The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

  In traditional Western marriages, for example, the husband wielded Authority over the wife. The model was mostly overturned in the 1970s, and some couples influenced by feminism switched to Equality Matching, splitting housework and child-rearing down the middle and strictly auditing the hours devoted to them. Since the businesslike psychology of Equality Matching clashes with the intimacy that most couples crave, most modern marriages have settled on Communal Sharing—with the consequence that many wives feel that the couple’s failure to keep tabs on contributions to household duties leaves them overworked and underappreciated. The spouses may also carve out Rational-Legal exceptions, such as a prenuptial agreement, or the stipulation in their wills of separate inheritances for the children of their previous marriages.

  Alternative linkages between a relational model and a resource or set of social roles define how cultures differ from one another. The members of one society may allow land to be bartered or sold, and be shocked to learn of another society that does the same with brides—or vice versa. In one culture, a woman’s sexuality may fall under the Authority of the males in her family; in another, she is free to share it with her lover in a Communal relationship; in still another, she may barter it for an equivalent favor without stigma, an example of Equality Matching. In some societies, a killing must be avenged by the victim’s kinsmen (Equality Matching); in others, it may be compensated with a wergild (Market Pricing); in still others, it is punished by the state (Authority Ranking).

  A recognition that someone belongs to a different culture can mitigate, to some extent, the outrage ordinarily triggered by the violation of a relational model. Such violations can even be a source of humor, as in old comedies in which a hapless immigrant or rural bumpkin haggles over the price of a train ticket, grazes his sheep in a public park, or offers to settle a debt by betrothing his daughter in marriage. The formula is reversed in Borat, in which the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen pokes fun at the willingness of culturally sensitive Americans to tolerate the outrageous behavior of an obnoxious immigrant in their midst. Tolerance may run out, however, when a violation breaches a sacred value, as when immigrants to Western countries practice female genital cutting, honor killings, or the sale of underage brides, and when Westerners disrespect the prophet Muhammad by depicting him in novels, satirizing him in editorial cartoons, or allowing schoolchildren to name a teddy bear after him.

  Differences in the deployment of relational models also define political ideologies.188 Fascism, feudalism, theocracy, and other atavistic ideologies are based on the primal relational models of Communal Sharing and Authority Ranking. The interests of an individual are submerged within a community (fascist comes from an Italian word for “bundle”), and the community is dominated by a military, aristocratic, or ecclesiastical hierarchy. Communism envisioned a Communal Sharing of resources (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”), an Equality Matching of the means of production, and an Authority Ranking of political control (in theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat; in practice, a nomenklatura of commissars under a charismatic dictator). A kind of populist socialism seeks Equality Matching for life’s necessities, such as land, medicine, education, and child care. At the other pole of the continuum, libertarians would allow people to negotiate virtually any resource under Market Pricing, including organs, babies, medical care, sexuality, and education.

  Tucked in between these poles is the familiar liberal-conservative continuum. In several surveys, Haidt has shown that liberals believe that morality is a matter of preventing harm and enforcing fairness (the values that line up with Shweder’s Autonomy and Fiske’s Equality Matching). Conservatives give equal weight to all five foundations, including In-group Loyalty (values such as stability, tradition, and patriotism), Purity/Sanctity (values such as propriety, decency, and religious observance), and Authority/Respect (values such as respect for authority, deference to God, acknowledgment of gender roles, and military obedience).189 The American culture war, with its clashes over taxes, medical insurance, welfare, gay marriage, abortion, the size of the military, the teaching of evolution, profanity in the media, and the separation of church and state, is fought in large part over different conceptions of the legitimate moral concerns of the state. Haidt notes that the ideologues at each pole are apt to view their opposite number as amoral, whereas in fact the moral circuitry in all of their brains is burning just as brightly, while filled with different conceptions of what morality comprises.

  Before spelling out the connections between moral psychology and violence, let me use the theory of relational models to resolve a psychological puzzle that has been left hanging from earlier chapters. Many moral advances have taken the form of a shift in sensibilities that made an action seem more ridiculous than sinful, such as dueling, bullfighting, and jingoistic war. And many effective social critics, such as Swift, Johnson, Voltaire, Twain, Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, Tom Lehrer, and George Carlin have been smart-ass comedians rather than thundering prophets. What in our psychology allows the joke to be mightier than the sword?

  Humor works by confronting an audience with an incongruity, which may be resolved by switching to another frame of reference. And in that alternative frame of reference, the butt of the joke occupies a lowly or undignified status.190 When Woody Allen says, “I’m very proud of my gold watch. My grandfather sold it to me on his deathbed,” listeners are at first surprised that an emotionally precious heirloom would be sold rather than given, particularly by someone who cannot profit from the sale. Then they realize that the Woody Allen character is unloved and comes from a family of venal oddballs. Often the first reference frame, which sets up the incongruity, consists of a prevailing relational model, and to get the joke the audience must step outside it, as in the switch from Communal Sharing to Market Pricing in the Woody Allen joke.

  Humor with a political or moral agenda can stealthily challenge a relational model that is second nature to an audience by forcing them to see that it leads to consequences that the rest of their minds recognize as absurd. Rufus T. Firefly’s willingness to declare war in response to a wholly imagined insult in Duck Soup deconstructs the Authority Ranking ethos of national grandeur and was appreciated in an era in which the image of war was shifting from thrilling and glorious to wasteful and stupid. Satire also served as an accelerant to recent social changes, such as the 1960s portrayals of racists and sexists as thick-witted Neanderthals and of Vietnam hawks as bloodthirsty psychopaths. The Soviet Union and its satellites also harbored a deep underground current of satire, as in the common definition of the two Cold War ideologies: “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; Communism is the exact opposite.”

  According to the 18th-century writer Mary Wortley Montagu, “Satire should, like a polished razor keen / Wound with a touch that’s scarcely felt or seen.” But satire is seldom polished that keenly, and the butts of a joke may be all too aware of the subversive power of humor. They may react with a rage that is stoked by the intentional insult to a sacred value, the deflation of their dignity, and a realization that laughter indicates common knowledge of both. The lethal riots in 2005 provoked by the editorial cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (for example, one showing Muhammad in heaven greeting newly arrived suicide bombers with “Stop, we have run out of virgins!”) show that when it comes to the deliberate undermining of a sacred relational model, humor is no laughing matter.

  How do the relational models that make up the moral sense license the various kinds of violence that people feel are morally legitimate? And what degree of freedom allows societies to throttle down moralistic violence or, better still, shift it into reverse? All the relational models invite moralistic punishment of the people who violate their rules of engagement. But each model licenses a distinctive kind of violence as well.191

  Human beings, Fiske notes, need not relate to one another using any of the models at all, a state he calls a null or asocial relationship. People who do
n’t fall under a relational model are dehumanized: they are seen as lacking the essential features of human nature and are treated, in effect, like inanimate objects which may be ignored, exploited, or preyed upon at will.192 An asocial relationship thus sets the stage for the predatory violence of conquest, rape, assassination, infanticide, strategic bombing, colonial expulsions, and other crimes of convenience.

  Placing other people under the aegis of a relational model imposes at least some obligation to take their interests into account. Communal Sharing has sympathy and warmth built into it—but only for members of the in-group. Fiske’s collaborator Nick Haslam has argued that Communal Sharing can lead to a second kind of dehumanization: not the mechanistic dehumanization of an asocial relationship, but an animalistic dehumanization that denies to outsiders the traits that are commonly perceived as uniquely human, such as reason, individuality, self-control, morality, and culture.193 Rather than being treated with callousness or indifference, such outsiders are treated with disgust or contempt. Communal Sharing may encourage this dehumanization because the excluded people are seen as lacking the pure and sacred essence that unites the members of the tribe, and thereby they threaten to pollute it with their animal contaminants. So Communal Sharing, for all its cuddly connotations, supports the mindset behind genocidal ideologies based on tribe, race, ethnicity, and religion.

  Authority Ranking also has two sides. It brings a paternalistic responsibility to protect and support one’s underlings, and thus may be the psychological basis of the Pacification Process in which overlords protect their subject peoples from internecine violence. In a similar way, it furnishes the moral rationalizations employed by slaveholders, colonial overlords, and benevolent despots. But Authority Ranking also justifies violent punishment for insolence, insubordination, disobedience, treason, blasphemy, heresy, and lèse-majesté. When welded to Communal Sharing, it justifies group-over-group violence, including imperial and jingoistic conquest and the subjugation of subordinate castes, colonies, and slaves.

  More benevolent is the obligation of reciprocal exchange in Equality Matching, which gives each party a stake in the continued existence and well-being of the other. Equality Matching also encourages a modicum of perspective-taking, which, as we have seen, can turn into genuine sympathy. The pacifying effect of commerce between individuals and nations may depend on a mindset in which exchange partners, even if they are not genuinely loved, are at least valued. On the other hand, Equality Matching supplies the rationale for tit-for-tat retaliation: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, blood for blood. As we saw in chapter 8, even people in modern societies are apt to conceive of criminal punishment as just deserts rather than as general or specific deterrence.194

  Rational-Legal reasoning, the add-on to the moral repertoire in literate and numerate societies, does not come with its own intuitions or emotions, and by itself neither encourages nor discourages violence. Unless all people are explicitly enfranchised and granted ownership of their own bodies and property, the amoral pursuit of profit in a market economy can exploit them in slave markets, human trafficking, and the opening of foreign markets with gunboats. And the deployment of quantitative tools can be used to maximize kill ratios in the waging of high-tech war. Yet Rational-Legal reasoning, as we shall see, can also be put in the service of a utilitarian morality that calculates the greatest good for the greatest number, and that titrates the amount of legitimate police and military force to the minimum necessary to reduce the aggregate amount of violence.195

  What, then, are the historical changes in moral psychology that encouraged reductions in violence such as the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, and the Rights Revolutions?

  The direction of the change in prevailing models is clear enough. “Over the last three centuries throughout the world,” Fiske and Tetlock observe, “there has been a rapidly accelerating tendency of social systems as a whole to move from Communal Sharing to Authority Ranking to Equality Matching to Market Pricing.”196 And if we use the polling data from chapter 7 as an indication that social liberals are at the leading edge of changes in attitudes that eventually drag along social conservatives as well, then Haidt’s data on the moral concerns of liberals and conservatives tell the same story. In judging the importance of moral concerns, recall, social liberals place little weight on In-group Loyalty and Purity/Sanctity (which Fiske lumps under Communal Sharing), and they place little weight on Authority/Respect. Instead they invest all their moral concern in Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity. Social conservatives spread their moral portfolio over all five.197 The trend toward social liberalism, then, is a trend away from communal and authoritarian values and toward values based on equality, fairness, autonomy, and legally enforced rights. Though both liberals and conservatives may deny that any such a trend has taken place, consider the fact that no mainstream conservative politician today would invoke tradition, authority, cohesion, or religion to justify racial segregation, keeping women out of the workforce, or criminalizing homosexuality, arguments they made just a few decades ago.198

  Why might a disinvestment of moral resources from community, sanctity, and authority militate against violence? One reason is that communality can legitimize tribalism and jingoism, and authority can legitimize government repression. But a more general reason is that a retrenchment of the moral sense to smaller territories leaves fewer transgressions for which people may legitimately be punished. There is a bedrock of morality based on autonomy and fairness on which everyone, traditional and modern, liberal and conservative, agrees. No one objects to the use of government violence to put assailants, rapists, and murderers behind bars. But defenders of traditional morality wish to heap many nonviolent infractions on top of this consensual layer, such as homosexuality, licentiousness, blasphemy, heresy, indecency, and desecration of sacred symbols. For their moral disapproval to have teeth, traditionalists must get the Leviathan to punish those offenders as well. Expunging these offenses from the law books gives the authorities fewer grounds for clubbing, cuffing, paddling, jailing, or executing people.

  The momentum of social norms in the direction of Market Pricing gives many people the willies, but it would, for better or worse, extrapolate the trend toward nonviolence. Radical libertarians, who love the Market Pricing model, would decriminalize prostitution, drug possession, and gambling, and thereby empty the world’s prisons of millions of people currently kept there by force (to say nothing of sending pimps and drug lords the way of Prohibition gangsters). The progression toward personal freedom raises the question of whether it is morally desirable to trade a measure of socially sanctioned violence for a measure of behavior that many people deem intrinsically wrong, such as blasphemy, homosexuality, drug use, and prostitution. But that’s just the point: right or wrong, retracting the moral sense from its traditional spheres of community, authority, and purity entails a reduction of violence. And that retraction is precisely the agenda of classical liberalism: a freedom of individuals from tribal and authoritarian force, and a tolerance of personal choices as long as they do not infringe on the autonomy and well-being of others.

  The historical direction of morality in modern societies is not just away from Communality and Authority but toward Rational-Legal organization, and that too is a pacifying development. Fiske notes that utilitarian morality, with its goal of securing the greatest good for the greatest number, is a paradigm case of the Market Pricing model (itself a special case of the Rational-Legal mindset).199 Recall that it was the utilitarianism of Cesare Beccaria that led to a reengineering of criminal punishment away from a raw hunger for retribution and toward a calibrated policy of deterrence. Jeremy Bentham used utilitarian reasoning to undermine the rationalizations for punishing homosexuals and mistreating animals, and John Stuart Mill used it to make an early case for feminism. The national reconciliation movements of the 1990s, in which Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and other peacemakers abjured in-kind retributive justice for a cocktail
of truth-telling, amnesty, and measured punishment of the most atrocious perpetrators, was another accomplishment of violence reduction via calculated proportionality. So is the policy of responding to international provocations with economic sanctions and tactics of containment rather than retaliatory strikes.

  If the recent theories of moral psychology are on the right track, then intuitions of community, authority, sacredness, and taboo are part of human nature and will probably always be with us, even if we try to sequester their influence. That is not necessarily a cause for alarm. Relational models can be combined and embedded, and Rational-Legal reasoning that seeks to minimize overall violence can strategically deploy the other mental models in benign ways.200

  If a version of Communal Sharing is assigned to the resource of human life, and applied to a community consisting of the entire species rather than a family, tribe, or nation, it can serve as an emotional undergirding of the abstract principle of human rights. We are all one big family, and no one within it may usurp the life or freedom of anyone else. Authority Ranking may authorize the state’s monopoly on the use of violence in order to prevent greater violence. And the authority of the state over its citizens can be embedded in other authority rankings in the form of democratic checks and balances, as when the president can veto the bills of Congress while at the same time Congress can impeach and remove the president. Sacred values, and the taboos that protect them, can be attached to resources that we decide are genuinely precious, such as identifiable lives, national borders, and the nonuse of chemical and nuclear weapons.