The resolution that I described in the following pages is that our social tolerance and our aggressiveness are not the opposites that at first they appear to be, because the two behaviors involve different types of aggression. Our social tolerance comes from our having a relatively low tendency for reactive aggression, whereas the violence that makes humans deadly is proactive aggression.
Hitler was said by his secretary to have had an agreeable, friendly, and paternal manner. He hated cruelty to animals: he was a vegetarian, adored his dog Blondi and was inconsolable when Blondi died.
Pol Pot was known to his acquaintances as a soft-spoken and kindly teacher of French history.
During 18 months in prison, Stalin was always amazingly calm and never shouted or swore. In effect, he was a model gentleman-inmate.
We can be the nastiest of species and also the nicest.
It is hard to imagine, considering the inherent silliness, cruelty and superstition of the human race, how it has contrived to last as long as it has. The witch-hunting, the torturing, the gullibility, the massacres, the intolerance, the wild futility of human behavior over the centuries is hardly credible.
And yet most of the time we do wonderful things that are the very opposite of “silliness, cruelty and superstition,” depending as the do on reason, kindness, and cooperation. The technical and cultural marvels that distinguish our species are made possible by these qualities, in combination with our intelligence.
For centuries, people have simplified their understanding of a confusing world by adopting one or the other of these opposed views. Rousseau and Hobbes are classic icons for the alternatives. Rousseau has come to stand for humanity’s being instinctively nice, Hobbes for humanity’s being naturally wicked.
The intrusion of politics makes the debate all the harder to settle, because when these abstractly theoretical analyses become arguments with societal significance, both sides tend to harden their stance. If you are a Rousseauian, your belief in essential human goodness probably marks you out as a peace-loving, easygoing crusader for social justice with faith in the masses. If you are a Hobbesian, your cynical view of human motives suggests you see a friend for social control, cherishing hierachy and accepting the inevitability of war. The debate becomes less about biology or psychology and more about social causes, political structures, and the moral high ground. Prospects for simple resolution duly recede.
I believe that there is an escape from this morass about the fundamental nature of humans. Rather than needing to prove that either side is wrong, we should ask whether the debate make sense at all. The potential for good and evil occurs in every individual. Our biology determines the contradictory aspects of our personalities, and society modifies both tendencies.
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Reactive aggression is the “hot” type, such as losing one’s temper and lashing out. Proactive aggression is “cold,” planned and deliberate. So our core question becomes two: why are we so lacking in reactive aggressiveness, and yet so highly proficient at proactive aggressiveness? The answer to the first explains virtue; the answer to the second accounts for our violence.
Tolerance is a rare phenomenon in wild animals, at least in the extreme form that humans show. It is found, however, among domesticated species. An increasing number of scientists believe that humans should be regarded as a domesticated version of an earlier human ancestor.
Funerals brought arguments over the value of the dead: had a woman produced enough children to be worth her bride price of seven chickens?
Their “goodness,” however, was applied only to people of the same society.
There are two codes of morals, two sets of mores, one for comrades inside and another for strangers outside, and both arise from the same interests. Against outsiders it is meritorious to kill, plunder, practise blood revenge, and steal women and slaves, but inside the group none of these things can be allowed because they would produce discord and weakness.
From the Ituri Forest and New Guinea highlands to everywhere else in the world, the same pattern emerges. Whether or not their lives are consumed by war beyond their settlements, people can be strikingly peaceful when at home.
Overall, physical aggression in human happens at less than 1% of the frequency among either of our closest ape relatives. Compared to them, in this respect, we really are a dramatically peaceful species.
War can vanish from a society for decades at a time, but when it starts up again, the numbers show that humans kill one another at rates higher than chimpanzees or any other primate.
Some people are much more aggressive than others. How people express their aggression also varies. Some are confrontational, some are passive-aggressive, some are gossips. There is so much diversity that we might come to assume there are no simple ways meaningfully to categorize types of aggression.
Reactive killing is harder to explain because the intensity of the fight is often out of all proportion to the provocation, and the killing is often accidental. The killer is typically remorseful, and is regularly caught and punished.
In keeping with their stronger emotional reactions, wild mammals tend to have a larger limbic system than domesticated mammals. Larger amygdalae are more typical of a wild than a domestic animal.
Wolves are different from dogs. However much you tame a wolf, it will not become domesticated. After years of behaving well, a wolf can suddenly and unpredictably forget its training. You should not trust wild animals, because they are all too reactively aggressive.
Whether reared in human homes or studied all their lives by people who love them deeply and thoughtfully, chimpanzees cannot be trusted not to use their strength in aggression — even when they understand the rules perfectly well.
The notion that humans are a domesticated species is at least as old as ancient Greece. Aristotle regarded most humans, such as the Greeks and Persians, whom he knew best, as so much less aggressive than wild animals that he put them in the same category of tameness as horses, cattle, pigs, goats and dogs. On the other hand, he considered hunter-gatherers to be wild, hence undomesticated.
His disdain foreshadowed Nazi justifications for violence toward people whose degree of domestication was supposedly inferior to their own.
Man is a domesticated animal… born and appointed by nature the most completely domesticated animal… the most perfect of all sorts of domestic animals that have been created.
His method of incorporating them shows how chaotic the understanding of biology was then. Instead of recognizing them for what they were — namely, unfortunate outcasts with diminished mental or physical abilities — he treated them as if they represented a subspecies of humanity. Linnaeus was the scientific idol of the day, an ultimate authority. When he implied that the “wild children” came from a “wild population,” most people seem to have just assumed he was right.
These were the most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld. Their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gestures violent and without dignity. Viewing such men, once can hardly make oneself believe they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world. Their skill in some respects may be compared to the instinct of animals; for it is not improved by experience.
Darwin knew that domesticated animals reproduce faster than their wild counterparts. If Blumenbach was right, “civilized men” would be expected to reproduce faster than “wild men.” There were other problems, too. Darwin knew that domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild ancestors, whereas the size of the human brain and skull had apparently increased over time. So Darwin regarded the idea that humans are domesticated animals as a double failure. Not only was there no mechanism for human domestication, but also humans did not follow the patterns of domesticated animals.
Everywhere, the essential rationale is the same. Our docile behavior recalls that of a domesticated species, and since no other species can have domesticated us, we must have done it ourselves. We must be self-domesticated.
There is a strong tendency for domesticated mammals to have floppy ears. This was amazing, because floppy years are very rare in adult wild animals.
Another example is white spots on foreheads, common in horses, cows, dogs, and cats but not in wild animals. It was the same story for curly tails, variable hair quality, and white feet.
Differences between males and females are less highly developed in domesticated than in wild animals, always for the same reason: males become less exaggeratedly male.
Conventionally, these 4 kinds of changes in human fossils have been explained separately, often in ways unique to humans. Body-size reduction might be understood to result from climate change, or from a reduction in food availability, or from adaptation to new diseases. Facial reduction might have been the result of novel cooking methods, such as boiling, which made food softer. Reduced sex differences might have issued from the increased use of technology, with males no longer needing to rely on certain physical skills to be good hunters. Smaller brains might be explained as the result of lighter bodies. But when we step back from each specific change, we see a bigger picture. The differences between modern humans and our earlier ancestors have a clear pattern. They look like the differences between a dog and a wolf.
Biologists ordinarily assume that features evolve because they are adaptations that promote an individual’s ability to survive and reproduce.
Accordingly, he imagined that the early stages of domestication would always involve selection in favor of the least reactively aggressive, most tractable animals. Whether a farmer did this consciously or unconsciously did not matter: most likely, it would happen simply because the more aggressive animals were more dangerous and difficult to deal with.
In the 4th generation, the experimenters were amazed to find a few pups approached by humans wagging their tails as if they were dogs. Unselected foxes had never wagged their tails.
Something similar happens in humans. Boys who are big for their age learn as early as 3 years old that they can win fights with smaller peers. Being rewarded for successful aggression, they end up being more aggressive throughout childhood.
You might think that more aggressive individuals would always fare better in the competition for evolutionary success. In fact, of course, too much of anything is a bad thing. An animal that fights too often, or too intensely, wastes energy and takes unnecessary risks. The trick is to get the balance right, to fight in the right contexts and at the right level of intensity, and only when the payoff is worthwhile.
Despite their size advantage, females very effectively suppress bullying by males. Males seem to have learned where the ultimate power lies: numbers beat physical strength.
Chimpanzee parties, by contrast, are numerically dominated by males. Females tend to travel alone or in smaller subgroups. It seems likely that because of this relatively dispersed way of life, female chimpanzees fail to gain confidence in each other’s support against males. Only in zoos without males, chimpanzee females developed mutual trust. In the wild, most adult females apparently spend too little time together to learn to depend on each other.
The cascade starts with gorilla competition for the foods eaten by chimpanzees. By contrast, bonobos, having no gorillas living in the same area, are relieved from that competition. So bonobos have more food choices than chimpanzees do.
The reduction in reactive aggression is explained by an island’s being too small to hold a full complement of predators, which means that the risk of being killed is less than on the continent. As a result, animals survive longer on islands and live at higher population densities. Island populations are therefore relatively crowded, which means that being too aggressive can be overly exhausting. If aggression does not pay, it is better not to waste time and energy and incur high risks by fighting. Under these conditions selection favors the less aggressive.
We cannot live without the cultural knowledge that enables each new generation to re-create its society’s way of life. Naive animals dropped into a new environment can often work out for themselves how to find food and survive. By contrast, humans mostly have to learn from others how to make a living by digging for edible food, cooking, fashioning tools, building houses, making boats, irrigating farmland, taming horses, making clothes, and so on. Without the learned skills passed down to us by previous generations, we are in trouble. With them, we dominate the planet.
Marean’s scenario highlights the importance of cooperation as an important ability, but ignores the fact that cooperation depends on a very low propensity for reactive aggression. Given how much less emotionally reactive humans are then chimpanzees, bonobos, or most group-living primates, a low propensity for reactive aggression cannot be taken for granted in our Mid-Pleistocene ancestors. Reduced reactive aggression must feature alongside intelligence, cooperation, and social learning as a key contributor to the emergence and success of our species.
Docility should be considered as foundational of humankind, not just because it is unusual, but because it seems likely to be a vital precondition for advanced cooperation and social learning.
It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that advancement in the standard of morality and an increase in the number of well-endowed men will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each another and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes. At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase.
The compact tribes win, and the compact tribes are the tamest. Civilization begins, because the beginning of civilization is a military advantage.
Japanese kamikaze pilots who flew their planes into enemy ships during WW2, or Islamic suicide bombers, responded to intense cultural pressures more than innate inclinations.
Alexander argues that at some unknown point in our evolution, language skills developed to the point where gossip became possible. Once that happened, reputations would become important. Being known as a helpful individual would be expected to have a big effect on someone’s success in life. Good behavior would be rewarded. Virtue would become adaptive.
Language begat reputation, and reputation begat morality.
We can probably all remember bullies from our school years who were so powerful that they did not care what some of the less well connected children thought of them. They were big and bold, and if others resented them, so what? The bullies got what they wanted without the approval of the mutterers. They were not stopped simply by gossip. They had to be stopped by someone fighting back, or by adults who whisked them off to detention.
It was not until the late 18th century that capital punishment started to fall in popularity. Before then, if you challenged the rules, you risked death. The counterpoint was impressive. Trouble was rare. Home owners could sleep with their doors open. They did not have to lock up their valuables. As long as you followed the rules, New England was a place of peace.
So, in many ways, individuals in these small-scale societies are freer than those in larger, agrarian groups, where individuals are subject to the “tyranny of kings.” But liberty has its limits. In the absence of domineering leaders, a social cage of tradition demands claustrophobic adherence to group norms. Gellner called it a “tyranny of the cousins.” The cultural rules are paramount. Individuals have limited personal freedom; they live or die by their willingness to conform.
Like alpha chimpanzees, these would-be despots defend their top status by reacting ferociously to challengers. In a world without prisons or police, those bullies whose reactive aggression was particularly egregious could be stopped only by execution. Thus the egalitarianism found among all mobile hunter-gatherers indicates that the most aggressive individuals were eliminated. The ironic and disturbing conclusion is that egalitarianism, a system that appeals because of its lack of domineering behavior, is made possible by the most domineering behavior in the human arsenal.
Everyone has a voice, but they all show considerable reluctance to use it. Men are so averse to grandiosity that self-deprecation is a highly regarded part of public behavior. Kenneth recorded the effect among Australian Aboriginals. It was important to show shame and embarrassment, he wrote, because they demonstrate to others that one does not have a conceited view of oneself.
The Declaration of Independence may have seemed revolutionary when it stated, “All men are created equal,” but within small groups, people have always tended to adopt norms of equality. Those who try to better themselves or take command in small groups can easily become targets of resentment.
Hunter-gatherer men are entirely different from primates such as chimpanzees or gorillas, because ordinary men’s status does not depend on violence. Individual apes and other primates become alpha by soundly defeating the prior alpha in a physical fight. Among mobile hunter-gatherers who follow social norms, by contrast, there are no fights and no equivalent of being an alpha male.
To the extent that there is leadership in hunter-gatherer bands, such as in taking initiative for group decisions, prestige is the important criterion. People compete for influence mostly by producing good arguments, creating good plans, being the best mediators, telling the best stories, or seeing the future most convincingly. A person who is skilled in these ways might be recognized as a leader or headman, but that role would be earned by his or her being wise and persuasive rather than assertive, pushy, or a good wrestler. Although leaders can be admired and respected, they cannot enforce their ideas, nor can they use their position to take anything from other members of the band. An inability to dictate to others means that, among mobile hunter-gatherers, there is no alpha position.
He suggested that the absence of alphas among nomadic hunter-gatherers was caused by killing: “The means to kill secretly anyone perceived as a threat acts directly as a powerful leveling mechanism. Inequalities of wealth, power and prestige can be dangerous for holders where means of effective protection is lacking.”
The gift had made Lee look arrogant. “When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”
If more drastic measures are needed, shunning or ostracism is often effective because being avoided and excluded is deeply painful to most people living in small groups, and will normally do the trick.
By brining down even the most domineering of men, capital punishment underlines the unique human phenomenon of an egalitarian hierarchy in which men normally succeed in suppressing a desire for dominance.
Canine reduction was likely adapted to a diet that required more intense chewing
Many adult dogs have delightfully floppy ears. Adult wolves never have floppy ears, but juvenile wolves do.
The suggestion is that tameness is basically a juvenile characteristic. Selection for docility means selecting for juvenility.
In every mammal, juveniles tend to be friendly. Compared with adults, they are strikingly unafraid and inquisitive.
The bonds they have formed up to that time can last a lifetime, but youthful innocence has gone. Henceforward, they will find it hard to trust unfamiliar individuals. After the socialization window closes, even dogs can be difficult to train.
Huxley’s fantasy came from seeing humans as juvenilized apes. If people could stay alive long enough, he speculated, they would no longer be juvenilized; and as a result, they would no longer be human.
Neaderthals occupied Europe for perhaps half a million years.
There were also some abilities that Neaderthals appeared not to have at all. They seem to have lacked facilities for the long-term storage of food. There is no evidence that they built sleds, despite living through harsh winters. Nor do they appear to have produced or used boats.
Reactive aggression results from a fear response. Selection against emotional reactivity reduces fear; and reduced fear allows a dog to take a longer, more careful look at a human than a wolf normally would.
Subsequent studies of wolves support the notion that reduced fear, more than intelligence, is what enables animals to understand human signals.
Whether an act is felt to be good also depends on the critical distinction between “us” and “them.” We consider it no shame to cheat, lie, or deceive where a teacher was concerned, though the same treatment of a school-fellow would have been immoral. It was the same in concentration camps of WW2. Stealing from fellow prisoners was theft; stealing form prison guards was organizing.
The killers who committed genocide in WW2, Cambodia, and Rwanda were caught up in societies where moral boundaries became excessively crystallized. Yet most were not sadistic monsters or ideological fanatics. They were unremarkable individuals who loved their families and countrymen in conventional moral way.
Amazingly, the babies tend to prefer looking at the good puppet. Before we can talk or walk, we are programmed to recognize norm violators — those whose antisocial behavior classifies them as “bad.”
However, in making moral choices we tend to act first and think later. Moral reasoning is usually a post-hoc process in which we search for evidence to support our initial intuitive reaction. Haidt compares the process to the actions of a press secretary working for a secretive administration, “constantly generating the most persuasive arguments it can muster for policies whose true origins and goals are unknown.”
If the strange men were willing to forgo their attack, they signaled their intent by having sexual intercourse with the female emissaries. If not, they sent the women back and then attacked. The final stage of peacemaking between two tribes almost always involved an exchange of wives.
People do not follow any general moral principle. Instead, moral decisions are influenced by a series of unconscious and unexplained biases.
Even the most impressively prosocial primates, such as chimpanzees and capuchins, only go so far. They have the abilities like empathy, perspective-taking, concern, and self-inhibiting, all of which humans can use while making moral decisions. But those abilities are were starting points. They provide the psychological basis for being able to make moral decisions, but they are not sufficient to create moral beings. “We have moral systems and apes do not.”
Men could insist that women provide food for the all-male secret ceremonies, or provide sexual services to whomever the men required. Religious knowledge, controlled by men, justified their dominance. The gods were kind to them.
The elders decided what was a crime against society, which explains why among hunter-gatherers those who are executed are not just the excessively aggressive and violent.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Some 300K years ago, males discovered absolute power. They had surely been individually dominant to females before the onset of capital punishment, just as chimpanzees are. Afterward, however, the dominance of males over females took a new form. It became a patriarchy in the special sense of male dominance based on a system. The system was a network of mature males protecting their mutual interests.
The first rule of life in a dense web of gossip is: Be careful what you do. The second rule is: What you do matters less than what people think you did, so you’d better be able to frame your actions in a positive light. You’d better be a good “intuitive politician.”
When we have time to think about our moral decisions, we turn to our conscience. Mencken called it “the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.” He seems to have got it right. Conscience is a mechanism of self-defense. Through natural selection, humans became equipped with an increasingly sophisticated moral conscience for steering clear of moral mobs.
The simple predictive formula is that, by carrying out a coordinated plan, a large coalition can dispatch a lone social outcast at an extremely small risk to themselves by being physically harmed. There are often complexities in the process of forming the coalition, or in deciding that a kill is the appropriate action, but the killing itself is not risky. Once that system is put into practice, it means, of course, that offenders are expected to work hard to avoid the ultimate penalty. Accordingly, a few words from a senior member of the group should be enough to remind anyone of the importance of conformity. Our sensitivity to right and wrong is understandable as an evolved response to the extreme danger of being in the wrong.
Such sensitivity to moral values also became biologically embedded into novel emotional responses. Prominent human emotions not known to occur in animals include shame, embarrassment, guilt, and the pain of being ostracized, all of which are human universals. Involuntary and painful, they have been convincingly explained as mechanisms that show an individual’s commitment to a social group after his or her social standing has been jeopardized.
Our moral psychology was forged during a period when being a social outcast was even more dangerous than it is for most people today.
Accordingly, the additional hidden message included in the phrase “coalition proactive aggression” is that there is a large imbalance of power in favor of the aggressors. The aggressors would not plan their surprise attack unless they could know they have absolute power.
It might seem surprising that this effective killing behavior is rare in the animal kingdom. The explanation is simple. In most species, the costs of attacking members of your own species are too high because you might get hurt. Only a few species happen to live in societies in which gangs of allied individuals can form, and the gangs can regularly find vulnerable loners or another group to beat up on with minimal risk of being hurt.
Night attacks appear to have been universal. The aggressors know that the most radical method to extinguish the enemy is to take them unawares, and to slaughter them before they can retaliate.
Obedience is a uniquely human relationship. Nonhumans such as dogs can learn to obey, but they cannot give orders. A system of obedience depends on punishment. Within families or small groups, the mechanism of punishment can be emotional manipulation or physical beatings, but in the politics of large-scale groups, a proactive coalition provides the power. An order given to a subordinate is essentially a threat to use aggression unless the order is obeyed.
In practice, real sovereignty is the ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity, which of course is concentrated in the powerful. Sovereign power is fundamentally premised on the capacity and the will to decide on life and death, the capacity to visit excessive violence on those declared enemies or on undesirables. The really fundamental sine qua non of law in any society — primitive or civilized — is the legitimate use of physical coercion by a socially authorized agent.
The SS were well organized. They chose to make their arrests when their victims were helpless. Prisoners being transported into concentration camps were given no opportunities to organize balances of force in their favor. They had no chance to fight back in a way that would give them advantage. Collaborative planning enables murders to be conducted with cold efficiency.
As Action also wrote: “Great men are almost always bad men.” The cost-benefit dynamics of coalitionary proactive aggression make murderous violence an alluring easy tool. Regardless of their personal physical weakness, individual human leaders use coalitions to kill with unprecedented ease.
If war is ancient, he worried, it must be natural. And if war is seen as natural, then there is little point in trying to prevent, reduce, or abolish it.
We do not apply that formula to other unpleasant natural things. We try to stop diseases even though they are clearly biological in nature. We try to intervene when men harass women, or when bullies throw their weight around, or when children fight one another. The fact that we think such behaviors have evolved does not inhibit us from trying to reduce their effects.
Every man has a wild beast within him. The question is what releases the beast.
In the ultimate example, coalitionary proactive aggression enabled concentration camp employees to shoot or gas millions of Jews, Romanies, Poles, homosexuals, and others during WW2 with hardly a single killer being hurt in the act. We are inclined to label callously planned violence such as the Holocaust as “inhuman.” But phylogenetically, of course, it is not inhuman at all. It is deeply human. No other mammal has such a deliberative approach to mass killing of its own species.
In battles of complex warfare, soldiers have no choice about whether to participate and may be thoroughly unenthusiastic about doing so. Their situation can be emotionally traumatic and often highly maladaptive for the individual. In some battles, soldiers are required to approach a body of armed opponents in an action exposing themselves deliberatively to a high risk of injury or death. The question is what makes them do it. Motivations forged over evolutionary time are not the answer.
All men on a battlefield are afraid, according to General Marshall’s study of battle behavior in WW2. Sometimes the whole army turns and runs. This occurs not because the army has been physically shaken but because its nerve has given. At other times, “fainthearts” dribble away in small numbers until, by the time the two sides engage, hardly anyone is left. The soldiers’ fear of engagement is so strong that the main task of officers as suppressing it, partly by being ready to kill deserters. That was Fredericks the Great’s formula. He was said to insist that the common soldier must fear his officer more than he fears the enemy. The commanding officer not only must bring the soldiers to the killing zone at the front, he must make them stay there.
Commanders tend to think that soldiers go into battle because they are obedient, whereas in reality two reasons are more important. One is found when fighting can actually improve the chance of survival; in some circumstances, being left behind can be the worst outcome.
The other reason for bravery is to avoid incurring the contempt of close companions. Military organizations intentionally foster close bonds. Their desire to maintain one another’s respect is sometimes suggested to have come from developing a false sense of kinship.
Respect also comes from being hazed, a practice that emphatically shows a recruit that he is subject to the coalitionary power of his group members. A soldier exposed as a coward can be in danger from his own unit.
Human psychology is not well adapted to being a soldier. That is why the most successful armies are those who have most completely worn down the self-interested tendencies in their troops, whether through discipline or through inspiration. In war, claimed Napoleon, “three-quarters turns on personal character and relations; the balance of manpower and materials counts only for the remaining quarter.”
He found 4 main symptoms of incompetence governing the outcome of battles: overconfidence, underestimation of the enemy, the ignoring of intelligence reports, and wastage of manpower.
Groupthink exacerbated the problem by contributing 6 additional symptoms: a shared illusion of invulnerability, an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, stereotyping the enemy as too evil for negotiation (or too weak to be a threat), a collective illusion of unanimity in a majority viewpoint (based on the false assumption that silence means consent), and self-appointed censors to protect the group form information that might weaken resolve (such as reports from spies).
In retrospect, the decision to invade seemed extraordinary. “How could I have been so stupid as to let them proceed?” President Kennedy repeatedly asked later.
The answer was clear. It was arrogance, “egos so tall that the eyes and ears can shut out whatever one prefers not to see or hear.” Kennedy, the final decider, desperately wanted to avoid being called “chicken.” Everyone around him thought he had the Midas touch and could not lose.
Delusion of this type are so routine in war that they are a mainstay of theories about military failure.
Armies pride themselves on their efficiency, and therefore might have been expected to have systems for ensuring accurate assessments of enemy strengths, but the opposite occurs: counter to commonsense intuitions that we might have, systems arise for ensuring inaccuracy. A core problem is the emergence of positive illusions. People overestimate the positive.
The declaration of WW1 was greeted with enormous popular enthusiasm in the capitals of all combatant countries, despite the statesmen’s foreboding.
Reality changes the perception. By the end of the war, after his son was killed, Kipling wrote, “If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied.”
In an even match, a rational opponent who thinks like Hamlet would accurately perceive himself as having a 50% probability of defeat. Accordingly, he might think about protecting himself in the event of failure, whether by devising escape plans, avoiding damage, or attempting to reassess the opponents’ strength. Such attention to the possibility of loss would lead to anxiety (a sure predictor of defeat) and, more generally, to distraction. So, because in a contest between equals 100% effort beats 90% effort, arrogant blind confidence will predict the winner. “Championship thinking” is irrational and wasteful and half of the time deluded, bu tin an even match, it brings more psychological resources to the fight and increase the chance of winning.
The second benefit of self-confidence is that it can create fear in the enemy; often a good bluff is sufficient. The Dayaks inspired fear in various ways. Tales of their cannibalism and parading of severed heads meant that “they were possessed, they weren’t acting normally,” and their enemies were duly scared.
Of victory, indeed, every nation is confident before the sword is drawn; and this mutual confidence produces that wantonness of bloodshed, that has so often desolated the world.
In 1928, leaders of 62 nations pledged not to resort to war as an instrument of policy.
Yet, despite all these failures, and in the face of much skepticism, the pact was in fact a success because it changed the rules of war. Between 1816 and 1928, most wars had been fought to acquired territory. Such wars of conquest became illegal under the Kellogg-Briand Pact. As a result, annexation of territory became rarer, and nations turned increasingly to trade.
The paradox is resolved if we recognized that human nature is a chimera. The Chimera, in classical mythology, was a creature with the body of a goat and the head of a lion. It was neither one thing nor the other: it was both.
Language-based conspiracy was the key, because it gave whispering beta males the power to join forces to kill alpha-male bullies.
The moral senses of individuals thus evolved to be self-protective to a degree not shown by other primates. The strongly conformist behaviors produced by the new tendencies provided a safe passage through life, and they had a second effect as well. By reducing competition and promoting respect for the interests of others, individual conformity brought benefits to the group of moral enforcers and their supporters.
People could then form alliances based on shared interests that they could articulate. With the arrival of planned and communally approved executions, the bullying of an alpha male was exchanged for the subtler tyranny of the previous underdogs. The newly powerful coalitions of males became the set of elders who would rule society — a system that largely continues today, albeit with more laws, threats, and imprisonment than execution.
Both our “angelic” and “demonic” tendencies, therefore, depended for the evolution on the sophisticated forms of shared intentionality made possible by language. Language created our chimeric personality in which killing power lies alongside reduced emotional reactivity. A unique communicative ability gave us a uniquely contradictory psychology of aggression.
The essentials will not change. Out of nonlife, life! Out of instincts, consciousness. Out of materialist brains, spirituality and laughter and joy and an understanding of the meaning of life. Out of darkness, a species that sees itself for what it is, a glint of mentality in a vast, mostly sterile universe.
The system of nations that has been in place since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 might feel permanent, but it has already started to change, and anything is possible in the future. History is far more important than evolutionary theorizing as a reminder about human potential, because the historical evidence of change is so much more vivid. We know that over time society sometimes improves in quality, and sometimes decays. What we cannot know is which direction our descendants will take.
The great problem with the purest Rousseauian visions is that they are easily interpreted as implying that a state or anarchy would be peaceful. Take away capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, racism, sexism, and other evils of the modern world, they seem to suggest, and an ideal society of love and harmony will emerge. The idea that humans have evolved merely with a Rousseauian tolerance, and not also with a Hobbesian selfishness, is problematic to the extent that it encourages people to let their guard down.
Just as happens in every society throughout the world, in the public sphere men dominated women. Within marriages, wives often dominate their husbands.
So much cooperation. We sometimes think that cooperation is always a worthwhile goal. But, just like morality, it can be for good or bad.
But if we step back and cherish our rough past, we can thank our cruel ancestors for making us sapiens. Ironically, executioners seem to have brought us to the beginning of wisdom.