Steven Pinker, THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, post 7

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

Summary:

Chapter 9 concerns four ways in which humanity’s “better angels” turn people away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism. These are empathy and the circle of moral concern (with caution that empathy can subvert fairness, as when concern fora personal story distracts from the larger issue); self-control (with evidence that children who exhibit greater self-control becomes smarter and more successful in life); our moral sense (with the author favoring a set of four ‘relational models’ for talking about morality: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing; how political ideologies favor one or more of these; how the historical trend is away from the first two in favor of the latter two, i.e. toward social liberalism; and how these intuitions of community, authority, sacredness, and taboo and part of human nature and will always be with us);

And reason, denigrated by pop culture, yet with evidence that humanity is getting smarter as the moral circle has expanded, along with evidence that intelligence is correlated with classical liberalism. And what are the exogenous causes of these shifts? Geographical and social mobility, open societies, an objective study of history, and moral quandaries in fiction as books have become more widely read over the centuries.

Finally Chapter 10 notes that some forces have not worked to reduce violence, including weaponry, resources and power, wealth, and religion. Forces that *have* reduced violence can be assessed a “Pacifist’s Dilemma” chart: The Leviathan; gentle commerce; feminization; and expanding circle of moral concern; and the escalator of reason. Finally the author reflects on how the decline of violence may be the most significant event in the history of our species. People yearn for a simpler, peaceful past, but that past did not exist. Ending with two quotes, one about how limited in scope the lives of our ancestors were, the other about how those who think morality must be grounded in religious faith are mistaken.

Earlier:
This page page with quotes at the bottom; Post 1; Post 2; Post 3; Post 4; Post 5; Post 6.

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Detailed Notes:

Chapter 9, Better Angels

• This seems to be the age of empathy judging by book titles, e.g. by Jeremy Rifkin. But empathy isn’t the entire solution, and empathy isn’t always appropriate.
• This chapter will explore the ‘better angels’ that restrain those inner demons. But it’s not enough just to discuss good and bad impulses. “The exploration of our better angels must show not only how they steer us away from violence, but why they so often fail to do so; not just how they have been increasingly engaged, but why history had to wait so long to engage them fully.” 573.8

• Empathy, p573
• The meaning of the word has changed; today it’s more like sympathy of compassion. Other meanings include projection; perspective-taking; ‘theory of mind’ or mind-reading. It’s not the same as emotional contagion.
• Recently popular is the idea of mirror-neurons, as in Rifkin’s book; but the theory is dodgy, with many problems, e.g. that area of the brain isn’t active when empathy is felt.
• There’s also the issue of counter-empathy, as when we feel good when someone else feels bad, as when our team wins and theirs loses.
• Sympathy is endogenous, an effect of how people relate to one another. 578.2
• Considering brain chemistry, a key is the hormone oxytocin, 579m, which enables components of motherhood.
• Thus the ‘circle of empathy’ begins with babies and other species exhibiting similar features, 580.
• The flip side of empathy is guilt; but these function only with communal relationships, not exchange ones like business transactions.
• Is it possible to expand the circle?
• The other quality that triggers empathy is neediness. Does empathy encourage altruism? Given different definitions of those terms, yes in either case.
• But can sympathy be manipulated through some exogenous cause, 585.7, to explain decline in violence?
• One way is by community building, for some grand project [[ e.g. alien invasion! ]]
• Another idea is that empathy is encouraged through narratives in fiction and in reportage. Experiments support the idea, even when the subjects are murderers; the individual personal story provokes sympathy.
• Fiction? George Eliot claimed so in 1856, p589. There is some evidence that reading fiction provokes sympathy – but also some pushback from those who think the idea too sentimental. Yet popular novels may have contributed to the Humanitarian Revolution, 590.4.
• In any event, empathy is not a solution. It has a dark side: it can subvert fairness, when people place personal stories that evoke sympathy over addressing the larger issue. [[ a problem with certain types of stories !! ]]
• And it’s too parochial; one can’t hope that “the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20^th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature” 591.5
• Nor is it necessary: “The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them.” 591.7
• What’s better is a circle of rights – “a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation.”
• p592.0: “The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary.” [[ expand the scope: we needn’t empathize with weird alien cultures in order to grant them equal standing on some galactic stage. ]]

• Self-Control, p592
• A key issue in reducing violence, as in the theory of the Civilizing Process, summary 592.6 ff. But what is the science of self-control and does it support that theory? Does the brain really contain competing systems for impulse and self-control? Etc, 593t.
• Self-control isn’t about selfishness, and it’s not inherently rational; there are reasons, e.g., to prefer pleasure now to pleasure later, given that we might die tonight. What’s not rational is to devalue future selves too much.
• 5 “Much of what looks like a lack of self-control in the modern world may consist of using a discounting rate that was wired into our nervous systems in the iffy world of our pre-state ancestors, when people died much younger and had no institutions that could parlay savings now into returns years later.” [[ yet another example of how our minds are optimized for ancient life. ]]
• Mathematically, it’s called myopic discounting. There’s a tug of war in the brain over such conflicts, as confirmed by practicing neurologists who’ve observed brain damage, 596-7.
• There are also rule-driven forms of self-control, as when we act differently to stimuli in different circumstances (e.g. what you do when a phone rings…)
• Studies show self-control is important for a successful life; children who exhibit greater self-control grow up to be smarter and more successful.
• And violence correlates with low self-control.
• But it’s only a correlation. We must explain how self-control how it affected the decline of violence… 601b.
• We note that the language of self-control is like that of force, and indeed self-control can be fatiguing. The effect is called ‘ego-depletion’, demonstrated by various studies. That is, events which require self-control, p603, lead to lapses in willpower in subsequent events.
• Self-control flattens individuality, 604t. and there’s evidence that males especially require self-control on their sexual appetites.
• So, can self-control be manipulated? 605.
• So how to explain changes in self-control over the centuries?
• There are of course techniques: don’t shop on an empty stomach, and so on 607t. Check your guns at the door. Reframe the insulter. Regimens of forced self-control. 609.2 sumry: “Ulyssean constraints, cognitive reframing, an adjustable internal discount rate, improvements in nutrition, and the equivalent of muscle gain with exercise”…
• There are also issues of fashion; how some societies value restraint (while the 1960s glorified its relaxation).
• But how to correlate those to societal changes? One way is to look at historical interest rates, which reflect how people think about their futures.
• Are there patterns in cultures? There have been classifications of Apollonian and Dionysian cultures. Other studies show how countries differ across six dimensions, 611, which support the idea of levels of self-control as related to violence.

• Recent Biological Evolution? P611
• Have changes in the evolution of humans changed rates of violence? It’s an idea worth exploring. This book has assumed a stable human nature, over the past 10,000 years; yet some changes, if based on a single gene or a small set, can result in rapid changes.
• Summary of gene studies, very technical, p613. Have shown results; a dig about how journalists misunderstand or oversimplify, given political implications: “The fact that a hypothesis is politically uncomfortable does not mean that it is false…”
• So is aggression heritable? Heritability, p614, how to detect: twin studies and so on. And studies do show, 616.4
• Specific pathways: pedomorphy (neoteny); oxytocin; testosterone; neurotransmitters.
• Evidence? Only two slight examples. One about the Maori; another about how the English became genetic capitalists. Author concludes there is not, in fact, any good evidence along these lines, p621

• Morality and Taboo, p622
• There is too much morality in the world, author says – too many people using ‘morality’ to commit violence on others.
• Issues to resolve, 622b, e.g. “How people in difference times and cultures can be driven by goals that they experience as ‘moral’ but that are unrecognizable to our own standards of morality.” How morality often increases suffering. And how it can be so compartmentalized, e.g. how the Nazis adored their pets.
• Author distinguishes between morality and the moral sense, 623t
• Moralized acts are universalized; actionable; and punishable.
• They often operate as norms and taboos that can not be articulated as principles; e.g. Haidt study in which ethical conundrums confuse: “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.”
• Three versions of moral concerns: Schweder’s three; Haidt’s five; and Alan Fiske’s four, which author finds “most useful”. Chart p626 to relate them.
• Fiske’s four ‘relational models’ reflect evolution and history: “Communal Sharing”, “Authority Ranking”, “Equality Matching”, and “Market Pricing”, which author prefers to call “Rational-Legal”. These form a grammar for how to talk about issues of morality.
• Each social norm involves one of these models, one or more roles, a context, and a resource, 629t. Applying a wrong model to a situation evokes embarrassment or shock, examples 629-630, especially when resources are deemed ‘sacred’.
• Taboos are not irrational; they involve societal relationships. Still, there are trade-offs: routine ones, that occur within a single relational model; taboo ones, that involve a sacred value in one for a secular value in another; and ‘tragic’ ones that complete sacred values, as in Sophie’s Choice.
• Politics is about reframing taboo tradeoffs as tragic tradeoffs… 631m.
• Different cultures are characterized by differing emphases on these moral relationships; e.g. rules in marriages. Also sources for humor: Woody Allen, Borat; and outrage. 632b
• And such differences define political ideologies, 632b—Communal and Authority models in ‘atavistic’ ideologies, fascism, feudalism, etc, in which interests of the individual are submerged within a community; communism combines communal, equality, and authority in different areas; socialism involves equality for resources; libertarians would make everything about Market Pricing.
• Within these poles is the liberal-conservative continuum, 633t, per Haidt: liberals emphasize preventing harm and enforcing fairness; conservatives give equal weight to all five foundations, including loyalty, purity, and authority. Neither side is amoral; both are very moral, in different ways.
• This theory of relational models explains a puzzle mentioned earlier: how do some once-commonplace activities come to be seen as ridiculous (dueling, etc)? Humor can challenge a relational model to show that its consequences would be absurd. …
• How do these relational models license violence? Each model invites punishment of those who violate it.
• Communal sharing applies to the in-group, thus dehumanizing the outgroup. Authority ranking provides rationale for slavery and colonial overlords.
• Equality matching supplies the rationale for tit for tat retaliation: an eye for an eye, etc.
• And rational-legal reasoning can lead to profit at the expense of slaves, human trafficking, and calculation of maximum kills.
• What historical changes in moral psychology encouraged reductions in violence…?
• Direction of change is clear: from Communal Sharing and Authority Ranking, to Equality Matching and Market Pricing. 636t: “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 a 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.” [[ well – except Roy Moore ! ]]
• The move away from community, sanctity, and authority results in less violence because there are fewer reasons to commit violence. One could ask if some of these reasons are legitimate wrongs; in any case, the retraction of violence in those matters “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.” P637t
• Yet these intuitions of community, authority, sacredness, and taboo are part of human nature and will always be with us. [[ thus the eternal battle of education vs ignorance, and variations of that idea; how progress could always collapse back into innate human nature. ]] At best we might channel those motivations to other areas, e.g. how to negotiate ‘sacred’ values on both sides of a conflict, e.g. Israel and Palestine, where a study showed *symbolic* concessions of sacred values works somewhat. [[ does this idea of sacred correspond to Crane’s? ]]
• So what exogenous causes have shifted moral intuitions away from community, authority, and purity… toward fairness, autonomy, and rationality?
• First, geographic and social mobility, 640t. Second, open societies; how Blue counties are along rivers and the coasts [[ recall Reich’s point ]]
• And, objective study of history. Stratified societies favor myth and legend; nationalist movements inspired “potted histories of their nations’ timeless values and glorious pasts.” 641t [[ recall ACE and right-wing rewrites of American history! ]]
• And moral quandaries in fiction – quotes a long passage from Huckleberry Finn, p641.

• Reason, p642
• Pop culture denigrates reason; e.g. how GW Bush didn’t need to be intelligent, how the Holocaust was somehow the fault of the Enlightenment.
• And scientists who claim reason is just a rationalization of gut feelings.
• Both are mistaken. Modern societies are getting smarter, and a smarter world is a less violent world.
• As for Bush, author cites a study that places him among very bottom of a scale of raw intelligence and openness to new ideas. While the three smartest presidents, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton, kept the country out of wars.
• And the Holocaust was a product of Nazi ideology, which was nationalistic and anti-Enlightenment, 643b and 644t.
• And reason v emotion? Studies don’t take into account that intuitions have already been shaped by moral reasoning over a lifetime, 644.
• However recall Hume: reason is just a process of getting from one proposition to the next, never mind their value.
• Why would reason itself lead to reduced violence?
• Voltaire’s quip; by debunking hogwash.
• Aligning with self-control.
• How the four relational models entail particular styles of reasoning: Communal Sharing is all or nothing, the intuitive biology of purity and contamination; Authority Ranking uses a linear ranking, the intuitive physics of forces; Equality Matching uses a scale of intervals; only Market Pricing uses proportionality, “nonintuitive tools of symbolic mathematics” 646.0. [[ religion is easy, science is hard ]]
• But should rationality lead to wanting less violence?
• Yes, given two conditions: that reasoning beings care about their own welfare; and that the reasoner is part of a community of other reasoners.
• Thus, self-interest and sociality lead to a morality with a goal of nonviolence. Process ongoing: 648.3ff This is Peter Singer’s expanding circle; his metaphor is that of an escalator, of reason.
• Yet why has the ride been so bumpy? Singer suggests because geniuses are so rare, 649b.
• Or is it that humanity itself is getting smarter?
• Yes, in part: we are getting smarter, as detected by James Flynn in the 1980s, who observed that IQ tests are periodically recalibrated upwards. This increase in intelligence, now called the Flynn Effect, is limited to abstract reasoning, and seems to be the result of increased education in abstract issues over the past century. It’s environmental – not an evolutionary shift. Examples of questions asked in 1900. An effect of schooling, 654b; less memorization, more reasoning; a trickle-down of scientific reasoning, e.g. list of terms now familiar 655b.
• So: the pacifying effects of reason, and the Flynn effect; have they led to decrease in violence?
• p656.4: “We have several grounds for supposing that enhanced powers of reason – specifically, the ability to set aside immediate experience, detach oneself from a parochial vantage point, and frame one’s ideas in abstract, universal terms – would lead to better moral commitments, including an avoidance of violence.” [[–this almost sounds like a manifesto for science fiction…!]]
• Sanity check: are people today really smarter? Well, note the “intellectual renaissance in recent decades” 657m in science and technology, nice Q. And moral progress: the Long peace, the rights revolutions.
• Yet were our ancestors morally retarded? Perhaps yes; consider how early 20^th C presidents sanctioned oppression of Native Americans; how Churchill felt the Aryan stock would triumph, 658. They had a moral compartmentalization… [[ to the extent that these gains are from education, they could vanish… ]]
• Similar moral stupidity was built into law. Consider a lawyer’s testimony from 1876, 659b, about how the Chinese religion must be wrong because “ours is right”.
• Even intellectuals, e.g. Eliot and others, 660t.
• But, is it true that the Flynn effect has expanded the moral circle? There’s evidence along seven lines. Again, it’s not overall intelligence that’s increased, just one type; and it’s not a direct effect of intellectuals.
  • Violent crime. Smarter people are less violent.
  • Cooperation: smarter people did better at the prisoner’s dilemma. Note Hofstadter’s idea of ‘superrationality’, 661m, an objective analysis of the entire situation.
  • Liberalism: smarter people are more liberal, in the classical sense, “which values autonomy and well-being of individuals over the constraints of tribe, authority, and tradition” 662m. Surveys of IQs show a range from ‘very conservative’ to ‘very liberal’ p662-3. Another study: “bright children become enlightened adults” 663; emphasizing reason and individualism over tradition.
  • Economic literacy, i.e. the theory of gentle commerce from classical liberalism, that understands positive-sum payoffs. “That set it in opposition to populist, nationalist, and communist mindsets that see the world’s wealth as zero-sum..” [[ Trump! ]]
  • Democracy is fortified by education and intellectual proficiency, one leg of Kant’s tripod. Boston Public Library: education required for order and liberty.
  • Civil war…
  • Political discourse. Has it really coarsened? No; the opposite. Examples of qualities of arguments in congress, in 1917 and 1972. Exception: American presidential debates. “Joe the Plumber” 668m. Because those debates are aimed at the sliver of undecided voters, uninformed and apt to be swayed by sound-bites. [[ and Trump hadn’t come along… ]] A vulnerability of the American political system…
• Summary 668b, from empathy, to self-control, etc. “Reason is up to these demands because it is an open-ended combinatorial system, an engine for generating and unlimited number of new ideas…” 669.3 … “And if you detect a flaw in this argument, it is reason that allows you to point it out and defends an alternative.” [[ cf. Asimov commented somewhere that if you don’t believe in “reason” the only way to convince anyone you’re right is… through reason. ]]
• Ending with a long quote from Adam Smith on moral sentiments.

Ch 10, On Angels’ Wings

• Darwin quote, about extending sympathies to all nations and races.
• Finally, the broad forces that have pushed violence downward – but not predictions or advice. “As a scientist, I must be skeptical of any mystical force or cosmic destiny that carries us ever upward.” 671.7

• Important but Inconsistent, 672
• First, forces that have not worked to reduce violence:
  • Weaponry, disarmament. Weapons get better, even as violence has declined; guns don’t kill people, people do.
  • Resources and power. Wars aren’t fought over resources.
  • No tight correlations between wealth and nonviolence.
  • Religion — clearly not a force for peace – examples 676b—despite claims. Nor were fascism and communism atheistic, 677.3. Occasional particular religions have worked for peace – Quakers, etc. 677b. So Hitchens was overstating it when he said that religion poisons *everything*. Religions adapt, e.g. the Mormons, 678t.

• The Pacifist’s Dilemma, 678
• Now apply the forces that do reduce violence to the paradigm of the prisoner’s dilemma, using the same chart, but now called the Pacifist’s Dilemma, with scores assigned the each of two parties, each a Pacifist or an Aggressor, p679t.
  • The Leviathan: this shifts the outcomes by adding penalties to the aggressor’s scores for victory or defeat, 681.
  • Gentle Commerce: this greatly increases the score for mutual peace. 683m.
  • Feminization, i.e. the growing influence of women over the domination of men, in politics, etc.; away from the culture of honor. This reduces scores for aggression. Some conservative scholars rue the loss of “virtues like bravery and valor and the ascendancy of materialism, frivolity, decadence, and effeminacy”; author responds that reducing violence should be a good thing, and maybe the victims of such manly violence might be taken into account, 687t.
  • Furthermore, how societies with deficits of women leave unmarried men as ‘bare branches’ who are likely to go wild or become fodder for armies. And a study that suggests 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.” 688.7
  • The Expanding Circle, 689
  • Smry p689 “involves occupying another person’s vantage point and imagining his or her emotions as if they were your own”
  • The Escalator of Reason, 690
  • Smry 690.6; “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.”
  • And there is 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.” 690.7.
  • 6: “A broader effect… “ “A humanistic value system, which privileges human flourishing as the ultimate good, is a product of reason because it can be justified: it can be mutually agreed upon by any community of thinkers who value their own interests and are engaged in reasoned negotiation, whereas communal and authoritarian values are parochial to a tribe or hierarchy.” 691.7
  • 8: “When history’s failed experiments are held up the light, the evidence suggests that value systems evolve in the direction of liberal humanism. … We saw this as well in the way that these revolutions eventually swept up the conservatives who first opposed them.”
  • Is this Whiggish? Yet it’s supported by facts.

• Reflections, 692
• “The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.”
• First, a concern about how the world considers modernity, def. 692.7 It’s seems fashionable to loathe it; to express nostalgia for a simpler time. Yet statisticians and historians marshal against it – book titles 692b – 693t, including Matt Ridley.
• Because we forget, or don’t know, what the past was like. 693.4: “Until recently most people never traveled more than a few miles….” Worth full quote:

Until recently most people never traveled more than a few miles from their place of birth. Everyone was ignorant of the vastness of the cosmos, the prehistory of civilization, the genealogy of living things, the genetic code, the microscopic world, and the constituents of matter and life. Musical recordings, affordable books, instant news of the world, reproductions of great art, and filmed dramas were inconceivable, let alone available in a tool that can fit in a shirt pocket. When children emigrated, their parents might never see them again, or hear their voices, or meet their grandchildren. And then there are modernity’s gifts of life itself: the additional decades of existence, the mothers who live to see their newborns, the children who survive their first years on earth.

• And yet, say many, we suffer such violence. But we’ve seen that the past was not peaceable. Some, like Robert Wright, have noticed the decline of violence and have been tempted to ascribe it to divinity.
• Is there an arrow to history, and can we wonder who posted it? Or might it vindicate the notion of moral realism?
• Author’s view, 694b… the realities of existence and thinking. And 695.8:

“Though our escape from destructive contests is not a cosmic purpose, it is a human purpose. Defenders of religion have long claimed that in the absence of divine edicts, morality can never be grounded outside ourselves. People can pursue only selfish interests, perhaps tweaked by taste or fashion, and are sentenced to lives of relativism and nihilism. We can now appreciate why this line of argument is mistaken. Discovering earthly ways in which human beings can flourish, including stratagems to overcome the tragedy of the inherent appeal of aggression, should be purpose enough for anyone. It is a goal that is nobler than joining a celestial choir, melting into a cosmic spirit, or being reincarnated into a higher life-form, because the goal can be justified to any fellow thinker rather than being inculcated to arbitrary factions by charisma, tradition, or force. And the data we have seen in this book show that it is a goal on which progress can be made—progress that is halting and incomplete, but unmistakable nonetheless.”

• p696, finally, a reflection on the actual agony of those who’ve died in violence over the millennia, and those they left behind.