The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,300

Americans today would second-guess the participation of “the greatest generation” in the epitome of a just war, World War II. Yet it’s unsettling to reread Franklin Roosevelt’s historic speech following Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and see that it is a textbook case of a victim narrative. All the coding categories of the Baumeister experiment can be filled in: the fetishization of memory (“a date which will live in infamy”), the innocence of the victim (“The United States was at peace with that nation”), the senselessness and malice of the aggression (“this unprovoked and dastardly attack”), the magnitude of the harm (“The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Very many American lives have been lost”), and the justness of retaliation (“the American people in their righteous might will win”). Historians today point out that each of these ringing assertions was, at best, truthy. The United States had imposed a hostile embargo of oil and machinery on Japan, had anticipated possible attacks, had sustained relatively minor military damage, eventually sacrificed 100,000 American lives in response to the 2,500 lost in the attack, forced innocent Japanese Americans into concentration camps, and attained victory with incendiary and nuclear strikes on Japanese civilians that could be considered among history’s greatest war crimes.33

Even in matters when no reasonable third party can doubt who’s right and who’s wrong, we have to be prepared, when putting on psychological spectacles, to see that evildoers always think they are acting morally. The spectacles are a painful fit.34 Just monitor your blood pressure as you read the sentence “Try to see it from Hitler’s point of view.” (Or Osama bin Laden’s, or Kim Jong-il’s.) Yet Hitler, like all sentient beings, had a point of view, and historians tell us that it was a highly moralistic one. He experienced Germany’s sudden and unexpected defeat in World War I and concluded that it could be explained only by the treachery of an internal enemy. He was aggrieved by the Allies’ murderous postwar food blockade and their vindictive reparations. He lived through the economic chaos and street violence of the 1920s. And Hitler was an idealist: he had a moral vision in which heroic sacrifices would bring about a thousand-year utopia.35

At the smaller scale of interpersonal violence, the most brutal serial killers minimize and even justify their crimes in ways that would be comical if their actions were not so horrific. In 1994 the police quoted a spree killer as saying, “Other than the two we killed, the two we wounded, the woman we pistolwhipped, and the light bulbs we stuck in people’s mouths, we didn’t really hurt anybody.”36 A serial rapist-murderer interviewed by the sociologist Diana Scully claimed to be “kind and gentle” to the women he captured at gunpoint, and that they enjoyed the experience of being raped. As further proof of this kindness, he noted that when he stabbed his victims “the killing was always sudden, so they wouldn’t know it was coming.”37 John Wayne Gacy, who kidnapped, raped, and murdered thirty-three boys, said, “I see myself more as a victim than as a perpetrator,” adding, without irony, “I was cheated out of my childhood.” His victimization continued into adulthood, when the media inexplicably tried to make him into “an asshole and a scapegoat.”38

Smaller-time criminals rationalize just as readily. Anyone who has worked with prisoners knows that today’s penitentiaries are filled to a man with innocent victims—not just those who were framed by sloppy police work but those whose violence was a form of self-help justice. Remember Donald Black’s theory of crime as social control (chapter 3), which seeks to explain why a majority of violent crimes don’t bring the perpetrator a tangible benefit.39 The offender is genuinely provoked by an affront or betrayal; the reprisal that we deem to be excessive—striking a sharp-tongued wife during an argument, killing a swaggering stranger over a parking spot—is from his point of view a natural response to a provocation and the administration of rough justice.

The unease with which we read these rationalizations tells us something about the very act of donning psychological spectacles. Baumeister notes that in the attempt to understand harm-doing, the viewpoint of the scientist or scholar overlaps with the viewpoint of the perpetrator.40 Both take a detached, amoral stance toward the harmful act. Both are contextualizers, always attentive to the complexities of the situation and how they contributed to the causation of the harm. And both believe that