The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,239

Indiana university was convicted for reading a book on the defeat of the Ku Klux Klan because it featured a Klansman on the cover, and when a Brandeis professor was found guilty for mentioning the term wetback in a lecture on racism against Hispanics. 32 Trivial incidents of racial “insensitivity” (such as the 1993 episode in which a University of Pennsylvania student shouted at some late-night revelers to “Shut up, you water buffalo,” a slang expression for a rowdy person in his native Hebrew that was construed as a new racial epithet) bring universities to a halt and set off agonized rituals of communal mortification, atonement, and moral cleansing.33 The only defense of this hypocrisy is that it may be a price worth paying for historically unprecedented levels of racial comity (though it’s in the nature of hypocrisy that one cannot say that either).

In The Blank Slate I argued that an outsize fear of reintroducing racial hostility has distorted the social sciences by putting a heavy thumb on the nurture side of the nature-nurture scale, even for those aspects of human nature that have nothing to do with racial differences but are universal across the species. The underlying fear is that if anything about human nature is innate, then differences among races or ethnic groups might be innate, whereas if the mind is a blank slate at birth, then all minds must start out equally blank. An irony is that a politicized denial of human nature betrays a tacit acceptance of a particularly dark theory of human nature: that human beings are perpetually on the verge of a descent into racial animus, so every resource of the culture must be mobilized against it.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS AND THE DECLINE OF RAPE AND BATTERING

To review the history of violence is to experience repeated bouts of disbelief in learning how categories of violence that we deplore today were perceived in the past. The history of rape provides one of those shocks.

Rape is one of the prime atrocities in the human repertoire. It combines pain, degradation, terror, trauma, the seizure of a woman’s means of perpetuating life, and an intrusion into the makeup of her progeny. It is also one of the commonest of atrocities. The anthropologist Donald Brown includes rape in his list of human universals, and it has been chronicled in every age and place. The Hebrew Bible tells of an era in which the brothers of a raped woman could sell her to her rapist, soldiers were entitled by divine decree to ravish nubile captives, and kings acquired concubines by the thousands. Rape, we have seen, was also common in tribal Amazonia, Homeric Greece, medieval Europe, and England during the Hundred Years’ War (in Shakespeare’s account, Henry V warns a French village to surrender or else their “pure maidens [will] fall into the hand of hot and forcing violation”). Mass rape is a fixture in genocides and pogroms all over the world, including recent rampages in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is also common in the aftermath of military invasions, such as by the Germans in Belgium in World War I, the Japanese in China and the Russians in Eastern Europe in World War II, and the Pakistanis in Bangladesh during its war of independence.34

Brown notes that while rape is a human universal, so are proscriptions against rape. Yet one has to look long and hard through history and across cultures to find an acknowledgment of the harm of rape from the viewpoint of the victim. “Thou shalt not rape” is not one of the Ten Commandments, though the tenth one does reveal the status of a woman in that world: she is enumerated in a list of her husband’s chattels, after his house and before his servants and livestock. Elsewhere in the Bible we learn that a married rape victim was considered guilty of adultery and could be stoned to death, a sentence that was carried over into Sharia law. Rape was seen as an offense not against the woman but against a man—the woman’s father, her husband, or in the case of a slave, her owner. Moral and legal systems all over the world codified rape in similar ways.35 Rape is the theft of a woman’s virginity from her father, or of her fidelity from her husband. Rapists can redeem themselves by buying their victim as a wife. Women are culpable for being raped. Rape is a perquisite of a husband, seigneur, slave-owner, or harem-holder.