The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,196

a club, leaving him spitting out blood and teeth. The students smashed the glass and left the couple on their knees crying.91

During the Holocaust, Christian Wirth commanded a slave labor compound in Poland, where Jews were worked to death sorting the clothes of their murdered compatriots. Their children had been taken from them and sent to the death camps.

Wirth allowed one exception.... One Jewish boy around ten was given sweets and dressed up as a little SS man. Wirth and he rode among the prisoners, Wirth on a white horse and the boy on a pony, both using machineguns to kill prisoners (including the boy’s mother) at close range.92

Glover allows himself a comment: “To this ultimate expression of contempt and mockery, no reaction of disgust and anger is remotely adequate.”

How could people do these things? Making sense of killing-by-category, insofar as we can do so at all, must begin with the psychology of categories.93

People sort other people into mental pigeonholes according to their affiliations, customs, appearances, and beliefs. Though it’s tempting to think of this stereotyping as a kind of mental defect, categorization is indispensable to intelligence. Categories allow us to make inferences from a few observed qualities to a larger number of unobserved ones. If I note the color and shape of a fruit and classify it as a raspberry, I can infer that it will taste sweet, satisfy my hunger, and not poison me. Politically correct sensibilities may bridle at the suggestion that a group of people, like a variety of fruit, may have features in common, but if they didn’t, there would be no cultural diversity to celebrate and no ethnic qualities to be proud of. Groups of people cohere because they really do share traits, albeit statistically. So a mind that generalizes about people from their category membership is not ipso facto defective. African Americans today really are more likely to be on welfare than whites, Jews really do have higher average incomes than WASPs, and business students really are more politically conservative than students in the arts—on average.94

The problem with categorization is that it often goes beyond the statistics. For one thing, when people are pressured, distracted, or in an emotional state, they forget that a category is an approximation and act as if a stereotype applies to every last man, woman, and child.95 For another, people tend to moralize their categories, assigning praiseworthy traits to their allies and condemnable ones to their enemies. During World War II, for example, Americans thought that Russians had more positive traits than Germans; during the Cold War they thought it was the other way around.96 Finally, people tend to essentialize groups. As children, they tell experimenters that a baby whose parents have been switched at birth will speak the language of her biological rather than her adoptive parents. As they get older, people tend to think that members of particular ethnic and religious groups share a quasi-biological essence, which makes them homogeneous, unchangeable, predictable, and distinct from other groups.97

The cognitive habit of treating people as instances of a category gets truly dangerous when people come into conflict. It turns Hobbes’s trio of violent motives—gain, fear, and deterrence—from the bones of contention in an individual quarrel to the casus belli in an ethnic war. Historical surveys have shown that genocides are caused by this triad of motives, with, as we shall see, two additional toxins spiked into the brew.98

Some genocides begin as matters of convenience. Natives are occupying a desirable territory or are monopolizing a source of water, food, or minerals, and invaders would rather have it for themselves. Eliminating the people is like clearing brush or exterminating pests, and is enabled by nothing fancier in our psychology than the fact that human sympathy can be turned on or off depending on how another person is categorized. Many genocides of indigenous peoples are little more than expedient grabs of land or slaves, with the victims typed as less than human. Such genocides include the numerous expulsions and massacres of Native Americans by settlers or governments in the Americas, the brutalization of African tribes by King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo Free State, the extermination of the Herero by German colonists in South-West Africa, and the attacks on Darfuris by government-encouraged Janjaweed militias in the 2000s.99

When conquerors find it expedient to suffer the natives to live so that they can provide tribute and taxes, genocide can have a second down-to-earth function. A reputation for a willingness to commit genocide