Views from Crestmont Drive

Subtitled “Why Violence Has Declined”
(Viking, Oct. 2011, xxvii + 802pp, including 106pp of notes, references, and index.)

Summary:

Chapter 8 concerns five forces that drive violence: Predation, Dominance, Revenge, Sadism, and Ideology. Humans are not innately aggressive, except in certain circumstances that trigger violence. So a dark side does exist (the human mind is not a blank slate, as Pinker established in an earlier book), but it’s not an ever-present mounting urge. A Moralization Gap describes how humans, subject to self-serving biases, create competing narratives of perpetrator and victim, depending on point of view, and how perpetrators often feel themselves to be victim; i.e. there’s no such thing as pure evil. For each of the five forces, Pinker identifies what drives them, and social developments in the 20th century have ameliorated them.

Comments:

I note several ideas I’ve absorbed and occasionally cite.

• The observation that many people love to watch violence, especially on TV and in movies. And that this, ironically, gives many people, especially conservatives who are prone to alarm, the idea that crime is running rampant across the nation.
• The notion of ‘pure evil’ as a childish oversimplification of a complex world, especially evident once you read accounts by ‘evildoers’ about how they think *they* are the victims, e.g. of assault on the purity of their race or nation. Or wokeness.
• There’s a running theme here of the psychological biases of humans, which of course reflects the author’s two earlier books, HOW THE MIND WORKS and THE BLANK SLATE.
• And of the tendency of humans to be tribal and to arrange themselves in dominance hierarchies
• The broad recognition that the second half of the 20th century was an age of psychology — the ideologies of Freud and behaviorism giving way to genetic rationales for behaviors, and clinical studies to uncover the biases and tendencies of human nature.
• And in general, the 20th century forces that have somewhat overcome these instincts are those considered progressive, or by conservatives, woke. The intermixing of cultures around the world, the recognition of science, the spread of knowledge and experience through books. The retreat from fundamentalist ideologies, including religious ones. An open society in which no one is punished for airing dissenting views.
• Alas, some of these forces seem to be in retreat…

Earlier:
This page page with quotes at the bottom; Post 1; Post 2; Post 3; Post 4; Post 5.

—

Chapter 8: Inner Demons

• We need to explain both violence, and its decline. This goes to whether humans are basically good, or bad, or some multiplex combination.

• The Dark Side
• First to establish that the dark side exists – that most of us *are* wired for violence.
• Evidence: the ‘terrible twos’, after which toddlers become less aggressive. And our ‘inner lives’ – how often many of us imagine killing another person, and how we so enjoy depictions of violence in religious texts, myths, movies, comics, etc, 484-485.
• It’s notable that actual violent incidents are very small compared to depictions; perhaps our interest is to understand how it works, just in case, 485.6; similar argument for illicit sex. 485.7 “Symons suggests that higher consciousness itself is designed for low-frequency, high-impact events.”
• Our own brains are “swollen and warped” versions of the brains of other mammals. We have a ‘rage circuit’ which can be triggered.
• But if that’s so, why the frequency of soldiers hesitating to fight in war? Similar pattern in brawls – they’re mostly bluff. Perhaps due to discretion, the understanding that personal harm or family retaliation may follow. Most human violence is cowardly, 487.7; when such issues aren’t present, men can explode into ‘rampages’…

• The Moralization Gap and the Myth of Pure Evil p488
• Author’s book The Blank Slate explored the modern denial of this dark side of human nature.
• Evil people don’t think of themselves as evil. Experiments identify two competing narratives: that of the perpetrator, and that the victim. Both sides tell stories that distort the truth, p489. Call this the Moralization Gap.
• These are because of self-serving biases—“The drive to present the self in a positive light was one of the major findings of 20^th-century social psychology.” 490.4. Effects of this drive include cognitive dissonance, and the Lake Woebegon effect.
• These are the prices of being social animals, 490b. Trivers; other books 490m. The glimmer of hope is that by understanding this effect people might be able to recognize that we are not always right, 492.6ff
• Given this psychological understanding, we can look at history differently. Each side in a conflict sincerely believes it is in the right – examples 492-493. Victims remember long-term events; perpetrators excuse themselves and want to move on, 493. Japan overlooks WWII; the American view of WWII overlooks various causes. Criminals rationalize, often claiming themselves as victims. “Evildoers always think they are acting morally” 494b.
• To understand this, as a scholar, is often to take the side of the perpetrator, as opposed to the moralist, who takes the side of the victim, and demonizing the other side as pure evil. This myth of pure evil shows up in religions and popular fiction, 496m. To understand it risks being accused of ‘making excuses’ or ‘blaming the victim’. Hannah Arendt understood the ‘banality of evil’.

• Organs of Violence, p497
• It’s a myth that violence in humans is merely ‘animalistic’, despite words like beastly and brutish. For one thing, predatory violence is very different than aggression, as can be seen in a housecat.
• Detailed description of a rat’s brain, and then of a human brain… how different areas control different kinds of response. We understand how certain areas work because of famous cases like Phineas Gage.
• How moral deliberation works; e.g. hiding from Nazis in the cellar, do you strangle the crying baby to save the others?
• There are five categories of violence as explored here: predatory; dominance; revenge; sadism; and ideology.

• Predation, p509
• In which violence is simply a means to an end, e.g. hunting for food or sport. It can include casual violence against humans, cases that people think are evidence of pure evil, 510m. The question is why isn’t such violence more common?
• Two forces are at work: first, the reaction when the target fights back, violence turns to anger…
• Second, people are prone to positive illusions, whereby they exaggerate their own talents and abilities, 511b – 512. Why should this be so? Perhaps some slight delusions about oneself make one more believable to potential allies, while straight-out lying would be more likely detected, 512.5: “It would be better for the species if no one exaggerated, 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.”
• Thus many military actions are led by general overconfident of their likelihood of victory. Example: Bush and Iraq war, in which the flow of information that might have clued the military leaders they were over-extended was cut off – ‘unknown knowns’, 514b, which Rumsfeld missed.

• Dominance, p515
• Much violence erupts from trivial altercations that threaten the perceived dominance hierarchy, which depends on information, on common knowledge of everyone’s position and status.
• Men are more concerned with status, and men are more violent, 517.5. High status men have more women – 517.9 – 518.
• Testosterone isn’t exactly a cause of aggression; it seems T prepares one for a challenge of dominance, 518.
• Despite modern myth, it’s not low self-esteem that causes violence – rather, *high* self-esteem, e.g. tyrants who are narcissists, psychopaths, or with borderland personality disorder (see definitions 520b).
• Another factor is group identity – how we can feel proud of our group even when no one alive is actually to credit for the group’s achievement. People assign groups the qualities of individuals, with traits for praise or blame. Thus sports and politics – sports even when the players keep changing (cheering for the teams’ clothes). We align with groups even when distinctions among them are trivial or arbitrary. Toddlers exhibit racist attitudes naturally – these things have to be unlearned, not learned. [[ as I’ve long thought ]] 523t.
• p523: How two psychologists propose that “people, to varying degrees, harbor a motive they call social dominance, through a more intuitive term is tribalism: the desire that social groups be organized into a hierarchy, generally with one’s own group dominant over the others. A social dominance orientation, they show, inclines people to a sweeping array of opinions and values, including patriotism, racism, fate, karma, caste, national destiny, militarism, toughness on crime, and defensives of existing arrangements of authority and inequality. An orientation away from social dominance, in contract, inclines people to humanism, socialism, feminism, universal rights, political progressivism, and the egalitarian and pacifist themes in the Christian Bible.”
• Thus race itself isn’t so important; people have divided themselves into groups long before the various races came together.
• Nationalism welds three things: the tendency toward tribalism; the concept of a group sharing some quality; and government. Add narcissism, and you get cultures prone to go to war for perceived slights or feelings of disrespect from the rest of the world (these days: Russia, the Islamic world). Some countries, like Holland and Switzerland, gave up such preeminence games; others never considered it (Canada, New Zealand).
• Ethnic groups often coexist without violence, even if they don’t like each other.
• If men are more obsessed with dominance, would the world be a better place if women were in charge? 526.3. With qualifications, yes. They are certainly less inclined to war.
• 528: “Dominance is an adaptation to anarchy, and it serves no purpose in a society that has undergone a civilizing process or in an international system regulated by agreements and norms. Anything that deflates the concept of dominance is likely to drive down the frequency of fights between individuals and wars between groups.”
• Two forces in mid/late 20^th century: the exposure and ridicule of manliness, honor, prestige, and glory in movies and popular culture. And the influence of biological science on literary culture, i.e. understanding of testosterone and the decline in books of words like glorious and honorable.

• Revenge, p529
• Throughout history: Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, other cultures. And it’s a major cause of violence – e.g. bin Laden’s statement about 9/11 being in revenge. And most student fantasies of violence were about revenge.
• Studies show how common the urge is…
• And it has a function: deterrence. The evolution of cooperation can be illustrated by the Prisoner’s Dilemma, p533, and refinements to the Tit for Tat strategy; repeated runs show that Tit for Tat is equivalent to the theory of reciprocal altruism. It’s not a disease; playing out the strategy illustrates various personality traits: nice; clear; retaliatory; forgiving.
• Forgiving is especially important, in variations like Generous TforT and Contrite TforT. It adjusts for periodic misunderstandings. But interactions must be ongoing for forgiveness to be effective. Why gossip is effective. Other games, like Public Goods or Tragedy of the Commons, lead to problem situations unless free riders can be punished.
• Does revenge work? Yes; so long as the avenger has a reputation for willingness to take revenge, and as long as the target knows why he’s targeted.
• Why is it needed so often? It maps to the Moralization Gap, and tends to escalate with the Leviathan to cut it off and administrate ‘justice’, which is partly a matter of citizens’ ‘revenge’ against a perpetrator, as well as deterrence.
• The ‘dimmer switch’ on escalating revenge is that we tend to forgive kin and friends, or with people we have to learn to live with. Thus the idea of apology – which must be made sincerely lest be seen as a ploy.
• And in fact governments in recent decades have increasingly apologized for past behaviors. P543.
• These can lead to reconciliations between former enemies, but four elements are required: truth-telling, adjustments of social identities (military becomes police, e.g.), incomplete justice – at some point amnesty must be allowed, since every perceived injustice on both sides can never be fully accounted for – and social gestures to underscore the new order.
• Example of Israel and Palestine—a Shakespearean tragedy, or Chekovian? At least with the latter, everyone is still alive.

• Sadism, p547
• Surely the worst qualitative depravity. Sadism, i.e. torture, can arise in five circumstances: instrumental violence (torturing a prisoner for information); as punishment; as entertainment; during rampages; and by serial killers (as distinguished from mass murderers).
• And there are four motives that bring it about: morbid fascination with the vulnerability of living things (the attraction of horror films e.g.); dominance; revenge; and sexual sadism.
• Males are more aggressive than females, and thus more likely to be violent in sex. Some testimonies of torture include erotic reactions.
• What brakes sadists? First, empathy for others; then cultural taboo; and of course the visceral revulsion of hurting another person.
• Then what triggers it? Rampages; psychopathy. It’s an acquired taste, like drug addiction, that is often unpleasant at first, like other paradoxical pleasures 555b, that can become addicting.
• So it’s a potential in human nature that can be prevented only by blocking the first steps that lead to it. P556.

• Ideology, p556
• “The infinite good it promises prevents its true believers from cutting a deal. It allows any number of eggs to be broken to make the utopian omelet. And it renders opponents of the ideology infinitely evil and hence deserving of infinite punishment.” 556.8
• Longer summary 557t… “Let these ingredients brew in the mind of a narcissist with a lack of empathy, a need for admiration, and fantasies of unlimited success…”
• This happens even though the ideals of many of these are ludicrous –557m, burning witches, etc.
• Ideologies happen through various kinds of groupthink. Polarization of thought; people are influenced by those around them. The Stanley Milgram experiment.
• 7: “People take their cues on how to behave from other people. This is a major conclusion of the golden age of social psychology…” (meaning the 1960s). The Stanford prison experiment; explains Abu Ghraib. People are inclined to conform. Similar experiments show rates are down, but “a majority of people will still hurt a stranger against their own inclinations if they see it as part of a legitimate project in their society.” 560.6
• Conformity isn’t entirely irrational, but it can be pathological, as when an early standard gets locked into place against better alternatives (QWERTY, Microsoft s/w); bestsellers. Various terms for ‘going with the crowd’. Also ‘spirals of silence’ where people go along because they think everyone else wants the same thing, or despite the evidence of their senses.
• Such conformity must come with some kind of enforcement, lest objectors point out false beliefs. Experiments show how mixes of true believers with skeptics widely scattered can eventually saturate a society; the way to avoid this would be through open societies with free of speech and movement and well-developed channels of communication, 564t.
• Experiments demonstrate how people will agree to a false consensus, e.g. a bad wine, or evaluations of academic garbage.
• Yet, how do these effects lead to violence? Through the Moralization Gap. People rationalize situations, to reduce cognitive dissonance.
• Through euphemism, gradualism, displacement of responsibility (I was only following orders), distancing (literally; not killing up close), and derogation of victims.
• There’s no cure, but the best vaccine is “an open society in which people and ideas move freely and no one is punished for airing dissenting views, including those that seem heretical to polite consensus” p569.2

• Pure Evil, Inner Demons, and the Decline of Violence, p569
• “The alternative to the myth of pure evil is that most of the harm that people visit on one another comes from motives that are found in every normal person.”
• “The second half of the 20^th century was an age of psychology.”
• Summary of entire chapter: last para on p570:

“People, especially men, are overconfident in their prospects for success; when they fight each other, the outcome is likely to be bloodier than any of them thought. People, especially men, strive for dominance for themselves and their groups; when contests of dominance are joined, they are unlikely to sort the parties by merit and are likely to be a net loss for everyone. People seek revenge by an accounting that exaggerates their innocence and their adversary’s malice; when two sides seek perfect justice, they condemn themselves and their heirs to strife. People can not only overcome their revulsion to hands-on violence but acquire a taste for it; if they indulge it in private, or in cahoots with their peers, they can become sadists. And people can avow a belief they don’t hold because they think everyone else avows it; such beliefs can sweep through a closed society and bring it under the spell of a collective delusion.”

Subtitled “Why Violence Has Declined”
(Viking, Oct. 2011, xxvii + 802pp, including 106pp of notes, references, and index.)

Today, detailed notes on Chapter 6, “The New Peace”, and Chapter 7, “The Rights Revolutions”. I’ll summarize and comment on these posts throughout the week.

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Ch6, The New Peace, p295

• • Despite the downward trend of war among states, pundits these days are as gloomy as ever. Examples. Partly due to market forces among pundits, partly due to human biases that raise alarm about rare events. And partly innumeracy, e.g. not recognizing ten-fold drops in casualties (example Kinsley).
  • This chapter concerns three types of organized violence: among groups citing ‘ancient hatreds’; ethnic cleansing (genocide); and terrorism.
  • These too are all in decline.
  • First, war in the rest of the world, outside the major powers. Both data sets and graphs show reductions. We have in fact almost put an end to war, as the 60s folk songs desired. The global homicide rate is 8.8 per 100,000.
    • The wars that linger are mostly among the ‘bottom billion’, in a strip running across central Africa and into SE Asia. War and poverty reinforce each other. Many of these conflicts follow from the withdrawal of colonial rulers. And some involve ideologues with little regard to loss of their citizens, trying simply to outlast their opponents (e.g. Vietnam and China).
    • 8: “A world that is less invigorated by honor, glory, and ideology and more tempted by the pleasures of bourgeois life is a world in which fewer people are killed.”
  • Looking for reasons, see Kant’s triangle of democracy, open economies, and engagement with the international community. P310.
    • Many of these countries are bad democracies, or anocracy, rife with corruption, etc. These countries resemble the 14^th century, run by thugs, 312m gangs or Mafiosi.
    • What helps are peacekeeping forces, which help reassure opposite sides that the other side isn’t cheating or planning an attack.
  • On the other hand, p316, many nonstate conflicts haven’t been tracked by historians, and so data is spotty. Such conflicts are “tribal battles, slave raids, pillaging by raiders and horse tribes, pirate attacks, and private wars by noblemen and warlords…”
  • The effects of war can be starvation and disease. But the oft-cited figure whereby civilian casualties used to be 10%, and are now 90%, is unsupportable
  • Summary p320. Wars still cause misery, and we shouldn’t see the decrease in numbers as a bright side…
  • Genocide
  • Genocide, or ‘democide’, is killing-by-category, over religious, political, or ethnic grounds. Example of course go back to the Bible, p322; Dostoyevsky; the Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1966-75.
  • How could people do these things? P323. Begin with psychology—stereotyping. Not a mental defect, but a kind of categorization indispensable to intelligence, 323b. There are statistical trends between groups. The problem is extending the generalization to individuals, especially during conflicts, Hobbes’ trio of motives—gain, fear, deterrence.
    • Native Americans; Romans against the Jews; Godfather (kill the children lest they group and come for revenge)
  • Biological metaphors; ‘bad blood’, result of evolution of the emotion of disgust (against contaminants etc) 327t, leads both to dehumanization and demonizing.
  • Summary 328: “The mind’s habit of essentialism can lump people into categories; its moral emotions can be applied to them in their entirely. The combination can transform Hobbesian competition among individuals or armies into Hobbesian competition among peoples. But genocide has another fateful component. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, to kill by the millions you need an ideology.”
  • Thus, examples: Christianity during the Crusades; Nazism during the holocaust; Marxism with Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot.
  • These are Utopian ideologies that figure, for the perfect good, no sacrifice of people is too great. Such ideologies often hearken back to some vanished agrarian paradise, 329.4 – ‘blood and soil’ – that envisions harmony, purity, and organic wholeness. More examples. Another motive targets commercial activities, concentrated in cities; people’s intuitive economics suspect something about economic middlemen, e.g. moneylenders, thus inviting animus against them, e.g. the Jews.
  • These visions parallel the apocalyptic visions of traditional religions, e.g. how Marxism mimicked Christian doctrine, p330. How Hitler promised a thousand-year Reich.
  • Also, leaders of such ideologies tend to be narcissistic and ruthless, e.g. Mao whose crazy ideas for the Great Leap Forward resulted in millions dead of starvation. P331. Thus genocide can be triggered by individuals, and carried out by relatively few. Genocides generally end when those leaders die.
  • So how has this changed over history? Again, Bible, Homer. Puritans thanked God for wiping out natives. Cromwell, for conquering Ireland.
  • Through most of history people didn’t think there was anything wrong with genocide. The only good Indian is a dead Indian, e.g. Until after WW II, revelations of the holocaust; the word ‘genocide’ was coined in 1944. Holocaust deniers at least feel the need to deny genocide, rather than bragging about it. (Progress!)
  • Attitudes shifted largely because survivors told their stories – Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi.
  • Numbers – it isn’t that genocide is ‘death by government’; it’s that a few, certain types of governments commit genocides: totalitarian ones: communist, Nazi, fascist, Islamic. In 20^th century most genocides were carried out by Soviets, China, and Nazi Germany, 337t. Chart p338; after WWII, incidents dwarfed in comparison, e.g. Rwanda.
  • Studies look for risk signs of genocide, p341: history of genocide; political instability; a ruling elite from an ethnic minority; and then three predictors from the theory of the Liberal Peace: democracy; open trade; lack of exclusionary ideology. (e.g. “…forms of nationalism that demonize ethnic or religious rivals”)
  • Summary, p343, genocides in the 20^th century derived from just three men: Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.

   

  • Terrorism.
  • Despite prominence in news, numbers of victims of terrorism are actually quite small – even the 3000 who died on 9/11. Compared to other causes of death.
  • Panic is the point; people react to perceived dangers (cf Kahneman et al, 345.9), which key off fathomability and dread. These can lead to distortions of public policy, e.g. 3 Mile Island. John Kerry pointed out how terrorism shouldn’t take over our lives, and was castigated, and had to apologize.
  • Terrorism isn’t new; Romans in Judea; Shia Muslims; a cult in India: Zealots, Assassins, Thugs. Anarchists who killed politicians in early 20^th
  • And political violence in the 1960s and 70s, including the SLA, 347b; the IRA in Europe; etc.
  • Little known fact: terrorist groups mostly fail, and all of them die. Very few achieve their goals. They tend to disband when their leaders die or get bored. Or they escalate their tactics until they lose all sympathy with the general population.
  • What about Islam? Suicide terrorists? What motivates them?
  • Explanation of natural selection and kin selection – someone is willing to die for a cause that promotes survival of their relatives (e.g. ‘brotherly love’) or those they perceive as their compatriots – thus the strategies of military commanders to form ‘bands of brothers’ who would die for each other.
  • The promise of an afterlife, or other religious motive, isn’t so much a factor. More often it’s the promise of honor bestowed on their surviving families; their glory and esteem.
  • Any signs Islamist terrorism is burning out? Answer is yes, p358.5. Favorable opinions of terrorist groups, in the Islamic world, have plunged. Statistics show a decrease in terrorist deaths.
  • We’ll never win the ‘war on terror’ any more than we’ll ‘rid the world of evil’, as GW Bush said. But terrorist groups tend to burn out by themselves, history shows.

   

  • Where Angels Fear to Tread
  • Now four more threats. There’s no way to predict likelihood of individual events. But for these threats, we can say, “maybe, but maybe not.” Despite the continued stream of books predicting doom.
  • First, war with Islam. The Muslim world is more violent than the West; it’s as if they missed out on the Humanist Revolution, the Enlightenment. Muslims are more prone to superstitions and cultures of honor, p363.
  • What happened? In the Middle Ages, Islamic civilization was more refined that Christendom; it retained knowledge from the Greeks, and India; thus astronomy, Arabic numbers.
  • But Islamic culture never had a separation of mosque and state. It acquired Greek philosophy and math, but not its drama and history. “In chapter 4 I speculated that the Humanitarian Revolution in Europe was catalyzed by a literate cosmopolitanism, …” 365.6. Even in 2010, the Iranian government restricted university students studying humanities, which “promotes skepticism and doubt in religious principles and beliefs.”
  • However, despite the so-called ‘clash of civilizations’, there is no single Islamic civilization. Many in those countries support progressive policies; many in countries with Sharia law don’t take it literally, any more than Americans do their Bibles, p367t. “Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.”
  • And Islamic countries are increasingly exposed to the outside world, via the Internet…
  • Second, nuclear terrorism. People tend to overestimate the likelihood of various scenarios – committing the ‘conjunction fallacy’ p369. Past predictions have foretold doom within a few years or a decade, and none has come true.
  • And other WMD’s are rarely used; they’re less effective than ordinary explosives.
  • Furthermore, the steps to construct a nuclear bomb are so complex, and the components so tightly controlled, that the odds against this are very high.
  • Third, Iran. Whose leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [until 2013] does have extremist views, including an apocalyptic war against the West. But a ‘parsimonious’ explanation is that that Bush’s calling Iran, Iraq, and North Korea the ‘axis of evil’ is what prompted N Korea, and then Iran, to develop nukes. Anyway the same kind of nuclear standoff – the certainly of Iran being destroyed if it strikes first – argues against such a war actually happening.
  • Finally, climate change – could it exacerbate these other factors? Likely not; resource scarcity seldom triggers conflicts.
  • Summary, 377: new conflicts might always break out; but it’s a mistake to think they are inevitable…

   

   

  Ch 7, The Rights Revolutions

  • Author tells anecdote about organized sports in school; he wasn’t very good, though he did like dodgeball. Which has now been banned! It’s another stage in the current diminishment of tolerance for violence… which has spread to “vulnerable classes of victims that in earlier eras fell outside the circle of protection, such as racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals.” 380.0
  • Graph p380 shows use of “civil rights” and other terms since 1960. These revolutions parallel the humanitarian revolution of two centuries earlier, and of the civilizing process, in that cultural norms formed without awareness of their rationale.
  • Thus the results of these revolutions: “The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and the other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness.”
  • Another legacy: we tend to forget past progress; activities are always pushing for the next battle to be won, as if the issue is as urgent as ever….
  • Civil Rights and the Decline of Lynching and Racial Pogroms, P382
  • Americans think of the two decades from 1948: Harry Truman, Rosa Parks, MLK, Civil Rights acts of the 1960s.
  • But it goes back to the emancipation of Negros 100 years before. In the meantime, a kind of intercommunal violence was carried out by groups like the KKK that entailed lynchings and ethnic riots called pogroms. Such events aren’t planned … long description p383.
  • Such violence has a longer history in the US – against Native Americans in the Trail of Tears; to the internment camps during WWII. 1863 draft riots (Gangs of New York). But these all began to decrease in the mid-19^th Graph p384. The song ‘Strange Fruit’. The last famous lynching was Emmett Till in 1955.
  • Since 1996 the government has kept counts of ‘hate crimes’ but these are so low as to be noise against the total murder rate of 17,000/year in the US.
  • And there were no lynchings or race riots against Muslims, even after 9/11 and other events.
  • Why did these fade? Better governance, and a rise in abhorrence to violence. Whereas earlier legal policies were exclusionary, new ones were written to be anti-exclusionary – ‘remedial discrimination’ or ‘affirmative action’.
  • So have mindsets of people changed, no longer demonizing other groups. Is the US really racist to the bone? There are always social commentators who say we’ve never had it so bad, p389b. That attitudes have changed is shown by data about questions like, if a black family moved in next door, would you move? Reactions have changed over the decades. And actual beliefs have changed, e.g. that African Americans are by nature lazy or less intelligent than whites. As has religious intolerance; fewer believe theirs is the one true religion that everyone should be converted to. P392.
  • So has imagery: early films and TV with demeaning portrayals; offensive sports team names, etc.
  • These remedial actions sometimes defy logic – how to justify racial preferences if everyone is to be defined by quality? Yet most are reluctant to abandon them. 394t: “The only defense of this hypocrisy is that it may be a price worth paying for historically unprecedented levels of racial comity (though it’s in the nature of hypocrisy that one cannot say that either).”
  • This related to an issue discussed in The Blank Slate – what one takes to be innate to human nature…

   

  • Women’s Rights and the Decline of Rape and Battering
  • An example of how we can be shocked by how violence we deplore today was perceived in the past. Rape common through history, e.g. Bible, Homer, etc etc; as are proscriptions against it. Examples of how rape was the woman’s fault; rapists can buy their victims, etc. 10^th commandment reduces status of women as something to be owned.
  • As laws became codified, the burden of put on the women.
  • We can understand the logic of rape via the genetic interests shaped by evolution, and the economics of human sexuality. There may even be an evolutionary advantage – not that this excuses it in any way, 396.4.
  • The second party to rape is the woman’s family, esp father, brother, husband, who have a stake in protecting her sexuality from rival males. 397.2 “In no society are women and in-laws obsessed with the virginity of grooms.”
  • Thus laws and customs treat women as property.
  • It’s in the woman’s interest to control her own sexuality (“As always, this reproductive spreadsheet is not something that a woman calculates…” 398.4)
  • Our current attitudes are shaped by the principle of autonomy, that all individuals have a right to their bodies. This idea began in 1700 when ownership of women was compared to slavery, 399t, then to the 19^th amendment in 1848, and then to a 1975 bestseller by Susan Brownmiller. A reaction against the male-centric view that human nature desires instant gratification – e.g. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange – an idea not shared by women.
  • Pop culture now reflects this attitude; the one thing you can’t put into video games, it seems, is rape.
  • Data: rates have fallen since the 1970s, by 80%, more so than other crimes. We are all increasingly feminist, despite supposed backlashes, as with surveys about whether women should obey husbands, not work, and so on.
  • Psychology of rape revealed by comparison of porn (for men) and erotica (for women) – “Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people” 405.6
  • It’s PC to claim rape is about power… 405-6
  • Wife-battering – domestic violence. A kind of ‘mate-guarding’, how men control the freedom of their partners. In fact, both sexes commit violence against each other. Data shows declines.
  • Rest of world: much worse. P413. Yet author predicts things will get better, 414.

   

  • Children’s Rights and the Decline of Infanticide, Spanking, Child Abuse, and Bullying.
  • Moses, Oedipus, many others were children left outside to the elements, who later became mythological heroes – makes for a good story, and evidence of how frequently infants have been abandoned or killed throughout history. In all cultures, 415.7
  • But why would anyone kill a child? A study reached conclusions “when faced with a variety of stressful situations”
  • Solution is ‘history theory’, how mothers avoid the sunk-cost fallacy by deciding whether to commit to the additional investment of raising a child considering their other children, her circumstances, and so on. 416-7: “The forecast may be based on bad signs in the infant, such as being deformed or unresponsive, or bad signs for successful motherhood, such as being burdened with older children, beset by war or famine … [etc]”
  • A ‘natural affection’ for a newborn is not automatic; in fact post-partum depression may be a kind of evaluation period for determining whether to invest in the child. Thus many societies bestow personhood on an infant only after a few weeks or a month.
  • Still, we see this as abhorrent, as with other practices: child sacrifice, etc, or killing an infant just because it’s a girl.
  • Female infanticide is a puzzle. Some Asian societies are beset by a shortage of women. Ideally a population should maintain a 50/50 ratio.
  • Trivers proposed the idea that sons can outperform daughters in terms of offspring, in the long run, except when circumstances are poor; and this would predict that sons would be favored in good times, daughters in bad times. But in fact, no societies anywhere kill their sons.
  • It’s a free rider problem considering the population of sons and daughters, p421m. It is true that in warring tribes girls are sacrificed because more warrior sons may be desired. In advanced societies there are economic reasons, as in India and China.
  • Today, infanticide isn’t condoned and is very rare. This came about through criminalization, in the Bible despite exceptions, from the idea that all lives are owned by God, not their parents, to the point of becoming a taboo.
  • Still, some have argued that infanticide is less heinous than murder of an older child or adult, a controversial notion; still, de facto distinctions are often made to treat former cases differently from latter ones.
  • This taboo was cemented by reactions to the Holocaust, the slippery slope of deciding some classes of people are not fit to live. 424.7: “But like all taboos, the human life taboo is incompatible with certain features of reality, and fierce debates in bioethics today hinge on… “
  • For example, that humans like to have sex even in circumstances when raising children is not feasible, 424.9, and “In the absence of contraception, abortion, or an elaborate system of social welfare, many children will be born without suitable caregivers to bring them to adulthood. Taboo or no taboo, many of those newborns will end up dead.”
  • Yet for a millennium and a half, despite prohibitions, infanticide was common, examples in Middle Ages, later ways of discreetly disposing of a child, as in Dickens.
  • The reduction by today came via affluence, and technology, in the form of contraception and abortion. And the high valuation of children.
  • 427, a couple pages about abortion. Despite some predictions, the presence of abortion in recent decades has not led to a slippery slope of the cheapening of human life via euthanasia and so on. Rather it’s useful to understand how people conceive of abortion – modern sensibilities focus on moral worth in terms of consciousness, not e.g. the beating of a heart. 427.4 “The change is a part of the turning away from religious and custom and toward science and secular philosophy as a source of moral illumination.”
  • And the distaste even for legal abortion has led to a decline in them, especially in Soviet countries. Again, mostly because of contraception.
  • Child-raising in past centuries as presumed that children are depraved and must have evil beaten out of them, p429. Thus children were raised harshly, frequently beaten or otherwise harshly treated.
  • Why would parents do that? Trivers explained the parent-offspring conflict; parents must spread attention around, while for a child it’s all about him or her alone.
  • What changed? The early religious belief in innate depravity and original sin, 432.0, gave way to John Locke, in 1693, who proposed the notion that how children were raised would affect what kind of adults they became (i.e. they were blank slates). Thus sayings by Milton, Pope, Wordsworth. Then Rousseau, with the romantic notion of original innocence – children aren’t yet able to reason, and should be allowed to enjoy the innocence of youth.
  • These ideas evolved into the notion of valuing children even to the point of taking them away from abusive parents, as in 1874 case in NY.
  • And then Dr. Spock in 1946 discouraged mothers from spanking children, advice that was reinforced by others to the point that spanking is outlawed in some countries, even corporal punishment in schools. Ever since 1950… “Other than in fundamentalist Christian groups…” 435.2
  • Surveys of parents about spanking children show higher acceptance in red states, lower in blue states.
  • “The prohibition of spanking represents a stunning change from millennia in which parents were considered to own their children, and the way they treated them was considered no one else’s business. But it is consistent with other intrusions of the state into the family, such as compulsory schooling, mandatory vaccination, the removal of children from abusive homes… [etc] In one frame of mind, this meddling is a totalitarian imposition of state power into the intimate sphere of the family. But in another, it is part of the historical current toward a recognition of the autonomy of individuals. Children are people…” p437.6
  • And so child abuse is now much less tolerated, and evidently in decline despite problems with self-reporting parents. “In fact over the past two decades the lives of children and adolescents improved in just about every way you can measure.” 440.5 And 439.5 “But starting in the 1980s, a growing number of opinion leaders, celebrities, and writers of television dramas began to call attention to child abuse…” [[ fascinating to acknowledge how TV is a kind of common culture that can affect actual culture – and to see how some see such themes as the concerns of liberal elites. In this age of the internet, has this commonality been fragmented to pieces? ]]
  • And bullying. Examples of movies and comics that depict bullies. Now bullying is targeted for elimination, perhaps accidentally by rumors of what motivated the Columbine shooters. The moral case against it is ironclad: children shouldn’t be able to get away with behavior proscribed in adults.
  • So children’s lives are far better. Yet efforts to protect children from violence are veering into the realm of sacrament and taboo.
  • Thus the so-called Nurture Assumption – that a parent can take control of a child’s life and mold them however they like. This isn’t true; children are socialized by their peer groups, not their parents; it takes a village, p443.6. Despite which, the idea has led to helicopter parents, to extreme reactions to minor violations in school, to whitewashing old movies. Now some children aren’t allowed to play outside, let alone to walk to school; mothers have been vilified. 444b nice summary para.
  • And fear of kidnapping by predators has led to photos of missing children on milk cartons, amber alerts, and much else. Despite the data: such incidents are extremely rare. Life is a series of trade-offs, and some precautions result in harm that would otherwise not occur…

   

  • Gay Rights, the Decline of Gay-Bashing, and the Decriminalization of Homosexuality. P447
  • Case of Alan Turing, who saved Western Civilization but who was arrested and committed suicide… for having sex with a man.
  • Since Leviticus there has been animus to gay people, and violence, despite there being nothing in it for the aggressor.
  • Same-sex behavior is understandable in some situations (ships, prisons, etc., 448m), but how to explain the orientation? It’s PC to say it’s nature, not nurture. Which however, many traditional societies disapprove of it (“These beliefs may be products of the cross-wiring between disgust and morality that leads people to confuse visceral revulsion with objective sinfulness.” 449.5)
  • The Enlightenment led to questioning visceral impulses and religious dogma. Jeremy Bentham proposed in 1785 that no harm is done and so homosexuality is not immoral; it began legalized in France and some other countries, and in the US since 1960. Still, there are countries that punish it by death, 450.
  • The US trend was triggered by Stonewall, and how the rise of AIDS led celebrities to reveal themselves; gay themes appeared in TV and movies; more Americans became accepting—liberals more often than conservatives [of course].
  • Trends in tolerance especially among the young—to whom is often doesn’t matter whether it’s natural or chosen. 453t.
  • Hate-crime laws have led to prosecution of violence against homosexuals, though it not clear if rates of murders and assaults – already quite low, as rates – have declined in the past two decades. In any event, government violence against gays has decreased in many parts of the world…

   

  • Animals Rights and the Decline of Cruelty to Animals
  • Author describes experiment he was told to do in grad school – leaving a rat overnight to press a lever to avoid a shock. The rat died.
  • Since the 1980s, strict regulations have governed how lab animals are treated.
  • This right movement is different than the others, because it’s based only on ethical principles, not on reciprocation.
  • Of course humans have killed animals throughout history for their meat. For 2 million years, perhaps. And had no reason to treat them decently. Same was true for pets.
  • The Bible, of course, states that animals exist for human purposes, Genesis; and how God is pleased by roasting beef, p458. Greece and Rome weren’t much better; Aquinas also judged that animals existed purely for man’s use. Early modern philosophers presumed that animals had no souls, thus felt no pain; Descartes; modern neuroscience disagrees.
  • Animals were dissected live, p459.0, .8. Agriculture treated them little better.
  • Various motives for treating animals better emerged, though seldom for animals’ benefit. Some were uncomfortable with eating meat, considering meat-eating with the disgust end of the disgust-purity continuum, 461t.
  • Other issues involved blood sports, 461b, Jewish dietary laws, 462t, more about the feelings of the observer.
  • Vegetarianism was named after Pythagoras until the 1840s; but the Nazis were also vegetarians, 462b.
  • Arguments for animal rights emerged in the 18^th and 19^th Science: Descartes; Voltaire; Jeremy Bentham’s insistence that animals do suffer; Darwin’s theory made that make sense. These ideas waned in the early 20^th century, until the 1970s, with books by Ruth Harrison and Peter Singer – Animal Liberation; The Expanding Circle.
  • Changes came in several ways:
    • Protection of lab animals;
    • The outlawing of blood sports, even bullfighting in most places; the decrease of hunting; release fishing; movie advisories about ‘no animals were harmed….’
    • Demand for meat remains – few are vegetarians – but there is increased demand for chicken, etc.; everyplace has vegetarian options these days; hopes for cultured meat; vegetarians has tripled, though, since 1985; and animals treated more humanely [free range chickens etc]
  • How far will these trends go? It’s unlikely meat-hunger will go completely away. And it’s naïve to think the values of humans will be matched to those of animals.
  • But: 474.8, “Should we arrange for the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, or even genetically engineer them into herbivores?”

   

  • Whence the Rights Revolution?
  • All these movements have occurred over the past 50 years – even though in many ways they go against human nature 475.3, and have been ratified into law by the Abrahamic religions 475.5.
  • Thus, 475.6, “the Rights Revolutions show that a moral way of life often requires a decisive rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard practice. In their place is an ethics that is inspired by empathy and reason and stated in the language of rights.”
  • These have been liberal revolutions, distributed along a gradient that runs from Western Europe, US blue states, US red states, then to democracies of Latin America and Asian, then authoritarian countries, then Africa and most of the Islamic world, 475b.
  • 476t, “In every issue touched by the Rights Revolutions [examples] … the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals.” [[ excellent point that I’ve made myself ]]
  • What brought these about? What exogenous factors? Democratic governments, in part.
  • Best candidate for single cause: “the technologies that made ideas and people increasingly mobile.” 477.4, with summary of electronics and travel advances. And the explosion in book publishing – see 477.6
  • How did this work? Because the spread of ideas resulted in the “debunking of ignorance and superstition” p477.7. Also, the exposure to the viewpoints of people unlike oneself – the reports in books about the Holocaust, etc etc. And third, the existence of “large catchment area of innovations” 478.6, as Diamond showed in Guns Germs and Steel.
  • 478.3: “It is also an intellectual agility – literally a kind of intelligence – which encourages one to step outside the parochial constraints of one’s birth and station, to consider hypothetical worlds, and to reflect back on the habits, impulses, and institutions and govern one’s beliefs and values.” [[ science fiction !!! ]]
  • Moral progress may parallel such technological progress; big example p479-80 about Martin Luther King, who grew up on the Bible, read theologians who challenged it, read the classic and modern philosophers, and heard Mordecai Johnson and learned about Gandhi – then choosing Gandhi’s strategy over Jesus’, about non-violence. King’s historical 1963 speech inspired the other rights movements, and their remarkable lack of violence they employed or provoked, compared to other historical shifts.

   

  • This ends six chapters documenting the historical decline of violence.
  • Next: psychology. How to understand the moral universe with science.