The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (12 page)
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Authors: Steven Pinker
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BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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It would be nice if the gap between the common ancestor and modern humans could be filled in by the fossil record. But chimpanzees’ ancestors have left no fossils, and hominid fossils and artifacts are too scarce to provide direct evidence of aggression, such as preserved weapons or wounds. Some paleoanthropologists test for signs of a violent temperament in fossil species by measuring the size of the canine teeth in males (since daggerlike canines are found in aggressive species) and by looking for differences in the size of the males and the females (since males tend to be larger in polygynous species, the better to fight with other males).
20
Unfortunately the small jaws of hominids, unlike the muzzles of other primates, don’t open wide enough for large canines to be practical, regardless of how aggressive or peaceful these creatures were. And unless a species was considerate enough to have left behind a large number of complete skeletons, it’s hard to sex them reliably and compare the size of the males and the females. (For these reasons many anthropologists are skeptical of the recent claim that
Ardipithecus ramidus
, a 4.4-million-year-old species that is probably ancestral to
Homo
, was unisex and small-canined and hence monogamous and peaceable.)
21
The more recent and abundant
Homo
fossils show that the males have been larger than the females for at least two million years, by at least as great a ratio as in modern humans. This reinforces the suspicion that violent competition among men has a long history in our evolutionary lineage.
22
KINDS OF HUMAN SOCIETIES20
Unfortunately the small jaws of hominids, unlike the muzzles of other primates, don’t open wide enough for large canines to be practical, regardless of how aggressive or peaceful these creatures were. And unless a species was considerate enough to have left behind a large number of complete skeletons, it’s hard to sex them reliably and compare the size of the males and the females. (For these reasons many anthropologists are skeptical of the recent claim that
Ardipithecus ramidus
, a 4.4-million-year-old species that is probably ancestral to
Homo
, was unisex and small-canined and hence monogamous and peaceable.)
21
The more recent and abundant
Homo
fossils show that the males have been larger than the females for at least two million years, by at least as great a ratio as in modern humans. This reinforces the suspicion that violent competition among men has a long history in our evolutionary lineage.
22
The species we belong to, “anatomically modern
Homo sapiens
,” is said to be 200,000 years old. But “behaviorally modern” humans, with art, ritual, clothing, complex tools, and the ability to live in different ecosystems, probably evolved closer to 75,000 years ago in Africa before setting out to people the rest of the world. When the species emerged, people lived in small, nomadic, egalitarian bands of kinsmen, subsisted by hunting and gathering, and had no written language or government. Today the vast majority of humans are settled in stratified societies numbering in the millions, eat foods cultivated by agriculture, and are governed by states. The transition, sometimes called the Neolithic (new stone age) Revolution, began around 10,000 years ago with the emergence of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, China, India, West Africa, Mesoamerica, and the Andes.
23
Homo sapiens
,” is said to be 200,000 years old. But “behaviorally modern” humans, with art, ritual, clothing, complex tools, and the ability to live in different ecosystems, probably evolved closer to 75,000 years ago in Africa before setting out to people the rest of the world. When the species emerged, people lived in small, nomadic, egalitarian bands of kinsmen, subsisted by hunting and gathering, and had no written language or government. Today the vast majority of humans are settled in stratified societies numbering in the millions, eat foods cultivated by agriculture, and are governed by states. The transition, sometimes called the Neolithic (new stone age) Revolution, began around 10,000 years ago with the emergence of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, China, India, West Africa, Mesoamerica, and the Andes.
23
It’s tempting, then, to use the 10,000-year horizon as a boundary between two major eras of human existence: a hunter-gatherer era, in which we did most of our biological evolving and which may still be glimpsed in extant hunter-gatherers, and the era of civilization thereafter. That is the dividing line that figures in theories of the ecological niche to which humans are biologically adapted, which evolutionary psychologists call “the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.” But that is not the cut that is most relevant to the Leviathan hypothesis.
For one thing, the 10,000-year milestone applies only to the
first
societies that farmed. Agriculture developed in other parts of the world later and spread outward from those cradles only gradually. Ireland, for example, was not lapped by the wave of farming that emanated from the Near East until around 6,000 years ago.
24
Many parts of the Americas, Australia, Asia, and Africa were populated by hunter-gatherers until a few centuries ago, and of course a few still are.
first
societies that farmed. Agriculture developed in other parts of the world later and spread outward from those cradles only gradually. Ireland, for example, was not lapped by the wave of farming that emanated from the Near East until around 6,000 years ago.
24
Many parts of the Americas, Australia, Asia, and Africa were populated by hunter-gatherers until a few centuries ago, and of course a few still are.
Also, societies cannot be dichotomized into hunter-gatherer bands and agricultural civilizations.
25
The nonstate peoples we are most familiar with are the hunters and gatherers living in small bands like the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert and the Inuit of the Arctic. But these people have survived as hunter-gatherers only because they inhabit remote parts of the globe that no one else wants. As such they are not a representative sample of our anarchic ancestors, who may have enjoyed flusher environments. Until recently other foragers parked themselves in valleys and rivers that were teeming with fish and game and that supported a more affluent, complex, and sedentary lifestyle. The Indians of the Pacific Northwest, known for their totem poles and potlatches, are a familiar example. Also beyond the reach of states are hunter-horticulturalists, such as peoples in Amazonia and New Guinea who supplement their hunting and gathering by slashing and burning patches of forest and growing bananas or sweet potatoes in small gardens. Their lives are not as austere as those of pure hunter-gatherers, but they are far closer to them than they are to sedentary, full-time farmers.
25
The nonstate peoples we are most familiar with are the hunters and gatherers living in small bands like the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert and the Inuit of the Arctic. But these people have survived as hunter-gatherers only because they inhabit remote parts of the globe that no one else wants. As such they are not a representative sample of our anarchic ancestors, who may have enjoyed flusher environments. Until recently other foragers parked themselves in valleys and rivers that were teeming with fish and game and that supported a more affluent, complex, and sedentary lifestyle. The Indians of the Pacific Northwest, known for their totem poles and potlatches, are a familiar example. Also beyond the reach of states are hunter-horticulturalists, such as peoples in Amazonia and New Guinea who supplement their hunting and gathering by slashing and burning patches of forest and growing bananas or sweet potatoes in small gardens. Their lives are not as austere as those of pure hunter-gatherers, but they are far closer to them than they are to sedentary, full-time farmers.
When the first farmers settled down to grow grains and legumes and keep domesticated animals, their numbers exploded and they began to divide their labors, so that some of them lived off the food grown by others. But they didn’t develop complex states and governments right away. They first coalesced into tribes connected by kinship and culture, and the tribes sometimes merged into chiefdoms, which had a centralized leader and a permanent entourage supporting him. Some of the tribes took up pastoralism, wandering with their livestock and trading animal products with sedentary farmers. The Israelites of the Hebrew Bible were tribal pastoralists who developed into chiefdoms around the time of the judges.
It took around five thousand years after the origin of agriculture for true states to appear on the scene.
26
That happened when the more powerful chiefdoms used their armed retinues to bring other chiefdoms and tribes under their control, further centralizing their power and supporting niches for specialized classes of artisans and soldiers. The emerging states built strongholds, cities, and other defensible settlements, and they developed writing systems that allowed them to keep records, exact taxes and tributes from their subjects, and codify laws to keep them in line. Petty states with designs on their neighbors’ assets sometimes forced them to become states in defense, and bigger states often swallowed smaller states.
26
That happened when the more powerful chiefdoms used their armed retinues to bring other chiefdoms and tribes under their control, further centralizing their power and supporting niches for specialized classes of artisans and soldiers. The emerging states built strongholds, cities, and other defensible settlements, and they developed writing systems that allowed them to keep records, exact taxes and tributes from their subjects, and codify laws to keep them in line. Petty states with designs on their neighbors’ assets sometimes forced them to become states in defense, and bigger states often swallowed smaller states.
Anthropologists have proposed many subtypes and intermediate cases among these kinds of societies, and have noted that there is no cultural escalator that inevitably turns simpler societies into more complex ones. Tribes and chiefdoms can maintain their ways indefinitely, such as the Montenegrin tribes in Europe that lasted into the 20th century. And when a state breaks down, it can be taken over by tribes, as in the Greek dark ages (which followed the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization and in which the Homeric epics were set) and the European dark ages (which came after the fall of the Roman Empire). Even today, many parts of failed states, such as Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are essentially chiefdoms; we call the chiefs warlords.
27
27
For all these reasons, it makes no sense to test for historical changes in violence by plotting deaths against a time line from the calendar. If we discover that violence has declined in a given people, it is because their mode of social organization has changed, not because the historical clock has struck a certain hour, and that change can happen at different times, if it happens at all. Nor should we expect a smooth reduction in violence along the continuum from simple, nomadic hunter-gatherers to complex, sedentary hunter-gatherers to farming tribes and chiefdoms to petty states to large states. The major transition we should expect is at the appearance of the first form of social organization that shows signs of design for reducing violence within its borders. That would be the centralized state, the Leviathan.
It’s not that any early state was (as Hobbes theorized) a commonwealth vested with power by a social contract that had been negotiated by its citizens. Early states were more like protection rackets, in which powerful Mafiosi extorted resources from the locals and offered them safety from hostile neighbors and from each other.
28
Any ensuing reduction in violence benefited the overlords as much as the protectees. Just as a farmer tries to prevent his animals from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles of raiding and feuding that just shuffle resources or settle scores among them but from his point of view are a dead loss.
28
Any ensuing reduction in violence benefited the overlords as much as the protectees. Just as a farmer tries to prevent his animals from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles of raiding and feuding that just shuffle resources or settle scores among them but from his point of view are a dead loss.
The topic of violence in nonstate societies has a long and politicized history. For centuries it was conventional wisdom that native peoples were ferocious barbarians. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, complained that the king of England “endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
Today the passage seems archaic, indeed offensive. Dictionaries warn against using the word
savage
(related to
sylvan
, “of the forest”) to refer to native peoples, and our awareness of the genocides of Native Americans perpetrated by European colonists makes the signatories seem like a black pot in a glass house casting the first stone. A modern concern with the dignity and rights of all peoples inhibits us from speaking too frankly about rates of violence in preliterate peoples, and the “anthropologists of peace” have worked to give them a Rousseauian image makeover. Margaret Mead, for example, described the Chambri of New Guinea as a sex-reversed culture because the men were adorned with makeup and curls, omitting the fact that they had to earn the right to these supposedly effeminate decorations by killing a member of an enemy tribe.
29
Anthropologists who did not get with the program found themselves barred from the territories in which they had worked, denounced in manifestoes by their professional societies, slapped with libel lawsuits, and even accused of genocide.
30
savage
(related to
sylvan
, “of the forest”) to refer to native peoples, and our awareness of the genocides of Native Americans perpetrated by European colonists makes the signatories seem like a black pot in a glass house casting the first stone. A modern concern with the dignity and rights of all peoples inhibits us from speaking too frankly about rates of violence in preliterate peoples, and the “anthropologists of peace” have worked to give them a Rousseauian image makeover. Margaret Mead, for example, described the Chambri of New Guinea as a sex-reversed culture because the men were adorned with makeup and curls, omitting the fact that they had to earn the right to these supposedly effeminate decorations by killing a member of an enemy tribe.
29
Anthropologists who did not get with the program found themselves barred from the territories in which they had worked, denounced in manifestoes by their professional societies, slapped with libel lawsuits, and even accused of genocide.
30
To be sure, it is easy to come away from tribal battles with the impression that they are fairly harmless in comparison with modern warfare. Men with a grievance against a neighboring village challenge its men to appear at a given time and place. The two sides face off at a distance at which their missiles can barely reach each other. They talk trash, cursing and insulting and boasting, and fire arrows or chuck spears while dodging those from the other side. When a warrior or two are injured or killed, they call it a day. These noisy spectacles led observers to conclude that warfare among primitive peoples was ritualistic and symbolic, very different from the glorious carnage of more advanced peoples.
31
The historian William Eckhardt, who is often cited for his claim that violence has vastly increased over the course of history, wrote, “Bands of gathering-hunters, numbering about 25 to 50 people each, could hardly have made much of a war. There would not have been enough people to fight, few weapons with which to fight, little to fight about, and no surplus to pay for the fighting.”
32
31
The historian William Eckhardt, who is often cited for his claim that violence has vastly increased over the course of history, wrote, “Bands of gathering-hunters, numbering about 25 to 50 people each, could hardly have made much of a war. There would not have been enough people to fight, few weapons with which to fight, little to fight about, and no surplus to pay for the fighting.”
32
Only in the past fifteen years have scholars with no political ax to grind, such as Lawrence Keeley, Steven LeBlanc, Azar Gat, and Johan van der Dennen, begun to compile systematic reviews of the frequency and damage of fighting in large samples of nonstate peoples.
33
The actual death counts from primitive warfare show that the apparent harmlessness of a single battle is deceptive. For one thing, a skirmish may escalate into all-out combat that leaves the battlefield strewn with bodies. Also, when bands of a few dozen men confront each other on a regular basis, even one or two deaths per battle can add up to a
rate
of casualties that is high by any standard.
33
The actual death counts from primitive warfare show that the apparent harmlessness of a single battle is deceptive. For one thing, a skirmish may escalate into all-out combat that leaves the battlefield strewn with bodies. Also, when bands of a few dozen men confront each other on a regular basis, even one or two deaths per battle can add up to a
rate
of casualties that is high by any standard.
But the main distortion comes from a failure to distinguish the two kinds of violence that turned out to be so important in studies of chimpanzees: battles and raids. It is the sneaky raids, not the noisy battles, that kill in large numbers.
34
A party of men will slink into an enemy village before dawn, fire arrows into the first men who emerge from their huts in the morning to pee, and then shoot the others as they rush out of their huts to see what the commotion is about. They may thrust their spears through walls, shoot arrows through doorways or chimneys, and set the huts on fire. They can kill a lot of drowsy people before the villagers organize themselves in defense, by which time the attackers have melted back into the forest.
34
A party of men will slink into an enemy village before dawn, fire arrows into the first men who emerge from their huts in the morning to pee, and then shoot the others as they rush out of their huts to see what the commotion is about. They may thrust their spears through walls, shoot arrows through doorways or chimneys, and set the huts on fire. They can kill a lot of drowsy people before the villagers organize themselves in defense, by which time the attackers have melted back into the forest.
Sometimes enough attackers show up to massacre every last member of the village, or to kill all the men and abduct the women. Another stealthy but effective way to decimate an enemy is by ambuscade: a war party can hide in the forest along a hunting route and dispatch enemy men as they walk by. Still another tactic is treachery: the men can pretend to make peace with an enemy, invite them to a feast, and at a prearranged signal stab the unsuspecting guests. As for any solitary man who blunders into their territory, the policy is the same as it is with chimpanzees: shoot on sight.
Men in nonstate societies (and they are almost always men) are deadly serious about war, not just in their tactics but in their armaments, which include chemical, biological, and antipersonnel weapons.
35
Arrowheads may be coated with toxins extracted from venomous animals, or with putrefied tissue that causes the wound to fester. The arrowhead may be designed to break away from its shaft, making it difficult for the victim to pull it out. Warriors often reward themselves with trophies, especially heads, scalps, and genitals. They literally take no prisoners, though occasionally they will drag one back to the village to be tortured to death. William Bradford of the
Mayflower
pilgrims observed of the natives of Massachusetts, “Not being content only to kill and take away life, [they] delight to torment men in the most bloody manner that may be, flaying some alive with the shells of fishes, cutting off members and joints of others by piecemeal and broiling on the coals, eat collops of their flesh in their sight while they live.”
36
35
Arrowheads may be coated with toxins extracted from venomous animals, or with putrefied tissue that causes the wound to fester. The arrowhead may be designed to break away from its shaft, making it difficult for the victim to pull it out. Warriors often reward themselves with trophies, especially heads, scalps, and genitals. They literally take no prisoners, though occasionally they will drag one back to the village to be tortured to death. William Bradford of the
Mayflower
pilgrims observed of the natives of Massachusetts, “Not being content only to kill and take away life, [they] delight to torment men in the most bloody manner that may be, flaying some alive with the shells of fishes, cutting off members and joints of others by piecemeal and broiling on the coals, eat collops of their flesh in their sight while they live.”
36
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