The mindset behind gentle commerce, unlike that of the other pacifying forces I review in this chapter, has not been directly tested in the psychology lab. We do know that when people (and for that matter, monkeys) are joined in a positive-sum game requiring them to collaborate in order to achieve a goal that benefits them both, hostile tensions can dissolve (chapter 8). We also know that exchange in the real world can be a lucrative positive-sum game. But we don’t know whether exchange itself reduces hostile tensions. As far as I know, in the vast literature on empathy and cooperation and aggression, no one has tested whether people who have consummated a mutually profitable exchange are less likely to shock each other or to spike each other’s food with three-alarm hot sauce. I suspect that among researchers, gentle commerce is just not a sexy idea. Cultural and intellectual elites have always felt superior to businesspeople, and it doesn’t occur to them to credit mere merchants with something as noble as peace.6
FEMINIZATION
Depending on how you look at it, the late Tsutomu Yamaguchi is either the world’s luckiest man or the world’s unluckiest man. Yamaguchi survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima, but then made an unfortunate choice as to where to go to flee the devastation: Nagasaki. He survived that blast as well and lived another sixty-five years, passing away in 2010 at the age of ninety-three. A man who survived the only two nuclear strikes in history deserves our respectful attention, and before he died he offered a prescription for peace in the nuclear age: “The only people who should be allowed to govern countries with nuclear weapons are mothers, those who are still breast-feeding their babies.”7
Yamaguchi was invoking the most fundamental empirical generalization about violence, that it is mainly committed by men. From the time they are boys, males play more violently than females, fantasize more about violence, consume more violent entertainment, commit the lion’s share of violent crimes, take more delight in punishment and revenge, take more foolish risks in aggressive attacks, vote for more warlike policies and leaders, and plan and carry out almost all the wars and genocides (chapters 2, 3, 7, and 8). Even when the sexes overlap and the difference between their averages is small, the difference can decide a close election, or set off a spiral of belligerence in which each side has to be a bit more bellicose than the other. Historically, women have taken the leadership in pacifist and humanitarian movements out of proportion to their influence in other political institutions of the time, and recent decades, in which women and their interests have had an unprecedented influence in all walks of life, are also the decades in which wars between developed states became increasingly unthinkable (chapters 5 and 7). James Sheehan’s characterization of the postwar transformation of the mission of the European state, from military prowess to cradle-to-grave nurturance, is almost a caricature of traditional gender roles.
Yamaguchi’s exact prescription, of course, can be debated. George Shultz recalls that when he told Margaret Thatcher in 1986 that he had stood by as Ronald Reagan suggested to Mikhail Gorbachev that they abolish nuclear weapons, she clobbered him with her handbag.8 But, Yamaguchi might reply, Thatcher’s own children were already grown up, and in any case her views were tuned to a world that was run by men. Since the world’s nuclear states will not all be governed by women anytime soon, let alone by nursing mothers, we will never know whether Yamaguchi’s prescription is right. But he had a point when he speculated that a more feminized world is a more peaceful world.
Female-friendly values may be expected to reduce violence because of the psychological legacy of the basic biological difference between the sexes, namely that males have more of an incentive to compete for sexual access to females, while females have more of an incentive to stay away from risks that would make their children orphans. Zero-sum competition, whether it takes the form of the contests for women in tribal and knightly societies or the contests for honor, status, dominance, and glory in modern ones, is more a man’s obsession than a woman’s. Suppose that in the Pacifist’s Dilemma, some portion of the rewards of victory and the costs of defeat—say, 80 percent—consists of the swelling and bruising of the male ego. And suppose that the choices are now made by female actors, so these psychic payoffs are reduced accordingly (figure 10–4; I have omitted the symmetrical Other’s Choices for clarity). Now peace is more tempting than victory, and war more costly than defeat. The pacifist option wins hands-down. The reversal would be even more dramatic if we adjusted the war cell to reflect a greater cost of violent conflict to women than to men.
To be sure, a shift from male to female influence in decision-making may not be completely exogenous. In a society in which rapacious invaders may swoop in at any moment, the costs of defeat to both sexes can be catastrophic, and anything short of the most truculent martial values may be suicidal. A female-tilted value system may be a luxury enjoyed by a society that is already safe from predatory invasion. But a relative tilt in power toward women’s interests can also be caused by exogenous forces that have nothing to do with violence. In traditional societies, one of these forces is living arrangements: women are better off in societies in which they stay with their birth family under the wing of their fathers and brothers, and their husbands are visitors, than in societies in which they move in with their husband’s clan and are dominated by their husbands and his kin (chapter 7). In modern societies, the exogenous forces include technological and economic advances that freed women from chronic child-rearing and domestic duties, such as store-bought food, labor-saving devices, contraception, longer life spans, and the shift to an information economy.
FIGURE 10–4. How feminization can resolve the Pacifist’s Dilemma
Societies in which women get a better deal, both traditional and modern, tend to be societies that have less organized violence (chapter 8). This is obvious enough in the tribes and chiefdoms that literally go to war to abduct women or avenge past abductions, such as the Yanomamö and the Homeric Greeks (chapters 1 and 2). But it may also be seen among contemporary countries in the contrast between the low levels of political and judicial violence in the über-feminist democracies of Western Europe and the high levels in the genital-cutting, adulteress-stoning, burqa-cladding Sharia states of Islamic Africa and Asia (chapter 6).
Feminization need not consist of women literally wielding more power in decisions on whether to go to war. It can also consist in a society moving away from a culture of manly honor, with its approval of violent retaliation for insults, toughening of boys through physical punishment, and veneration of martial glory (chapter 8). This has been the trend in the democracies of Europe and the developed world and in the bluer states of America (chapters 3 and 7). Several conservative scholars have ruefully suggested to me that the modern West has been diminished by the loss of virtues like bravery and valor and the ascendancy of materialism, frivolity, decadence, and effeminacy. Now, I have been assuming that violence is always a bad thing except when it prevents greater violence, but these men are correct that this is a value judgment, and that no logical argument inherently favors peace over honor and glory. But I would think that the potential victims of all this manliness deserve a say in this discussion, and they may not agree that their lives and limbs are a price worth paying for the glorification of masculine virtues.
Feminization is a pacifying development for yet another reason. Social and sexual arrangements that favor the interests of women tend to drain the swamps where violent male-male competition proliferates. One of these arrangements is marriage, in which men commit themselves to investing in the children they sire rather than competing with each other for sexual opportunities. Getting married reduces men’s testosterone and their likelihood of living a life of crime, and we saw that American homicide rates plunged in the marriage-happy 1940s and 1950s, rose in the marriage-delaying 1960s and 1970s, and remain high in African American communities that have particularly low rates of marriage (chapter 3).
Another swamp-drainer is equality in numbers. Unpoliced all-male social milieus, s
uch as the cowboy and mining camps of the American frontier, are almost always violent (chapter 3). The West was wild because it was young men who went there while the young women stayed behind in the East. But societies can become stacked with males for a more sinister reason, namely that their female counterparts were aborted or killed at birth. In an article called “A Surplus of Men, a Deficit of Peace,” the political scientists Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer show that the traditional killing of baby girls in China has long resulted in large numbers of unattached men.9 They are always poor men, because the richer ones attract the scarce women. These “bare branches,” as they are called in China, congregate in gangs of drifters who brawl and duel among themselves and rob and terrorize settled populations. They can even grow into armies that menace local or national governments. A leader can clamp down on the gangs by violent repression, or he can try to co-opt them, which usually requires adopting a macho ruling philosophy that is congenial to their mores. Best of all, he can export their destructive energy by sending them to other territories as migrant workers, colonists, or soldiers. When the leaders of rival countries all try to dispose of their excess men, the result can be a grinding war of attrition. As Hudson and den Boer put it, “Each society has plenty of bare branches to spare in such a conflict—and the respective governments might be happy to spare them.”10
Traditional gynecide, joined in the 1980s by the female-abortion industry, injected a bolus of excess males into the population structures of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, and parts of India (chapter 7).11 These surpluses of men bode poorly for the immediate prospects of peace and democracy in those regions. Over the longer term, the sex ratio may eventually be rebalanced by the feminist and humanitarian concern with the right of female fetuses to take their first breath, together with political leaders’ finally grasping the demographic arithmetic and enhancing the incentives to raise daughters. The resulting boon for baby girls would translate into less violent societies. But until the first fifty-fifty cohorts are born and grow up, those societies may be in for a bumpy ride.
A society’s respect for the interests of women has one more connection to its rate of violence. Violence is a problem not just of too many males but of too many young males. At least two large studies have suggested that countries with a larger proportion of young men are more likely to fight interstate and civil wars (chapter 6).12 A population pyramid with a thick base of young people is dangerous not just because young men like to raise hell, and in bottom-heavy societies will outnumber their more prudent elders. It’s also dangerous because these young men are likely to be deprived of status and mates. The sclerotic economies of countries in the developing world cannot nimbly put a youth bulge to work, leaving many of the men unemployed or underemployed. And if the society has a degree of official or de facto polygyny, with many young women being usurped by older or richer men, the surfeit of marginalized young people will turn into a surfeit of marginalized young men. These men have nothing to lose, and may find work and meaning in militias, warlord gangs, and terrorist cells (chapter 6).
The title Sex and War sounds like the ultimate guy bait, but this recent book is a manifesto for the empowerment of women.13 The reproductive biologist Malcolm Potts, writing with the political scientist Martha Campbell and the journalist Thomas Hayden, has amassed evidence that when women are given access to contraception and the freedom to marry on their own terms, they have fewer offspring than when the men of their societies force them to be baby factories. And that, in turn, means that their countries’ populations will be less distended by a thick slab of young people at the bottom. (Contrary to an earlier understanding, a country does not have to become affluent before its rate of population growth comes down.) Potts and his coauthors argue that giving women more control over their reproductive capacity (always the contested territory in the biological battle of the sexes) may be the single most effective way of reducing violence in the dangerous parts of the world today. But this empowerment often must proceed in the teeth of opposition from traditional men who want to preserve their control over female reproduction, and from religious institutions that oppose contraception and abortion.
Several varieties of feminization, then—direct political empowerment, the deflation of manly honor, the promotion of marriage on women’s terms, the right of girls to be born, and women’s control over their own reproduction—have been forces in the decline of violence. The parts of the world that lag in this historical march are the parts that lag in the decline of violence. But worldwide polling data show that even in the most benighted countries there is considerable pent-up demand for female empowerment, and many international organizations are committed to hurrying it along (chapters 6 and 7). These are hopeful signs in the long term, if not the immediate term, for further reductions in violent conflict in the world.
THE EXPANDING CIRCLE
The last two pacifying forces scramble the psychological payoffs of violence. The first is the expansion of the circle of sympathy. Suppose that living in a more cosmopolitan society, one that puts us in contact with a diverse sample of other people and invites us to take their points of view, changes our emotional response to their well-being. Imagine taking this change to its logical conclusion: our own well-being and theirs have become so intermingled that we literally love our enemies and feel their pain. Our potential adversary’s payoffs would simply be summed with our own (and vice versa), and pacifism would become overwhelmingly preferable to aggression (figure 10–5).
Of course, a perfect fusion of the interests of every living human is an unattainable nirvana. But smaller increments in the valuation of other people’s interests—say, a susceptibility to pangs of guilt when thinking about enslaving, torturing, or annihilating others—could shift the likelihood of aggressing against them.
We have seen evidence for both links in this causal chain: exogenous events that expanded opportunities for perspective-taking, and a psychological response that turns perspective-taking into sympathy (chapters 4 and 9). Beginning in the 17th century, technological advances in publishing and transportation created a Republic of Letters and a Reading Revolution in which the seeds of the Humanitarian Revolution took root (chapter 4). More people read books, including fiction that led them to inhabit the minds of other people, and satire that led them to question their society’s norms. Vivid depictions of the suffering wrought by slavery, sadistic punishments, war, and cruelty to children and animals preceded the reforms that outlawed or reduced those practices. Though chronology does not prove causation, the laboratory studies showing that hearing or reading a first-person narrative can enhance people’s sympathy for the narrator at least make it plausible (chapter 9).
FIGURE 10–5. How empathy and reason resolve the Pacifist’s Dilemma
Literacy, urbanization, mobility, and access to mass media continued their rise in the 19th and 20th centuries, and in the second half of the 20th a Global Village began to emerge that made people even more aware of others unlike themselves (chapters 5 and 7). Just as the Republic of Letters and the Reading Revolution helped to kindle the Humanitarian Revolution of the 18th century, the Global Village and the electronics revolution may have helped along the Long Peace, New Peace, and Rights Revolutions of the 20th. Though we cannot prove the common observation that media coverage accelerated the civil rights movement, antiwar sentiment, and the fall of communism, the perspective-sympathy studies are suggestive, and we saw several statistical links between the cosmopolitan mixing of peoples and the endorsement of humanistic values (chapters 7 and 9).14
THE ESCALATOR OF REASON
The expanding circle and the escalator of reason are powered by some of the same exogenous causes, particularly literacy, cosmopolitanism, and education.15 And their pacifying effect may be depicted by the same fusion of interests in the Pacifist’s Dilemma. But the expanding circle (as I have been using the term) and the escalator of reason are conceptually distinct (chapter 9). The first involves occup
ying another person’s vantage point and imagining his or her emotions as if they were one’s own. The second involves ascending to an Olympian, superrational vantage point—the perspective of eternity, the view from nowhere—and considering one’s own interests and another person’s as equivalent.
The escalator of reason has an additional exogenous source: the nature of reality, with its logical relationships and empirical facts that are independent of the psychological makeup of the thinkers who attempt to grasp them. As humans have honed the institutions of knowledge and reason, and purged superstitions and inconsistencies from their systems of belief, certain conclusions were bound to follow, just as when one masters the laws of arithmetic certain sums and products are bound to follow (chapters 4 and 9). And in many cases the conclusions are ones that led people to commit fewer acts of violence.
Throughout the book we have seen the beneficial consequences of an application of reason to human affairs. At various times in history superstitious killings, such as in human sacrifice, witch hunts, blood libels, inquisitions, and ethnic scapegoating, fell away as the factual assumptions on which they rested crumbled under the scrutiny of a more intellectually sophisticated populace (chapter 4). Carefully reasoned briefs against slavery, despotism, torture, religious persecution, cruelty to animals, harshness to children, violence against women, frivolous wars, and the persecution of homosexuals were not just hot air but entered into the decisions of the people and institutions who attended to the arguments and implemented reforms (chapters 4 and 7).