The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,271

they will probably do more harm than good, because of the unforeseen consequences of their adjustments on the vastly more than 50 people who are affected by them. To take just two examples, more than twice as many children are hit by cars driven by parents taking their children to school as by other kinds of traffic, so when more parents drive their children to school to prevent them from getting killed by kidnappers, more children get killed.213 And one form of crime-control theater, electronic highway signs that display the names of missing children to drivers on freeways, may cause slowdowns, distracted drivers, and the inevitable accidents.214

The movement over the past two centuries to increase the valuation of children’s lives is one of the great moral advances in history. But the movement over the past two decades to increase the valuation to infinity can lead only to absurdities.

GAY RIGHTS, THE DECLINE OF GAY-BASHING, AND THE DECRIMINALIZATION OF HOMOSEXUALITY

It would be an exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing explained the nature of logical and mathematical reasoning, invented the digital computer, solved the mind-body problem, and saved Western civilization. But it would not be much of an exaggeration.215

In a landmark 1936 paper, Turing laid out a set of simple mechanical operations that was sufficient to compute any mathematical or logical formula that was computable at all.216 These operations could easily be implemented in a machine—a digital computer—and a decade later Turing designed a practicable version that served as a prototype for the computers we use today. In the interim, he worked for the British decryption unit during World War II and helped to crack the cipher used by the Nazis to communicate with their U-boats, which was instrumental in defeating the German naval blockade and turning around the war. When the war was over, Turing wrote a paper (still widely read today) that equated thinking with computation, thereby offering an explanation of how intelligence could be carried out by a physical system.217 For good measure, he then tackled one of the hardest problems in science—how the structure of an organism could emerge from a pool of chemicals during embryonic development—and proposed an ingenious solution.

How did Western civilization thank one of the greatest geniuses it ever produced? In 1952 the British government arrested him, withdrew his security clearance, threatened him with prison, and chemically castrated him, driving him to suicide at the age of forty-two.

What did Turing do to earn this stunning display of ingratitude? He had sex with a man. Homosexual acts were illegal in Britain at the time, and he was charged with gross indecency, under the same statute that in the preceding century had broken another genius, Oscar Wilde. Turing’s persecution was motivated by a fear that homosexuals were vulnerable to being entrapped by Soviet agents. The fear became risible eight years later when the British war secretary John Profumo was forced to resign because he had had an affair with the mistress of a Soviet spy.

At least since Leviticus 20:13 prescribed the death penalty for a man lying with mankind as he lieth with a woman, many governments have used their monopoly on violence to imprison, torture, mutilate, and kill homosexuals.218 A gay person who escaped government violence in the form of laws against indecency, sodomy, buggery, unnatural acts, or crimes against nature was vulnerable to violence from his fellow citizens in the form of gay-bashing, homophobic violence, and antigay hate crimes.

Homophobic violence, whether state-sponsored or grassroots, is a mysterious entry in the catalog of human violence, because there is nothing in it for the aggressor. No contested resource is at stake, and since homosexuality is a victimless crime, no peace is gained by deterring it. If anything, one might expect straight men to react to their gay fellows by thinking: “Great! More women for me!” By the same logic, lesbianism should be the most heinous crime imaginable, because it takes women out of the mating pool two at a time.

But homophobia has been more prominent in history than lesbophobia.219 While many legal systems single out male homosexuality for criminalization, no legal system singles out lesbianism, and hate crimes against gay men outnumber hate crimes against gay women by a ratio of almost five to one.220

Homophobia is an evolutionary puzzle, as is homosexuality itself.221 It’s not that there’s anything mysterious about homosexual behavior. Humans are a polymorphously perverse species, and now and again seek sexual gratification from all manner of living and nonliving things that don’t