The History of Violence, beyond Pinker: The better Archangels of our Nature
Our ape relatives (and some economists) might hold the key for understanding the overall decrease of violence across the history of Human kind.
Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” represent a cornerstone of every recent analysis of human violence. And if you have read that book, or even parts of it, it probably changed your perception of human history. Personally, I was left in awe and admiration for a titanic body of research and the erudition of author’s references. Pinker fits lots of pieces together to reach a surprising conclusion: levels of violence across history are steadily decreasing. Although counterintuitive, this is a well corroborated conclusion. We suffer and die much less from violence today than a century ago, then a millennium ago…
The idea of metaphorical “better angels”, guiding the humanity by hand towards the Eternal Peace is profoundly appealing and, well… biblical. One can almost imagine the flaming winged silhouettes descending from the Sky, bringing Enlightenment and Bliss. In Pinker’s vision they are called Empathy, Self-Control, Moral Sense and Reason. They supposedly give origin to a set of macroscopic historical social processes and trends, such as Pacification process, Civilisation process, Humanitarian revolution, the Rights revolution, etc…
Thus, I felt a bit like a heretic, when I ended up with that skeptical feeling. That sensation that this set of explanations is a rather fascinating way of reshuffling social, cultural, historical and intellectual elements, putting them in a logical row. But personally, I just do not believe that human instinctive behaviour (and Violence, as one of the remarkable examples of such automatic action patterns) is subject to that kind of influence. Could it be that the Trends described by Pinker, are all mere consequences? That beneath these phenomena might lay something more crucial for us, something more strategically relevant for the Human kind as a biological entity? Something that can make us start the fire of Violence, but also play the symphony of Peace? Could the entire causal chain be starting much before, in the deep darkness of Evolutionary Psychology, the place where nobility and indecency share the common genetic, neurological and endocrine roots?
Chimps and Bonobos. The two souls of our Nature
Readers are probably acquainted with the story of these two closest genetic relatives to our Species. Like the iconic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, they are almost identical in their genome, but very different in their behavioural programming. While chimps are utterly violent, political, patriarchal and hierarchical species, bonobos seem to be the opposite. Cradled in the abundance of Congolese Rain forest, protected from their violent cousins by the Congo river, they live in a “peace and love” community. Extremely pacific, slightly matriarchal, and notoriously hyper-sexual in their social customs, bonobos represent a rather surprising example of non-violent sexually dimorphic primate species. What is so surprising in the realm of bonobos?
Violence is among the most typical features of anthropomorphic primates. Males. And it is all about competition with other males. For ranking. And rank ultimately means “access to resources”: food and sexuality.
The height, muscles and teeth of males are generally employed against their competitors. Weapons for agonistic encounters. Violence in these species is all about climbing hierarchies, not about predation.
Alphas spend their time fighting with aspiring contenders, protecting their social rank and preventing sexual contacts between females and other males.
Bonobos are the exception — dimorphic like chimps (and humans), but pacific and sexually promiscuous to extreme extent.
Due to their minimal genetic difference with our species, chimps and bonobos represent a very useful models for understanding of humans. Are we programmed for genocidal, patriarchal and hierarchy-obsessed behaviours as in chimpanzees? Or for egalitarian, peaceful, matriarchal and promiscuous settings of bonobos? Which option will prevail in our social and cultural system and ultimately individual conduct, is not a matter of conscious choice. I believe this to be a direct consequence of epigenetic tuning of our instinctive behavioural systems, stemming from ecological circumstances we are exposed to, especially as infants and children! Which ecological circumstances?
First circumstance: the availability of food and other wealth-related aspects. Competition is less fierce if the contended resource is abundant. Rich societies are less violent. Bonobos live in a relative abundance of food and water. Chimps are spread even in much less favourable environments.
Second circumstance: the equality of the distribution of wealth. The economically unequal societies are much more violent, with higher crime rates, including homicide rates, firearm abuse, etc. Chimps access the food at their foraging sites strictly according to their rank. Bonobos normally share their food.
Third circumstance: possibility of free access to sexuality or, in other terms, cultural norms regulating the promiscuity of women. Sexually restrictive (usually conservative and patriarchal) societies give origin to higher levels of violence. As an illustration of this principle we can compare the sexually restrictive Middle East cultures with licentious Scandinavian cultural systems. The difference in levels of social violence is striking. Wait, but what about Amish subculture? They live in extremely sexually repressive circumstances, nevertheless they represent a remarkable example of non-violent society! Remember the second circumstance — they cultivate a collectivistic and egalitarian system, where economic and social differences are minimal. This is among the most prominent feature of Amish and similar communities, making them the exception that confirms the principle.
Basically I suggest the presence of two Archangels, two substantially enabling causal factors regulating the violence at both social and individual level — Wealth and Sexuality, corresponding to Food and Procreation among non-human species. Let’s examine this more in detail.
Wealth, Gini index and Violence: the American Dream and the Scandinavian Reality
There is a very long list of of different adverse effects related to high inequality. As explained by Pickett and Wilkinson, in “The Spirit Level”, there seems to be an overall negative influence of high inequality on both social (crime, economic growth rates, etc.) and individual level (health, longevity). . Even world wars seem to be fostered by elevated Gini figures, as recently observed by Hauner, Milanovic and Naidu!
Poverty and inequality are both strong predictors of violent crime. Rich countries are pacific, egalitarian countries also.
The Great Gatsby graph explains that the probability to live your adult life in a social stratum above (higher than) the one your parents dwelled in, is directly tied to levels of inequality. The less the inequality, the higher the social mobility. The American dream has moved to Scandinavian peninsula, Denmark and Iceland.
Furthermore, inequality is related specifically to higher violence, not to all types of criminal acts. This happens contrary to expectations of economists. But this is exactly what an ethologist, biologist or evolutionary psychologist would expect!
In fact, inequality is not related to increase in property crimes, but rather the violent ones, reinforcing the “biological hypothesis” which sees the violence as a result of innate and instinctive tournament-type competition. All this might be happening far away from consciousness and logic. This process is supposedly deeply intertwined with hormonal and neurological fine-tuning at epigenetic level.
Steve Pinker is skeptical about the fact that genes are at the origin of the global decrease of violence. This is likely to be true, with one remark — same genes can be expressed in an array of different ways giving ultimately origin to chimp-like and bonobo-like human societies.
Sexual promiscuity as Archangel of peace?
Controlling the female sexuality, limiting the sexual choices of women and sometimes virtually removing the female physical presence in social contexts is likely to undermine the effect of agonistic behaviour on male hierarchies, resulting in a more conservative attitude towards the present establishment and less resolute attempts to overturn the “alphas”. Controlling women could be both the strategy to assure the paternity and a “social engineering” tactic to lower the tensions by removing the arousing stimuli.
Thus, lower social strata of men historically, in hierarchical and patriarchal societies, have only one way to improve their access to sexuality –violence and fight.
Besides physical fighting, there is also a “political” agonism as in chimpanzees’ society — the strength and the status are derived from the “gang” or supporting group of males. The chimpanzee version of electoral support.
Ultimately, the alpha males are “gatekeepers” of the realm of female sexuality, and they actively pursue the “mate guarding” behaviour. Thus, defeating the alphas in a violent agonistic encounter (or killing them) becomes the only way to access the reproduction, for subordinate “classes” of males.
According to that reasoning female promiscuity can seriously lower the necessity of violent encounters. I have performed a preliminary statistical analysis of the relationship between the SOI (measure of sexual openness and inclination towards promiscuity) and violence (crime rate). It revealed a clear, statistically relevant negative correlation of average SOI for women in 48 countries (as provided by David Schmitt) with crime rates measures in those countries. Although deeper analyses are required, this seems like a further support to the idea that the origins of violence among humans is in the asymmetric access to resources. Resources beyond the mere wealth/food. Resources that include the access to sexuality and reproduction. The more democratic and egalitarian is that access, the less the violence is needed.
So, why the overall violence is decreasing? Pinker revisited!
At this point seems very seducing the idea that Evolution has equipped humans with regulatory mechanisms, acting at both social and individual level, mechanisms able to fine-tune our expressions of aggressiveness. And that these mechanisms tend to keep the minimal required level of violence in order to guarantee the access to food (wealth) and procreation (sexuality).
There is an interplay between ecological (cultural, economic, social in general) aspects and our biology, giving origin to an epigenetic fine-tuning.
The scarcer the wealth (or more unequally distributed), the more violence the individual will need to guarantee the survival and the position on the ranking system.
In turn, that social positioning is often related to “preferential mating” — rich and powerful are perceived as more attractive mating partners. Together with conservative attitudes towards sexuality (female promiscuity and sexual freedom in particular) in most of the dominant cultural and religious systems.
There we can delineate another type of inequality — unequal access to sexuality and procreation.
Wealth and Sex as two Archangels (or Archdemons) able to set the stage for the Pinker’s pacification processes to take place. They lurk from eons of our biological history and influence our destinies as individuals and as a species, determining macroscopic social events — wars, economic growth, cultural revolutions, tectonic movements of political and ideological elements, etc…
Wealth (GDP pro capita) is constantly rising in human history, together with our technology-driven development of production capacity!
Inequality is on a roller-coaster on the level of decades, but when compared on centuries-based scale and on millennia-level, it is clearly decreasing.
From sharp “pecking order” of slaveholding social systems to economically relatively egalitarian modern times. Although the egalitarian nature of modern neoliberal capitalism might be debated, it still cannot be easily compared with the ancient social orders. It still deserves its place among the most egalitarian types of socio-economic system throughout the entire human history.
Sexual freedom and promiscuity, on the other hand, were at the acme of social acceptance during 1960s and 70s. Since then, social tolerance of sexuality has probably decreased in a significant manner. Although it might be counterintuitive, but a sharp decrease of freedom is likely to have occurred in recent decades, since the fast decline of the “hippy movement”, “love and peace” ideology and the extinction of the “Flower Children”. Since then, both West and East faced a visible come back of conservative and religious attitudes. However, we can observe a radically different situation when a larger time-frame is examined — an important overall loosening in social norms regarding expressions of sexuality. Today, women enjoy more freedom in their manifestation of sexuality, compared to (almost!) all previous epochs .
With that remarkable exception of Sexual revolution period, contemporary social rules are likely among the most permissive in history.
These “Archangels” might be responsible for the slow trip of the Humanity from the realm of Chimps to the realm of Bonobos. Lowering of social violence might be a consequence of this process — increase in overall wealth, increasingly egalitarian social distribution of that wealth and more liberal and permissive social norms regulating the sexuality (of women in particular). Rather than cultural, ideological or legal elements usually invoked in “The Better Angels of our Nature”, there might be a number of ecological, evolution-related, biological and epigenetic phenomena at stake. In the eternal struggle for the multiplication of genes.
Pinker is ultimately right about the overall trends, but I would argue with causal explanations he provides, which might be framed quite differently.
But wait, trends are inverting! Stay tuned…
And yes, just a note worth adding! Have you noticed the “small bumps” at the end of decreasing violent crime-rate graphs? Until now, we have focused here on a large time-scale, just to understand Pinker’s trends. But what if we narrow our focus again on recent decades? The situation seems dramatically different, with reversing trends and significant increase in overall violence measures! The more recent graphs might hide even more surprising conclusions. A sharp turn “right” in global ideological views, increasingly unequal economies, decline of the middle class and the steady rise of internal Gini co-efficients in some of the leading and most populous countries in the World, together with radical return to religious and conservative views and moralism are all prominent features of the last five to six decades. Why suddenly Pinker’s bright vision of future seems vacillating?
I believe that authors like Piketty and Milanovic might be more helpful for our understanding of these recent trends. But this will be the focus of my next blog. Coming soon…