The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,198

not even small children, alive, as they fear lest these should later appear as avengers against the victors.103

Half a world away, the anthropologist Margaret Durham offered a similar vignette from an Albanian tribe that ordinarily abided by norms for measured revenge:In February 1912 an amazing case of wholesale justice was reported to me. . . . A certain family of the Fandi bairak [subtribe] had long been notorious for evil-doing—robbing, shooting, and being a pest to the tribe. A gathering of all the heads condemned all the males of the family to death. Men were appointed to lay in wait for them on a certain day and pick them off; and on that day the whole seventeen of them were shot. One was but five and another but twelve years old. I protested against thus killing children who must be innocent and was told: “It was bad blood and must not be further propagated.” Such was the belief in heredity that it was proposed to kill an unfortunate woman who was pregnant, lest she should bear a male and so renew the evil.104

The essentialist notion of “bad blood” is one of several biological metaphors inspired by a fear of the revenge of the cradle. People anticipate that if they leave even a few of a defeated enemy alive, the remnants will multiply and cause trouble down the line. Human cognition often works by analogy, and the concept of an irksome collection of procreating beings repeatedly calls to mind the concept of vermin.105 Perpetrators of genocide the world over keep rediscovering the same metaphors to the point of cliché. Despised people are rats, snakes, maggots, lice, flies, parasites, cockroaches, or (in parts of the world where they are pests) monkeys, baboons, and dogs.106 “Kill the nits and you will have no lice,” wrote an English commander in Ireland in 1641, justifying an order to kill thousands of Irish Catholics.107 “A nit would make a louse,” recalled a Californian settler leader in 1856 before slaying 240 Yuki in revenge for their killing of a horse.108 “Nits make lice,” said Colonel John Chivington before the Sand Creek Massacre, which killed hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1864.109 Cankers, cancers, bacilli, and viruses are other insidious biological agents that lend themselves as figures of speech in the poetics of genocide. When it came to the Jews, Hitler mixed his metaphors, but they were always biological: Jews were viruses; Jews were bloodsucking parasites; Jews were a mongrel race; Jews had poisonous blood.110

The human mind has evolved a defense against contamination by biological agents: the emotion of disgust.111 Ordinarily triggered by bodily secretions, animal parts, parasitic insects and worms, and vectors of disease, disgust impels people to eject the polluting substance and anything that looks like it or has been in contact with it. Disgust is easily moralized, defining a continuum in which one pole is identified with spirituality, purity, chastity, and cleansing and the other with animality, defilement, carnality, and contamination. 112 And so we see disgusting agents as not just physically repellent but also morally contemptible. Many metaphors in the English language for a treacherous person use a disease vector as their vehicle—a rat, a louse, a worm, a cockroach. The infamous 1990s term for forced displacement and genocide was ethnic cleansing.

Metaphorical thinking goes in both directions. Not only do we apply disgust metaphors to morally devalued peoples, but we tend to morally devalue people who are physically disgusting (a phenomenon we encountered in chapter 4 when considering Lynn Hunt’s theory that a rise in hygiene in Europe caused a decline in cruel punishments). At one pole of the continuum, whiteclad ascetics who undergo rituals of purification are revered as holy men and women. At the other, people living in degradation and filth are reviled as subhuman. The chemist and writer Primo Levi described this spiral during the transport of Jews to the death camps in Germany:The SS escort did not hide their amusement at the sight of men and women squatting wherever they could, on the platforms and in the middle of the tracks, and the German passengers openly expressed their disgust: people like this deserve their fate, just look how they behave. These are not Menschen, human beings, but animals, it’s clear as the light of day.113

The emotional pathways to genocide—anger, fear, and disgust—can occur in various combinations. In Worse than War, a history of 20th-century genocide, the political scientist Daniel Goldhagen points out that not all genocides have the same causes.