One night after the ninth inning of a baseball game, I was too comatose to get off the couch or even change the channel and passively watched the fol­ lowing program on the cable sports network. It was a show about fishing, and consisted entirely of footage of a middle-aged man in an aluminum boat on a nondescript stretch of water pulling in one large bass after another. With each catch he brought the fish close to his face and stroked it, making little kissy noises and cooing, “Ooh, aren’t you a beauty! You’re a pretty one! Yes, you are!f’ 510 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE The chasm between the perpetrator’s perspective-amoral, pragmatic, even frivolous…:._and the victim’s is nowhere wider than in our predation of animals. It’s safe to say that the bass, if given the chance, would not reciprocate the fisherman’s affection:, and most people would not want to know the opinion of a broiler chicken or a live lobster on whether the mild pleasure we get from eating their flesh rather than a plate of eggplant justifies the sacrifice they will make. The same incuriosity enables coldhearted predatory violence against humans. .Here are a few examples: Romans suppres�ing provincial rebellions; Mon­ gols razing.cities that resist their conquest; free companies of demobilized soldiers plundering and· raping; colonial settlers expelling or massacring indigenous peoples; gangsters whacking a rival, an informant, or an uncoop­ erative official; rulers assassinating a political opponent or vice versa; govern­ ments jailing or executing dissidents; warring nations bombing enemy cities; hoodlums injuring a victim who resists a robbery or carjacking; criminals killing an eyewitness to a crime; mothers smothering a newborn they feel they cannot raise. Defensive and preemptive violence-doing it to them before they do it to you-is also a form of instrumental violence. Predatory violence may be the most extraordinary and perplexing phe­ nomenon in the human moral landscape precisely because it is so mundane and explicable. We read of an atrocity-say, rebel soldiers encamped on a rooftop in Uganda who passed the time by kidnapping women, tying them up, raping them, and throwing them to their deaths-shake our heads, and ask, “How could people do these things?” 79 We refuse to accept obvious answers, like boredom, lust, or sport, because the suffering of the victim is so obscenely disproportionate to the benefit to the perpetrator. We take the vic­ tim’s point of view and advert to a conception of pure evil. Yet to understand these outrages, we might be better off asking not why they happen but why they don’t happen more often. With the possible exception of Jain priests, all of us engage in predatory violence, if only against insects. In most cases the temptation to prey on humans is inhibited by emotional and cognitive restraints, but in a minority of indi­ viduals these restraints are absent. Psychopaths make up 1 to 3 percent of the male population, depending on whether one uses the broad definition of anti­ social personality disorder, which embraces many kinds of callous troublemak.:. ers, or a narrower definition that picks out the more cunning manipulators.So Psychopaths are liars and bullies from the time they are children, show no capacity for sympathy or remorse, make up 20 to 30 percent of violent criminals, and commit half t11e serious crimes.81 They also perpetrate nonviolent crimes like bilking elderly couples out of their life savings and running a business with ruthless disregard for the welfare of the workforce or stakeholders. As we saw, the regions ot the brain that handle social emotions, especially the amyg­ dala and orbital cortex, are relatively shrunken or umesponsive in psychopaths, hough they may show no other signs of pathology.82 In some pe1;_,pJle, :�igiis:qf ‘/ sychopathy develop after damage to these regions from disease or ut the condition is also partly heritable. Psychopathy may have inority strategy that exploits a large population of trusting cooperators; 83 hough no society can stock its militias and armies exclusively with psycho­ aths, such men are bound to be disproportionately attracted to these adven­ res, with their prospect of plunder and rape. As we saw in chapter 6, genocides nd civil wars often involve a division of labor between the ideologues or war­ iords who run them and the shock troops, including some number of psycho­ 8 ;paths, who are happy to carry them out. 4 .>the psychology of predatory violence consists in the human capacity for • means-end reasoning and the fact that our faculties of moral restraint do not kick in automatically in our dealings with every living thing. But there are two psychological twists in the way that predatory violence is carried out. Though predatory violence is purely practical, the human mind does not stick to abstract reasoning for long. It tends to backslide into evolutionarily prepared and emotionally charged categories. 85 As soon as the objects being preyed upon take protective measures in response, emotions are likely to run high. The human prey may hide and regroup, or they may fight back, perhaps even threatening to destroy the predator preemptively, a kind of instrumental violence of their own that gives rise to a security dilemma or Hobbesian trap. In these cases the predator’s state of mind may shift from dispassionate means­ ends analysis to disgust, hatred, and anger. 86 As we have seen, perpetrators commonly analogize their victims to vermin and treat them with moralized disgust. Or they may see them as existential threats and treat them with hatred, the emotion that, as Aristotle noted, consists of a desire not to punish an adversary but to end its existence. When extermination is not feasible and perpetrators have to continue to deal with their victims, either directly or with the participation of third parties, they may treat them with anger. The preda­ tors may respond to the defensive reprisals of their prey as if they were the ones under attack, and experience a moralized wrath and a thirst for revenge. Thanks to the Moralization Gap, they will minimize their own first strike as necessary and trivial while magnifying the reprisal as unprovoked and dev­ astating. Each side will count the wrongs differently-the perpetrator tallying an even number of strikes and the victim an odd number-and the difference in arithmetic can stoke a spiral of revenge, a dynamic we will explore in a later section. There is a second way self-serving biases can fan a small flame of predatory violence into an inferno. People exaggerate not just their moral rectitude but their power and prospects, a subtype of self-serving bias called positive illu­ sions.87 Hundreds of studies have shown that people overrate their health, leadership ability, intelligence, professional competence, sporting prowess, 512 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE and managerial skills. People also hold the nonsensical belief that they are inherently lucky. Most people think they are more likely than the average person to attain a good first job, to have gifted children, and to live to a ripe old age. They also think that they are less likely than the average person to be the victim of an accident, crime, disease, depression, unwanted pregnancy, or earthquake. Why should people be so deluded? Positive illusions make people happier, more confident, and mentally healthier, but that cannot be the explanation for why they exist, because it only begs the question of why our brains should be designed so that only unrealistic assessments make us happy and confident, as opposed to calibrating our contentment against reality. The most plausible explanation is that positive illusions are a bargaining tactic, a credible bluff. In recruiting an ally to support you in a risky venture, in bargaining for the best deal, or in intimidating an adversary into backing down, you stand to gain if you credibly exaggerate your strengths. Believing your own exaggera­ tion is better than cynically lying about it, because the arms race between lying and lie detection has equipped your audience with the means of seeing through barefaced Hes.88 As long as your exaggerations are not laughable, your audience cannot afford to ignore your self-assessment altogether, because you have more information about yourself than anyone else does, and you have a built-in incentive not to distort your assessment too much or you would con­ stantly blunder into disasters. It would be better for the species if no one exag­ gerated, but our brains were not selected for the benefit of the species, and no individual can afford to be the only honest one in a community of self­ enhancers.89 Overconfidence makes the tragedy of predation even worse. If people were completely rational, they would launch an act of predatory aggression only if they were likely to succeed and only if the spoils of the success exceeded the losses they would incur in the fighting. By the same token, the weaker party should concede as soon as the outcome was a foregone conclusion. A world with rational actors might see plenty of exploitation, but it should not see many fights or wars. Violence would come about only if the two parties were so closely matched that a fight was the only way to determine who was stronger. But in a world with positive illusions, an aggressor may be emboldened to attack, and a defender emboldened to resist, well out of proportion to their odds of success. As Winston Churchill noted, “Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.” 90 The result can be wars of attrition (in both the game-theoretic and military sense), which, as we saw in chapter 5, are among the most destructive events in history, plumping out the tail of high-magnitude wars in the power-law distribution of deadly quarrels. Military historians have long noted that leaders make decisions in war that are reckless to the point of delusion.91 The invasions of Russia by Napoleon 514 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE Empire on the other all predicted that the war would be a rout and their vic­ torious troops would be home by Christmas. Ecstatic crowds of young men on both sides poured out of their homes to enlist, not because they were altruists eager to die for their country but because they didn’t think they were going to die. They couldn’t all be right, and they weren’t. In Vietnam, three American administrations escalated the war despite ample intelligence telling them that victory at an acceptable cost was unlikely. Destructive wars of attrition, Johnson points out, needn’t require that both sides be certain or even highly confident of prevailing. All it takes is that the subjective probabilities of the adversaries sum to a value greater than one. In modern conflicts, he notes, where the fog of war is particularly thick and the leadership removed from the facts on the ground, overconfidence can survive longer than it would have in the small-scale battles in which our positive illu­ sions evolved. Another modern danger is that the leadership of nations is likely to go to men who are at the right tail of the distribution of confidence, well into the region of overconfidence. Johnson expected that wars stoked by overconfidence should be less com­ mon in democracies, where the flow of information is more likely to expose the illusions of leaders to cold splashes of reality. But he found that it was the flow of information itself, rather than just the existence of a democratic system, that made the difference. Johnson published his book in 2004, and the choice of an image for the cover was a no-brainer: the famous 2003 photograph of a flight-suited George W. Bush on the deck of an aircraft carrier festooned with the banner “Mission Accomplished.” Overconfidence did not undermine the conduct of the Iraq War itself (other than for Saddam Hussein, of course), but it was fatal to the postwar goal of bringing stable democracy to Iraq, which the Bush administration catastrophically failed to plan for. The political sci­ entist Karen Alter conducted an analysis before the war broke out showing that the Bush administration was unusually closed in its decision-making process.95 In a textbook illustration of the phenomenon of groupthink, the prewar policy team believed in its own infallibility and virtue, shut out contradictory assess­ ments, enforced consensus, and self-censored private doubts.96 Just before the Iraq War, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld observed, There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns-the ones we don’t know we don’t know. Johnson, following a remark by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, notes that Rums­ feld omitted a crucial fourth category, the unknown knowns-things that are known, or at least could be known, but are ignored or suppressed. It was the unknown knowns that allowed a moderate amount of instrumental violence INNER DEMONS 515 (a few weeks of shock and awe) to unleash an open-ended exchange of every other kind of violence. DOMINANCE The colorful idioms chest-thumping, having a chip on his shoulder, drawing a line in the sand, throwing down the gauntlet, and pissing contest all denote an action that is inherently meaningless but provokes a contest for dominance. That is a sign that we are dealing with a category that is very different from preda­ tory, practical, or instrumental violence. Even though nothing tangible is at stake in contests for dominance, they are among the deadliest forms of human quarrel. At one end of the magnitude scale, we have seen that many wars in the Ages of Dynasties, Sovereignty, and Nationalism were fought over nebu­ lous claims to national preeminence, including World War I. At the other end of the scale, the single largest motive for homicide is “altercations of relatively trivial origin; insult, curse, jostling, etc.” In their book on homicide, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson advise that “the participants in these ‘trivial altercations’ behave as if a great deal more is at issue than small change or access to a pool table, and their evaluations of what is at stake deserve our respectful consideration.” 97 Contests of dominance are not as ridiculous as they seem. In any zone of anarchy, an agent can protect its interests only by cultivating a reputation for a willingness and an ability to defend itself against depredations. Though this mettle can be demonstrated in retaliation after the fact, it’s better to flaunt it proactively, before any dam­ age is done. To prove that one’s implicit threats are not hot air, it may be neces­ sary to seek theaters in which one’s resolve and retaliatory capacity can be displayed: a way to broadcast the message “Don’t fuck with me.” Everyone has an interest in knowing the relative fighting abilities of the agents in their midst, because all parties have an interest in preempting any fight whose outcome is a foregone conclusion and that would needlessly bloody both fight­ ers if carried out.98 When the relative prowesses of the members of a commu­ nity are stable and widely known, we call it a dominance hierarchy. Dominance hierarchies are based on more than brute strength. Since not even the baddest primate can win a fight of one against three, dominance depends on the abil­ ity to recruit allies-who, in turn, don’t choose their teammates at random but join up with the stronger and shrewder ones.99 The commodity that is immediately at stake in contests of dominance is information, and that feature differentiates dominance from predation in sev­ eral ways. One is that while contests of dominance can escalate into lethal clashes, especially when the contestants are closely matched and intoxicated with positive illusions, most of the time (in humans and animals alike) they are settled with displays. The antagonists flaunt their strength, brandish their weapons, and play games of brinkmanship; the contest ends when one side 516 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE backs down.1°0 With predation, in contrast, the only point is to obtain an object of desire. Another implication of the informational stakes in contests of dominance is that the violence is interwoven with exchanges of data. Reputation is a social construction that is built on what logicians call common knowledge. To avert a fight, a pair ofrivals must not only know who is stronger, but each must know that the. other. knows, and must know that the other knows that he knows, and so on.101 Common knowledge may be undermined by a contrary opinion, and so contests of dominance are fought in arenas of public informa� tion. They may be sparked by an insult, particularly in cultures of honor, and in thosethat sanction formal dueling. The insult is treated like a physical injury or theft, and it sets off an urge for violent revenge (which can make the psy� chology of dominance blend into the psychology of revenge, discussed in the next section). Studies of American street violence have found that the young men who endorse a code of honor are the ones most likely to commit an act of serious violence in the following year.102 They also have found that the pres­ ence of an audience doubles the likelihood that an argument between two men will escalate to violence.103 When dominance is reckoned within a closed group, it is a zero-sum game: if someone’s rank goes up, another’s has to go down. Dominance tends to erupt in violence within small groups like gangs and isolated workplaces, where a person’s rank within the clique determines the entirety of his social worth. If people belong to many groups and can switch in and out of them, they are more likely to find one in which they are esteemed, and an insult or slight is less consequential.104 Since the only commodity at stake in contests of dominance is information, once the point has been made about who’s the boss, the violence can come to an end without setting off rounds of vendetta. The primatologist Frans de Waal discovered that in most primate species, after two animals have fought, they will reconcile.105 They may touch hands, kiss, embrace, and in the case of bonobos, have sex. This makes one wonder why they bother to fight in the first place if they were just going to make up afterward, and why they make up afterward if they had reason to fight. The reason is that reconciliation occurs only among primates whose long-term interests are bound together. The ties that bind may be genetic relatedness, collective defense against predators, being in cahoots against a third party, or, in an experiment, getting fed only if they work together.106 The overlap of interests is not perfect, so they still have reason to fight for dominance or retaliation within the group, but it is not zero, so they cannot afford to smack each other around indefinitely, let alone kill each other. Among primates whose interests are not bound up in any of these ways, adversaries are unforgiving, and violenceis likelier to escalate. Chim­ panzees, for example, reconcile after a fight within their community, but they never reconcile after a battle or raid with members of a different community.107 INNER DEMONS 517 we shall see in the next chapter, reconciliation among humans is also gov­ ed by the perception of common interests. metaphor of competitive distance urination suggests that the gender with equipment best suited to competing is the gender that is most likely to ticipate in contests of dominance. Though in many primate species, includ­ g humans, both sexes jockey for preeminence, usually against members of eir own sex, it seems to loom larger in the minds of men than in the minds -women, taking on a mystical status as a priceless commodity worth almost y sacrifice. Surveys of personal values in men and women find that the men ssign a lopsided value to professional status compared to all the other plea­ ures of life.108 They take greater risks, and they show more confidence and ore overconfidence.1°9 Most labor economists consider these sex differences be a contributor to the gender gap in earnings and professional success. And men are, of course, by far the more violent sex. Though the exact ratios ry, in every society it is the males more than the females who play-fight, 1;,ully, fight for real, carry weapons, enjoy violent entertainment, fantasize about killing, kill for real, rape, start wars, and fight in wars. Not only is the !direction of the sex difference universal, but the first domino is almost cer­ tainly biological. The difference is found in most other primates, emerges in toddlerhood, and may be seen in boys who (because of anomalous genitalia) are secretly raised as girls. We have already seen why the sex difference evolved: mammalian males can reproduce more quickly than females, so they compete for sexual oppor­ tunities, while females tilt their priorities toward ensuring the survival of themselves and their offspring. Men have more to gain in violent competition, and also less to lose, because fatherless children are more likely to survive than motherless ones. That does not mean that women avoid violence altogether-Chuck Berry speculated that Venus de Milo lost both her arms in a wrestling match over a brown-eyed handsome man-but they find it less appealing. Women’s competitive tactics consist in less physically perilous rela­ tional aggression such as gossip and ostracism. 3 In theory, violent competition for mates and violent competition for domi­ nance needn’t go together. One doesn’t have to invoke dominance to explain why Genghis Khan inseminated so many women that his Y chromosome is common in Central Asia today; it’s enough to observe that he killed the wom­ en’s fathers and husbands. But given that social primates regulate violence by deferring to dominant individuals, dominance and mating success in practice went hand in hand during most of our species’ history. In nonstate societies, dominant men have more wives, more girlfriends, and more affairs with other men’s wives. 4 In the six earliest empires, the correlation between status and mating success can be quantified precisely. Laura Betzig found that emperors often had thousands of wives and concubines, princes had hundreds, 0 11 111 112 11 11 l’ioblemen had dozens, upper-class men had up to a dozen, and middle-class men had three or four. 5 (It follows mathematically that many lower-class men had none-and thus a strong incentive to fight their way out of the lower class.) Recently, with the advent of reliable contraception an…
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