The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,216

the reality over long enough spans of time.211 Among the contributors to the perception of kinship are the experience of having grown up together, having seen one’s mother care for the other person, commensal meals, myths of common ancestry, essentialist intuitions of common flesh and blood, the sharing of rituals and ordeals, physical resemblance (often enhanced by hairdressing, tattoos, scarification, and mutilation), and metaphors such as fraternity, brotherhood, family, fatherland, motherland, and blood.212 Military leaders use every trick in the book to make their soldiers feel like genetic relatives and take on the biologically predictable risks. Shakespeare made this clear in the most famous motivational speech in the literary history of war, when Henry V addresses his men on St. Crispin’s Day:And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be rememberèd—

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother.

Modern militaries too take pains to group soldiers into bands of brothers—the fire teams, squads, and platoons of half a dozen to several dozen soldiers that serve as a crucible for the primary emotion that moves men to fight in armies, brotherly love. Studies of military psychology have discovered that soldiers fight above all out of loyalty to their platoonmates.213 The writer William Manchester reminisced about his experience as a Marine in World War II:Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down, and I couldn’t do it to them.... I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have saved them. Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.214

Two decades later, another Marine-turned-author, William Broyles, offered a similar reflection on his experience in Vietnam:The enduring emotion of war, when everything else has faded, is comradeship. A comrade in war is a man you can trust with anything, because you trust him with your life.... Despite its extreme right-wing image, war is the only utopian experience most of us ever have. Individual possessions and advantage count for nothing: the group is everything. What you have is shared with your friends. It isn’t a particularly selective process, but a love that needs no reasons, that transcends race and personality and education—all those things that would make a difference in peace.215

Though in extremis a man may lay down his life to save a platoon of virtual brothers, it’s rarer for him to calmly make plans to commit suicide at some future date on their behalf. The conduct of war would be very different if he did. To avoid panic and rout (at least in the absence of file closers), battle plans are generally engineered so that an individual soldier does not know that he has been singled out for certain death. At a bomber base during World War II, for example, strategists calculated that pilots would have a higher probability of survival if a few of them who drew the short straws in a lottery would fly off to certain death on one-way sorties rather than all of them taking their chances in the fuel-laden planes needed for round trips. But they opted for the higher risk of an unpredictable death over the lower risk of a death that would be preceded by a lengthy period of doom.216 How do the engineers of suicide terrorism overcome this obstacle?

Certainly an ideology of an afterlife helps, as in the posthumous Playboy Mansion promised to the 9/11 hijackers. (Japanese kamikaze pilots had to make do with the less vivid image of being absorbed into a great realm of the spirit.) But modern suicide terrorism was perfected by the Tamil Tigers, and though the members grew up in Hinduism with its promise of reincarnation, the group’s ideology was secular: the usual goulash of nationalism, romantic militarism, Marxism-Leninism, and anti-imperialism that animated 20th-century third-world liberation movements. And in accounts by would-be suicide terrorists of what prompted them to enlist, anticipation of an afterlife, with or without the virgins, seldom figures prominently. So while expectation of a pleasant afterlife may tip the perceived cost-benefit ratio (making it harder to imagine an atheist suicide bomber), it cannot be the only psychological driver.

Using interviews with