The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (38 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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Detraction will not suffer it! More than a century later, in 1759, Samuel Johnson imagined a Quebec Indian chief commenting on “the art and regularity of European war” in a speech to his people during the Seven Years’ War:
They have a written law among them, of which they boast as derived from him who made the earth and sea, and by which they profess to believe that man will be made happy when life shall forsake him. Why is not this law communicated to us? It is concealed because it is violated. For how can they preach it to an Indian nation, when I am told that one of its first precepts forbids them to do to others what they would not that others should do to them....The sons of rapacity have now drawn their swords upon each other, and referred their claims to the decision of war; let us look unconcerned upon the slaughter, and remember that the death of every European delivers the country from a tyrant and a robber; for what is the claim of either nation, but the claim of the vulture to the leveret, of the tiger to the fawn?
111
(A leveret is a young hare.) Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
(1726) was the quintessential exercise in the shifting of vantage points, in this case from the Lilliputian to the Brobdingnagian. Swift has Gulliver describe the recent history of his homeland to the King of Brobdingnag:
Gulliver’s Travels
(1726) was the quintessential exercise in the shifting of vantage points, in this case from the Lilliputian to the Brobdingnagian. Swift has Gulliver describe the recent history of his homeland to the King of Brobdingnag:
He was perfectly astonished with the historical Account I gave him of our Affairs during the last Century, protesting it was only a Heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banishments, the very worst Effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, or Ambition could produce....“As for yourself,” (continued the King), “who have spent the greatest Part of your Life in Travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many Vices of your Country. But by what I have gathered from your own Relation, and the Answers I have with much Pain wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.”
112
Satires appeared in France as well. In one of his
pensées
, Blaise Pascal (1623–62) imagined the following dialogue: “Why are you killing me for your own benefit? I am unarmed.” “Why, do you not live on the other side of the water? My friend, if you lived on this side, I should be a murderer, but since you live on the other side, I am a hero, and it is just.”
113
Voltaire’s
Candide
(1759) was another novel that slipped scathing antiwar commentary into the mouth of a fictitious character, such as the following definition of war: “A million assassins in uniform, roaming from one end of Europe to the other, murder and pillage with discipline in order to earn their daily bread.”
pensées
, Blaise Pascal (1623–62) imagined the following dialogue: “Why are you killing me for your own benefit? I am unarmed.” “Why, do you not live on the other side of the water? My friend, if you lived on this side, I should be a murderer, but since you live on the other side, I am a hero, and it is just.”
113
Voltaire’s
Candide
(1759) was another novel that slipped scathing antiwar commentary into the mouth of a fictitious character, such as the following definition of war: “A million assassins in uniform, roaming from one end of Europe to the other, murder and pillage with discipline in order to earn their daily bread.”
Together with satires suggesting that war was hypocritical and contemptible, the 18th century saw the appearance of theories holding that it was irrational and avoidable. One of the foremost was gentle commerce, the theory that the positive-sum payoff of trade should be more appealing than the zero-sum or negative-sum payoff of war.
114
Though the mathematics of game theory would not be available for another two hundred years, the key idea could be stated easily enough in words: Why spend money and blood to invade a country and plunder its treasure when you can just buy it from them at less expense and sell them some of your own? The Abbé de Saint Pierre (1713), Montesquieu (1748), Adam Smith (1776), George Washington (1788), and Immanuel Kant (1795) were some of the writers who extolled free trade because it yoked the material interests of nations and thus encouraged them to value one another’s well-being. As Kant put it, “The spirit of commerce sooner or later takes hold of every people, and it cannot exist side by side with war. . . . Thus states find themselves compelled to promote the noble cause of peace, though not exactly from motives of morality.”
115
114
Though the mathematics of game theory would not be available for another two hundred years, the key idea could be stated easily enough in words: Why spend money and blood to invade a country and plunder its treasure when you can just buy it from them at less expense and sell them some of your own? The Abbé de Saint Pierre (1713), Montesquieu (1748), Adam Smith (1776), George Washington (1788), and Immanuel Kant (1795) were some of the writers who extolled free trade because it yoked the material interests of nations and thus encouraged them to value one another’s well-being. As Kant put it, “The spirit of commerce sooner or later takes hold of every people, and it cannot exist side by side with war. . . . Thus states find themselves compelled to promote the noble cause of peace, though not exactly from motives of morality.”
115
As they did with slavery, Quakers founded activist groups that opposed the institution of war. Though the sect’s commitment to nonviolence sprang from its religious belief that God speaks through individual human lives, it didn’t hurt the cause that they were influential businessmen rather than ascetic Luddites, having founded, among other concerns, Lloyd’s of London, Barclays Bank, and the colony of Pennsylvania.
116
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The most remarkable antiwar document of the era was Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace.”
117
Kant was no dreamer; he began the essay with the self-deprecating confession that he took the title of his essay from the caption on an innkeeper’s sign with a picture of a burial ground. He then laid out six preliminary steps toward perpetual peace, followed by three sweeping principles. The preliminary steps were that peace treaties should not leave open the option of war; that states should not absorb other states; that standing armies should be abolished; that governments should not borrow to finance wars; that a state should not interfere in the internal governance of another state; and that in war, states should avoid tactics that would undermine confidence in a future peace, such as assassinations, poisonings, and incitements to treason.
117
Kant was no dreamer; he began the essay with the self-deprecating confession that he took the title of his essay from the caption on an innkeeper’s sign with a picture of a burial ground. He then laid out six preliminary steps toward perpetual peace, followed by three sweeping principles. The preliminary steps were that peace treaties should not leave open the option of war; that states should not absorb other states; that standing armies should be abolished; that governments should not borrow to finance wars; that a state should not interfere in the internal governance of another state; and that in war, states should avoid tactics that would undermine confidence in a future peace, such as assassinations, poisonings, and incitements to treason.
More interesting were his “definitive articles.” Kant was a strong believer in human nature; elsewhere he had written that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made.” Thus he began from a Hobbesian premise:
The state of peace among men living side by side is not the natural state; the natural state is one of war. This does not always mean open hostilities, but at least an unceasing threat of war. A state of peace, therefore, must be
established,
for in order to be secured against hostility it is not sufficient that hostilities simply be not committed; and, unless this security is pledged to each by his neighbor (a thing that can occur only in a civil state), each may treat his neighbor, from whom he demands this security, as an enemy.
He then outlined his three conditions for perpetual peace. The first is that states should be democratic. Kant himself preferred the term
republican
, because he associated the word
democracy
with mob rule; what he had in mind was a government dedicated to freedom, equality, and the rule of law. Democracies are unlikely to fight each other, Kant argued, for two reasons. One is that a democracy is a form of government that by design (“having sprung from the pure source of the concept of law”) is built around nonviolence. A democratic government wields its power only to safeguard the rights of its citizens. Democracies, Kant reasoned, are apt to externalize this principle to their dealings with other nations, who are no more deserving of domination by force than are their own citizens.
republican
, because he associated the word
democracy
with mob rule; what he had in mind was a government dedicated to freedom, equality, and the rule of law. Democracies are unlikely to fight each other, Kant argued, for two reasons. One is that a democracy is a form of government that by design (“having sprung from the pure source of the concept of law”) is built around nonviolence. A democratic government wields its power only to safeguard the rights of its citizens. Democracies, Kant reasoned, are apt to externalize this principle to their dealings with other nations, who are no more deserving of domination by force than are their own citizens.
More important, democracies tend to avoid wars because the benefits of war go to a country’s leaders whereas the costs are paid by its citizens. In an autocracy “a declaration of war is the easiest thing in the world to decide upon, because war does not require of the ruler, who is the proprietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like. He may, therefore, resolve on war as on a pleasure party for the most trivial reasons.” But if the citizens are in charge, they will think twice about wasting their own money and blood on a foolish foreign adventure.
Kant’s second condition for perpetual peace was that “the law of nations shall be founded on a Federation of Free States”—a “League of Nations,” as he also called it. This federation, a kind of international Leviathan, would provide objective, third-party adjudication of disputes, circumventing every nation’s tendency to believe that it is always in the right. Just as individuals accede to a social contract in which they surrender some of their freedom to the state to escape the nastiness of anarchy, so it should be with states: “For states in their relation to each other, there cannot be any reasonable way out of the lawless condition which entails only war except that they, like individual men, should give up their savage (lawless) freedom, adjust themselves to the constraints of public law, and thus establish a continuously growing state consisting of various nations which will ultimately include all the nations of the world.”
Kant didn’t have in mind a world government with a global army. He thought that international laws could be self-enforcing. “The homage which each state pays (at least in words) to the concept of law proves that there is slumbering in man an even greater moral disposition to become master of the evil principle in himself (which he cannot disclaim) and to hope for the same from others.” The author of “Perpetual Peace” was, after all, the same man who proposed the Categorical Imperative, which stated that people should act so that the maxim of their action can be universalized. This is all starting to sound a bit starry-eyed, but Kant brought the idea back to earth by tying it to the spread of democracy. Each of two democracies can recognize the validity of the principles that govern the other. That sets them apart from theocracies, which are based on parochial faiths, and from autocracies, which are based on clans, dynasties, or charismatic leaders. In other words, if one state has reason to believe that a neighboring one organizes its political affairs in the same way that it does because both have stumbled upon the same solution to the problem of government, then neither has to worry about the other one attacking, neither will be tempted to attack the other in preemptive self-defense, and so on, freeing everyone from the Hobbesian trap. Today, for example, the Swedes don’t stay up at night worrying that their neighbors are hatching plans for Norway Über Alles, or vice versa.
The third condition for perpetual peace is “universal hospitality” or “world citizenship.” People from one country should be free to live in safety in others, as long as they don’t bring an army in with them. The hope is that communication, trade, and other “peaceable relations” across national boundaries will knit the world’s people into a single community, so that a “violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world.”
Obviously the satirists’ deglorification of war and Kant’s practical ideas on how to reduce it did not catch on widely enough to spare Western civilization the catastrophes of the next century and a half. But as we shall see, they planted the seeds of a movement that would blossom later and turn the world away from war. The new attitudes had an immediate impact as well. Historians have noted a change in the attitudes to war beginning around 1700. Leaders began to profess their love of peace and to claim that war had been forced upon them.
118
As Mueller notes, “No longer was it possible simply and honestly to proclaim like Julius Caesar, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Gradually this was changed to ‘I came, I saw, he attacked me while I was just standing there looking, I won.’ This might be seen as progress.”
119
118
As Mueller notes, “No longer was it possible simply and honestly to proclaim like Julius Caesar, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Gradually this was changed to ‘I came, I saw, he attacked me while I was just standing there looking, I won.’ This might be seen as progress.”
119
More tangible progress was seen in the dwindling appeal of imperial power. In the 18th century some of the world’s most bellicose nations, such as the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, and Portugal, reacted to military disappointments not by doubling down and plotting a return to glory but by dropping out of the conquest game, leaving war and empire to other countries and becoming commercial nations instead.
120
One of the results, as we shall see in the next chapter, was that wars between great powers became shorter, less frequent, and limited to fewer countries (though the advance of military organization meant that the wars that did occur were more damaging).
121
120
One of the results, as we shall see in the next chapter, was that wars between great powers became shorter, less frequent, and limited to fewer countries (though the advance of military organization meant that the wars that did occur were more damaging).
121
And the greatest progress was yet to come. The extraordinary decline of major war in the last sixty years may be a delayed vindication of the ivory-tower theories of Immanuel Kant—if not “perpetual peace,” then certainly a “long peace,” and one that keeps getting longer. As the great thinkers of the Enlightenment predicted, we owe this peace not just to the belittling of war but to the spread of democracy, the expansion of trade and commerce, and the growth of international organizations.
WHENCE THE HUMANITARIAN REVOLUTION?We have seen that in the span of just over a century, cruel practices that had been a part of civilization for millennia were suddenly abolished. The killing of witches, the torture of prisoners, the persecution of heretics, the execution of nonconformists, and the enslavement of foreigners—all carried out with stomach-turning cruelty—quickly passed from the unexceptionable to the unthinkable. Payne remarks on how difficult it is to explain these changes:
The routes whereby uses of force are abandoned are often quite unexpected, even mysterious—so mysterious that one is sometimes tempted to allude to a higher power at work. Time and again one encounters violent practices so rooted and so self-reinforcing that it seems almost magical that they were overcome. One is reduced to pointing to “History” to explain how this immensely beneficial policy—a reduction in the use of force—has been gradually imposed on a human race that has neither consciously sought it nor agreed with it.
122
One example of this mysterious, unsought progress is the long-term trend away from using force to punish debtors, which most people never realized was a trend. Another is the way that political murder had faded in English-speaking countries well before the principles of democracy had been articulated. In cases like these a nebulous shift in sensibilities may have been a prerequisite to consciously designed reforms. It’s hard to imagine how a stable democracy can be implemented until competing factions give up the idea that murder is a good way to allocate power. The recent failure of democracy to take hold in many African and Islamic states is a reminder that a change in the norms surrounding violence has to precede a change in the nuts and bolts of governance.
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