The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,231

to that of gym teachers and camp counselors offered many opportunities to redeem myself.

There was pickup hockey and tackle football (sans helmet and pads), where I could check and be checked into the boards, or dive for fumbles in a scrum of bodies. There was murderball, in which one boy clutched a volleyball and counted off the seconds while the others pummeled him until he let go. There was Horse (strictly forbidden by the counselors, doubtless on the orders of lawyers), in which a fat kid (“the pillow”) would lean back against a tree, a teammate would bend over and hold him around the waist, and the rest of the team would form a line of backs by holding the waist of the kid in front of him. Each member of the opposing team would then take a running leap and come crashing down on the back of the “horse” until it either collapsed to the ground or supported the riders for three seconds. And during the evening there was Knucks, the outlawed card game in which the loser would be thwhacked on the knuckles with the deck of cards, the number of edge-on and face-on thwacks determined by the point spread and restrained by a complex set of rules about flinching, scraping, and excess force. Mothers would regularly inspect our knuckles for incriminating scabs and bruises.

Nothing organized by grown-ups could compare with these delirious pleasures. The closest they came was dodgeball, with its ecstatic chaos of hiding behind aggressive teammates, ducking projectiles, diving to the floor, and cheating death until the final mortal smack of rubber against skin. It was the only sport in the Orwellianly named “physical education” curriculum that I actually looked forward to.

But now the Boy Gender has lost another battle in its age-old war with camp counselors, phys ed teachers, lawyers, and moms. In school district after school district, dodgeball has been banned. A statement by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education, which must have been written by someone who was never a boy, and quite possibly has never met one, explained the reason:NASPE believes that dodgeball is not an appropriate activity for K–12 school physical education programs. Some kids may like it—the most skilled, the most confident. But many do not! Certainly not the student who gets hit hard in the stomach, head, or groin. And it is not appropriate to teach our children that you win by hurting others.

Yes, the fate of dodgeball is yet another sign of the historical decline of violence. Recreational violence has a long ancestry in our lineage. Play fighting is common among juvenile primate males, and rough-and-tumble play is one of the most robust sex differences in humans.1 The channeling of these impulses into extreme sports has been common across cultures and throughout history. Together with Roman gladiatorial combat and medieval jousting tournaments, the bloody history of sports includes recreational fighting with sharp sticks in Renaissance Venice (where noblemen and priests would join in the fun), the Sioux Indian pastime in which boys would try to grab their opponents’ hair and knee them in the face, Irish faction fights with stout oak clubs called shillelaghs, the sport of shin-kicking (popular in the 19th-century American South) in which the contestants would lock forearms and kick each other in the shins until one collapsed, and the many forms of bare-knuckle fights whose typical tactics may be inferred from the current rules of boxing (no head-butting, no hitting below the belt, and so on).2

But in the past half-century the momentum has been going squarely against boys of all ages. Though people have lost none of their taste for consuming simulated and voluntary violence, they have engineered social life to place the most tempting kinds of real-life violence off-limits. It is part of a current in which Western culture has been extending its distaste for violence farther and farther down the magnitude scale. The postwar revulsion against forms of violence that kill by the millions and thousands, such as war and genocide, has spread to forms that kill by the hundreds, tens, and single digits, such as rioting, lynching, and hate crimes. It has extended from killing to other forms of harm such as rape, assault, battering, and intimidation. It has spread to vulnerable classes of victims that in earlier eras fell outside the circle of protection, such as racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals. The ban on dodgeball is a weathervane for these winds of change.

The efforts to